Thanks. I needed this today. :-)
Mourning and moving on: rituals for leaving a career (2014)
91–100 of 132 posts
Re: Mourning and moving on: rituals for leaving a career (2014)
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can I ask what you mean with "pretty common"? Do you think more than half of all STEM graduate students had a similar experience as she did? Do you have actual data to support this? I am asking this because HN neems to be so much more negative of academia than what I am seeing around me. More generally I think it is worth stressing that any site like this can be a terrible echo chamber at times. Generally there are s…
Let me add another point of anectdata. I did my CS PhD with a full scholarship in the UK. Then a 3.5 year postdoc in a great Leinbiz institute in Germany. Part of a huge EU project (in Framework Programne 7) By all measures, I was "living the life" in academia. with both my parents being academics (both researchers and pretty published in their fields) Yet, I left it after the project finished. The prospect of having…
I was a biological anthropology postdoc for a year or so. My office mate used to refer to the process of turning one decent idea into as many papers as possible as producing LPUs ("Least Publishable Units"). He was joking, but it wasn't a joke.
It was depressing. I dropped out. I have love for academia, but there is a pretty overwhelming amount of gamesmanship in surviving that system. I found becoming a developer a much easier career to navigate.
Re: Mourning and moving on: rituals for leaving a career (2014)
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can I ask what you mean with "pretty common"? Do you think more than half of all STEM graduate students had a similar experience as she did? Do you have actual data to support this? I am asking this because HN neems to be so much more negative of academia than what I am seeing around me. More generally I think it is worth stressing that any site like this can be a terrible echo chamber at times. Generally there are s…
I did a PhD in CS. There were certainly some students who had a bad experience, but I don't think it was the majority or even near the majority. I think 1 in 5 is a reasonable guess. The ones who did do tend to be more vocal about it, which is natural.
Computer science is much, much more marketable than typical PhDs.
Re: Mourning and moving on: rituals for leaving a career (2014)
#94Earlier 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'…
> just how serious should she... be taken? Very seriously indeed if you value higher education and research. Lot's of people do. Over a decade ago now, Ben Ginsberg wrote "Fall of the Faculty". Political scientists like Wendy Brown have picked apart not only the evidence, but done deep analytical work on the reasons for the disintegration of academia in the West. Even Peter Thiel (who I profoundly disagree with on al…
Has Peter Thiel ever put his thoughts on higher education down in long-form writing? I've seen him speak about it, but I'd be interested in a deep dive.
Re: Mourning and moving on: rituals for leaving a career (2014)
#95> We create meaning around the stress and soften transitions with rituals and rites of passage. I graduated into the height of the pandemic, so I never had a graduation ceremony. Instead, they played a shitty video presentation over Zoom and my parents cracked open a beer and watched it on TV. By the time I got invited back for a ceremony, I had already moved hundreds of miles away from my university. Obviously, I tu…
If it makes you feel better, my college graduation was the only one where my school decided to have an outdoor ceremony...in May in the deep south.
Needless to say, wearing a black gown over dress cloths is not great when its 95F and humid out. For our families of all ages, sitting in the football stadium for hours in the middle of the day was even worse. Multiple people were taken to the hospital for heat stroke.
Graduation was a decent excuse for my uncles and brother to come into town for a visit, but I would have happily celebrated graduation at a Mexican restaurant with air conditioning and a margarita without the big ceremony.
Re: Mourning and moving on: rituals for leaving a career (2014)
#96> We create meaning around the stress and soften transitions with rituals and rites of passage. I graduated into the height of the pandemic, so I never had a graduation ceremony. Instead, they played a shitty video presentation over Zoom and my parents cracked open a beer and watched it on TV. By the time I got invited back for a ceremony, I had already moved hundreds of miles away from my university. Obviously, I tu…
> Obviously, I turned down the offer. I sometimes wonder if I'll regret that choice later on down the line. I could not tell you a single thing about my graduation ceremony.
Same. It's been over 2 decades. I was practically a different person.
Re: Mourning and moving on: rituals for leaving a career (2014)
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't regret skipping college graduation and I barely remember high school graduation I do regret that I didn't join any clubs in college until my last semester, and that I didn't make the kind of friendships I wanted
^ listen to this person. The ceremonies at the beginning and the end—not a big deal. The part that matters is what you do there. I think the celebrations are more for the parents, really. We live our lives in the bulk, the area, the day-to-day. We experience others’ lives at boundary transitions, the perimeter, the ending ceremonies.
