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Mourning and moving on: rituals for leaving a career (2014)
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Re: Mourning and moving on: rituals for leaving a career (2014)
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Leaving academia is like this. It's very sticky and scary to leave. I remember how devastating it was for me. I think it's because there's a very strong sense of a missed dream, and that you can never return.
I feel the need to point out that it's not difficult for people whose identity is not centered around their jobs, since I see that disconnect in the comments. I found the author's take full of the pageantry that I often associate with people who make big deals out of fairly inconsequential things, but before I begrudge the author their take, I have to remember that my career is of relatively little importance to me.…
I think academia is one of those special places where a lot of people who enter it are altruistic and idealistic, and consider it a part of their identity to make a change in the world in a larger sense. You are literally taking a pay-cut, willingly, in order to make the world a better place. At least in theory. So, in that sense, academia is (or at least used to be) more akin to monasteries than corporations.
Not that other jobs aren't making a change in the world, but you know what I mean. It's one thing to be a knowingly replaceable cog in a team that tries to offer more effective ads, and it's quite another to singularly, completely in isolation, try to devote your life trying to invent the MRI, where if you fail the MRI may never come to exist. So yes, a lot of people in academia traditionally do ascribe a big part of their identity to their jobs, but I think this goes beyond the superficial sense you describe (i.e. I'm so boring and soulless that my work defines me).
Which is also why it's such a big deal when some academics are found to be 'cheating' the system (again, see monasteries). Traditionally, the whole edifice has been based on 'honor', but the tide seems to be changing; the rampant corporatisation of academia has been a very recent phenomenon, and now that the inevitable shills and snake-oil merchants have entered the game, we don't quite know how to handle them.
Re: Mourning and moving on: rituals for leaving a career (2014)
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Leaving academia is like this. It's very sticky and scary to leave. I remember how devastating it was for me. I think it's because there's a very strong sense of a missed dream, and that you can never return.
I feel the need to point out that it's not difficult for people whose identity is not centered around their jobs, since I see that disconnect in the comments. I found the author's take full of the pageantry that I often associate with people who make big deals out of fairly inconsequential things, but before I begrudge the author their take, I have to remember that my career is of relatively little importance to me.…
You can't really be an academic whose identity is not centered around their job. This is because it virtually never makes sense to pursue an academic career as a means to other ends (given that pay and conditions tend to be quite bad).
Re: Mourning and moving on: rituals for leaving a career (2014)
#34Seems a bit dramatic
Leaving academia is like this. It's very sticky and scary to leave. I remember how devastating it was for me. I think it's because there's a very strong sense of a missed dream, and that you can never return.
Another anecdata point... For me leaving academia was a big challenge - I'd have to find a job, pass interviews, move home, etc, etc. Scary stuff! But as soon as I had actually done this, my new career path in industry went smoothly, and my first year in industry massively improved my personal confidence. As an academic I was surrounded by other academics, but in industry I was forced to interact and communicate with a more diverse group of people, and I quickly found that it wasn't as scary as I had thought. E.g. doing product demos to senior people, supporting our marketing people by building prototypes, etc.
Amazingly, the company I moved to had much better tooling for the type of software research research I was recruited for than I had had access to at Uni. I built something (as part of a supportive team that understood software dev) in about six months, that I had struggled (and failed) to build in academia over a couple of years.
Re: Mourning and moving on: rituals for leaving a career (2014)
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity, why can't you return?
Not OP, but in general to be hirable in academia you need to demonstrate a constant flow of papers and grant proposals. Being 'out of the game' for a couple of years means you have not published or applied to grants within that time. At best, you might be looking at restarting at the bottom of the ladder until you've reasonably caught up in numbers to climb back up again. And it's not even just a case of "computer sa…
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Re: Mourning and moving on: rituals for leaving a career (2014)
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to highjack this topic, but she was recommended (like to many others of you no doubt) quite a bit in my Youtube feeds over the last few months; and the first few videos I watched seemed to be solid enough. Yet as I watched a few more, I couldn't shake the feeling that she's so out of left field that she's not just a 'quirky renegade' anymore, but rather a quack who dresses up her quackery with just enough 'real'…
As an expert in at least some of the things Sabine makes videos about (string theory), Sabine is a contrarian who, if you are not otherwise an expert on what she is talking about, it would be best to avoid. Sabine, like many contrarians, takes advantage of the fact that there are smart and convincing criticisms of many mainstream ideas, and she does her best to rely on those criticisms. However like all contrarians s…
Likewise. I did my PhD in quantum foundations/information, albeit some years ago now. I'm not aware of any serious researchers in the field that look kindly on superdeterministic interpretations.
