He was now closer to 30 to than to 20, was interviewing for the same job that a BS-grad can go after, and wasn't competitive compared to them.
I asked him why he had spent so much time in chemistry just to pivot and he just literally didn't know. It was hard to look at his graduate education as anything other than a wasted decade that actually has set him back career wise.
One interesting question is how does someone do that to themselves?
Another interesting question is - what is the value of a PhD when someone uninterested in the field and not-that-thought-out about it can get one? We think of PhD designating that someone has committed to the field and pushed a little edge of the frontier forward through sheer motivation and brillians and it was just hard to imagine this being true for this guy.
Because the system arounds you encourages it.
Complexity becomes a way to postpone the verdict. etc.
Meh
Doesn’t sound like you’re doing science, to me.
In fact, this is the crux of the whole reproducibility crisis in social sciences, is it not?
The field of social research in a nutshell
I don't regret my wasted years. Sure, I would have likely earned more money, but it was fun, and made me who I am.
I do find it a bit of a shame that my current and previous employers couldn't give two hoots that I have a PhD etc, but oh well.
EDIT: I have a PhD and post-doc experience in Cell Biology, and now work as a software engineer at a fairly large hardware company.
to be honest, there is no interest in studying capitalism, if it's not a critical study of capitalism and its mechanisms. and i fear that your study was just foucault-slop, pseudo-radical drivel, that in the end doesn't change anything.
there's some philosophical interest in the question, though i can't say exactly where. but if you start from a statement like that and the development of thesis is mostly a display of what you read, it's barely social science. it is social theory at best, and not particularity good one...
the interesting questions, especially in social science, are usually "how" and not "why". the mechanisms. that would have been more empirical and more interesting.
push it a bit more, and you will find yourself you're doing marketing - which is applied sociology anyway: who buys what, and how, and maybe, also why (at the very end).
but anyway, twenty years of foucault-slop isn't bad at all. at least you chilled.
Not one of those? Try being Mexican if you are good at manual labor - endless work available, no credentials or experience needed.
When I'm defending a political position and it's going so badly that I have to add epicycles, I know I'm on the wrong track. But if I go back to first principles and develop a simpler internally consistent argument, it is usually insanely extremist to modern sensibilities.
Turns out that human morality and consistency are usually strangers.
Increasingly the arts are being defunded based on a similar argument, and humanity as a whole is worse off because of it.
Something could be valuable despite being "useless" but not in this case.
If you are getting education because you are interested in the topic but won't get a job in it: I fully support this. However you should not take a loan out to get this education: there are too many other things to do in life that you also will want to do. Worse the loan means you cannot change your mind later if you are wrong (or you can, but you will still have to pay for the mistake instead of whatever you are interested in today).
There is one other reason for education: to become a better citizen (don't fall for bad politics). However that should be to everybody and I haven't seen much evidence that higher education really helps much.
I don’t have any higher education. I was stupid and arrogant and thought it would be a waste of time and money. However even if I did do it at that time. I almost certainly would have squandered it. I would t have been mature or aware enough to understand how and where to focus my time and energy in such a setting.
By about my mid-20s I felt like it was, but by the point I had a life and bills to pay and a job to attend to allow for any of that. There’s barely any time or money for education now. I’ve thought about trying to go back for the last decade, but it just becomes less realistic every year.
All I'm saying is, not everyone doing a PhD and then leaving academia was accidentally climbing up the wrong ladder. Some did it on purpose, just to admire the view.
I would have felt that he was at least technically savvy; and, beyond that, he might have the spark of one of the best qualities of a future colleague i.e. interesting-ness - one can't underestimate that.
On the other hand
> he just literally didn't know
That would have been disappointing to hear.
The answer, as I’m sure many already know, is idealism and a certain kind of naïvité. It’s not an absolute naïvité, but it is some kind of belief in the value of doing something that isn’t “mere” careerism. You think it’s noble to contribute to science. And you do contribute, a teeny eensy weensy bit. And then you’re 30 and one day you unblind yourself. You look at the job market, and how much money various jobs actually pay. More importantly, you realize quite suddenly that money can actually make your life better, and that, whatever damage it might have wrought on your soul to pursue it, it would at least have enabled you to own a home one day. Maybe have kids. Shit. And the fresh grads who went straight into tech and finance making $300k (hold on, you can make $300k? Wait a second, that’s not a senior executive salary? That’s a normal-ish bourgeois white-collar HCoL salary that people make fresh out of school? WHAT?)… just naturally understood.
And then you try to explain this on a message board or something, and half the people call you a class traitor, and the other half call you a sucker.
Ouman•24m ago
jdpigeon•19m ago
bluGill•11m ago
Genetically if you don't have kids you are a dead end. You career will have some bearing on the life you give you kids (if you have any, I'm not trying to say you should!) but otherwise I believe it should stay out of your kids life.
Similar to the above, most people live with a married spouse (common law marriage: a legal marriage is not required for this discussion, though it may or may not matter for other purposes). While many people do meet their spouse through their career this is not required and the career itself has nothing to say about it. (historically kings and queens did marry for career reasons)
Note that both kids and a spouse implies you shouldn't allow your career to take up too much time even though many will try to.
Many people have hobbies. Even if you love the things you do at work, odds are your mind cannot handle doing it once you are done with work: your career cannot tell you anything about them. There are many people who pick a career because the things like love cannot support the life they otherwise want to live: their career can't tell them about the destination because it is purely something they do to get there.
All of this is to say that even if your career would offer you help on the destination, you should ignore it.
21asdffdsa12•6m ago
And when you contribute to a societey that overproduces resources, thrives scientifically and does not carry a load of parasites, then your career actions may push the cohort fitness.
This of course implies that the offspring of dedicated focus personal has desert flower traits- meaning every offspring will be dumb as a rock, and pro at procreation. Meaning clever people will have "Hippie" pregnant machine offspring and the "spiritual" birth-machines will have hyper-analytical "dead-enders". None of them happy with the state of the world.
Life as they say- finds a way- to make you despair with the result of the affair.