> I think the celebrations are more for the parents, really.
This is important, and not to be brushed off.
During my PhD, my program had what’s called a “white coat ceremony”. This is typically a medical school ceremony, but my grad program does it after the second year of study to recognize the transition from being a graduate “student” to a graduate “research assistant”.
I was a very isolated and focused student, spending the majority of my waking time in lab from day one of school. By the end of year two, I already viewed myself as being fully immersed in research. So, the ceremony felt trivial to me, and I didn’t plan to attend.
However, at the last minute, my advisor told me he wanted me to attend despite my protest.
Due to the last minute change, I didn’t invite my parents to the ceremony, as they lived several hours away and I didn’t want them to feel obligated to travel on short notice.
As the ceremony started, I immediately realized that it was just as much for the parents as it was for the students. So many parents were there, with clear pride at their children’s growth and success (even though most had no clue what their kids were even studying).
I immediately and deeply regretted not telling my parents about the ceremony. I realized I had made a unilateral decision for them, and that my behavior was very self-oriented and inconsiderate of their desire to see me succeed.
They were disappointed when I told them about it, and I apologized for not inviting them and acknowledged that it was a selfish thing. They’re chill people and didn’t make a fuss over it, but it was a closed door that could never be reopened.
Two years later when I defended my dissertation, that was the moment I wanted my parents to be present, and of course they were. We had a blast celebrating afterwards, so all’s well that ends well.
I strongly believe “maturation” happens in discrete moments, and the start of that white coat ceremony was one of those moments for me. I grew up a lot that day.
Re: Mourning and moving on: rituals for leaving a career (2014)
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 th…
"Complainants and their critiques can be safely discarded because they need to git gud."
She states in the first three minutes of the video linked above that she was excelling academically. How bizarre to observe a lack of research in a thread complaining about how the academy has drifted from the conduct of pure research. Three minutes. One hundred twenty seconds. That's all it would have taken.
Re: Mourning and moving on: rituals for leaving a career (2014)
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
> just how serious should she... be taken? Very seriously indeed if you value higher education and research. Lot's of people do. Over a decade ago now, Ben Ginsberg wrote "Fall of the Faculty". Political scientists like Wendy Brown have picked apart not only the evidence, but done deep analytical work on the reasons for the disintegration of academia in the West. Even Peter Thiel (who I profoundly disagree with on al…
I think - no, I fear, fear is the right word - that there is much more than just academia disintegrating in the West. > Almost all human values have been expunged and replaced by a puppet show of performative theatrics, led by MBA educated impostors and career administrators. Not just academia. This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.
I was going to reply to a go further up but yes this has absolutely crept into many other technical areas. I had a similar grad school as others here have expressed but I didn’t stay in academia after school.
I’ve worked the past 15 years or so for several different F100 companies in various technical R&D functions. These companies manufacture real things and generally have labs, resources, and staff that rival but the very best academic institutions. The politics and worldviews with which the MBAs have infect the technical teams with the last 20 or so years is palpable.
I know there used to be real in-depth research done; talking to the old timers and looking through old technical reports showed that to me. Doing that now will quickly get you RIFed. Now quickly getting to revenue and moving onto the next project is all that matters. Nothing is retained in classic 20-30 page technical reports that help build true institutional knowledge or even allow us to repeat projects based on the learnings from 2 years ago. If you are smart you quickly learn how to test and validate things to make whomever the customer is happy (following the $) while providing the bare minimum to the lawyers to make a specific marketing claim. In practice this means I’ve become very good at not opening certain doors during research (ie the ones that I intuitively know have a high likelihood of derailing a project) even if they probably should have been. See no evil, hear no evil…
It’s sad.
Re: Mourning and moving on: rituals for leaving a career (2014)
#100> We create meaning around the stress and soften transitions with rituals and rites of passage. I graduated into the height of the pandemic, so I never had a graduation ceremony. Instead, they played a shitty video presentation over Zoom and my parents cracked open a beer and watched it on TV. By the time I got invited back for a ceremony, I had already moved hundreds of miles away from my university. Obviously, I tu…
You won’t. It’s a small day in the grand scheme of things. I hope you make time for family and friends tho!