It's bizarrely parochial to suppose that every single photon is magically correlated with the experimenter's future measurement choices in a way that will exactly violate Bell's Theorem.
Another way to put it:
> If such a theory did exist, it would require a grand conspiracy of causal relationships leading to results in precise agreement with quantum mechanics, even though the theory itself would bear no resemblance to quantum mechanics. Moreover, it is hard to imagine why it should only be in Bell experiments that free choices would be significantly influenced by causes relevant also to the observed outcomes; rather, every conclusion based upon observed correlations, scientific or casual, would be meaningless because the observers’s method would always be suspect. It seems to us that any such theory would be about as plausible, and appealing, as, belief in ubiquitous alien mind-control.
Causarum Investigatio and the Two Bell's Theorems of John Bell, Wiseman & Cavalcanti, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.06413
Re: Mourning and moving on: rituals for leaving a career (2014)
#37[deleted]
Re: Mourning and moving on: rituals for leaving a career (2014)
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to highjack this topic, but she was recommended (like to many others of you no doubt) quite a bit in my Youtube feeds over the last few months; and the first few videos I watched seemed to be solid enough. Yet as I watched a few more, I couldn't shake the feeling that she's so out of left field that she's not just a 'quirky renegade' anymore, but rather a quack who dresses up her quackery with just enough 'real'…
As an expert in at least some of the things Sabine makes videos about (string theory), Sabine is a contrarian who, if you are not otherwise an expert on what she is talking about, it would be best to avoid. Sabine, like many contrarians, takes advantage of the fact that there are smart and convincing criticisms of many mainstream ideas, and she does her best to rely on those criticisms. However like all contrarians s…
As another 'mainsteam' academic with relevant expertise I think this comment is spot on.
I would like to add that Sabine's video on her academic experience was quite a tragic thing to watch. If her allegations are true then the behavior of her PhD supervisor was completely outrageous.
She also did seem a bit too dreamy-eyed about academia. Sure you can criticize everything you want, but she never seemed to have understood that tone of voice still matters. Academics are busy people with emotions, and not likely to engage with someone whose claims appear to have more loudness than substance.
Re: Mourning and moving on: rituals for leaving a career (2014)
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to highjack this topic, but she was recommended (like to many others of you no doubt) quite a bit in my Youtube feeds over the last few months; and the first few videos I watched seemed to be solid enough. Yet as I watched a few more, I couldn't shake the feeling that she's so out of left field that she's not just a 'quirky renegade' anymore, but rather a quack who dresses up her quackery with just enough 'real'…
>So my question is - just how serious should she (and others like her, who denounce 'mainstream' academia as much as those other fringe groups who go on and on about the corruption of 'mainstream' media) be taken? Anyone have an opinion on this? I know nothing about her but the video on her experience in academia is spot on. It's a pretty common experience among STEM academics. You will face the point where you have…
I don't think this is generally true and the generalization is actively hurtful. Promoting a skewed/miserable perspective on academia. It all depends on the institution, your funding situation, your field etc. The miserable academics are the ones that moan the loudest. There is often an online circlejerk of whining academics that wind themselves up (esp PhD students). Also the ones that are barely scrapping by are the ones that need to resort to bullshit. You may be able to game your stats but people can smell bullshit from a mile away. Everyone will know you're just good at playing the system
Re: Mourning and moving on: rituals for leaving a career (2014)
#40I'm afraid I can't relate. I initially invested a lot of time in my first choice of career (over a decade) and just left last year. I walked out the door, said goodbye, and the next day it was out of my mind. That being said, I think the key is keeping a strong mental separation between "passion for a field of work" and "predetermined path by society to actualize that passion". The latter, in my opinion, is something that one should never get attached to.