Shut up and calculate...
December 29, 2016 9:48 AM Subscribe
What does any of this have to do with physics? An excellent long form essay on graduate school in physics.
Gradually, I heard what Rajeev was saying but was too diplomatic to actually say, “You didn’t fail, Bob. You quit.”
Professorial aspirations cannot fail, they can only be failed.
posted by benzenedream at 10:41 AM on December 29, 2016
Professorial aspirations cannot fail, they can only be failed.
posted by benzenedream at 10:41 AM on December 29, 2016
> "Professorial aspirations cannot fail, they can only be failed."
While I'm well aware of how difficult the academic job market is ... in this case, he *didn't* fail. He didn't struggle to go through multiple postdocs and apply for rare academic postings and get repeatedly rejected etc. etc. before finally moving on to something else. He saw how difficult it was going to be, and how frustrated he already was, and quit.
Now, you can argue he was sensible to quit. You can argue the odds are high that he would have failed had he continued. You can argue that there are red flags all over this little memoir indicating that quitting was the most rational decision he could have made (15 hour days? Good god.)
But the statement that he didn't fail, but decided to quit, is, in this case, literally true. And it's a realization he may have sorely needed since it sounds like until he had it, he equated quitting with failing -- which is not an uncommon problem for wannabe academics to have, and muddying the waters on it doesn't do anyone any favors.
Professorial aspirations can indeed fail. But you can also walk away from them without it being a failure of any kind.
posted by kyrademon at 10:54 AM on December 29, 2016 [31 favorites]
While I'm well aware of how difficult the academic job market is ... in this case, he *didn't* fail. He didn't struggle to go through multiple postdocs and apply for rare academic postings and get repeatedly rejected etc. etc. before finally moving on to something else. He saw how difficult it was going to be, and how frustrated he already was, and quit.
Now, you can argue he was sensible to quit. You can argue the odds are high that he would have failed had he continued. You can argue that there are red flags all over this little memoir indicating that quitting was the most rational decision he could have made (15 hour days? Good god.)
But the statement that he didn't fail, but decided to quit, is, in this case, literally true. And it's a realization he may have sorely needed since it sounds like until he had it, he equated quitting with failing -- which is not an uncommon problem for wannabe academics to have, and muddying the waters on it doesn't do anyone any favors.
Professorial aspirations can indeed fail. But you can also walk away from them without it being a failure of any kind.
posted by kyrademon at 10:54 AM on December 29, 2016 [31 favorites]
I didn't expect to resonate with this essay but I really did. I'm a quitter, big time. I will put hard work in, but if my path forward is hazy or there's some obstacle then I am done. And of course, I have the temerity to look at people much more experienced than me and think, "Gosh, this is just so easy with them! What's wrong with me! I'll never be able to hack it!" I started out ages ago wanting to be a mathematician, but going into engineering meant I could solve nice, small problems that I can hold in my mind, or failing that an Excel spreadsheet. But you know what, I'm not an explorer by nature, and there's nothing wrong with that. I won't win a Nobel but neither will like 6 billion other people.
My old undergrad advisor Prof Art Benjamin recently gave an interview with some good advice for grad students, namely: Have diverse academic interests (so that when you get stymied in one place you can be productive somewhere else) and more importantly, have some passion outside academia for when it feels just impossible.
posted by muddgirl at 11:31 AM on December 29, 2016 [3 favorites]
My old undergrad advisor Prof Art Benjamin recently gave an interview with some good advice for grad students, namely: Have diverse academic interests (so that when you get stymied in one place you can be productive somewhere else) and more importantly, have some passion outside academia for when it feels just impossible.
posted by muddgirl at 11:31 AM on December 29, 2016 [3 favorites]
As a grad student, finishing up a physics degree, there's a lot of things in here that resonated with me and that I probably will have thoughts to write about it once I've had a chance to digest it a little. The ending, though, the drive back, leaves me with one burning question...
How the heck did he end up in Wisconsin?
posted by Zalzidrax at 11:39 AM on December 29, 2016 [1 favorite]
How the heck did he end up in Wisconsin?
posted by Zalzidrax at 11:39 AM on December 29, 2016 [1 favorite]
But the statement that he didn't fail, but decided to quit, is, in this case, literally true. And it's a realization he may have sorely needed since it sounds like until he had it, he equated quitting with failing -- which is not an uncommon problem for wannabe academics to have, and muddying the waters on it doesn't do anyone any favors... Professorial aspirations can indeed fail. But you can also walk away from them without it being a failure of any kind.
I'm reading his essay differently. The ending to me wasn't a happy: "I no longer feel like I was a failure since I in fact decided to quit instead of fail out." The ending was instead a bitter realization that: "I didn't actually give myself a chance to fail. I quit. The awful experience I had wasn't any different than this brilliant professor had when he was a graduate student. The only difference was that he didn't quit. He stuck with it. I didn't. I quit."
The author opens up about how he hasn't been happy since quitting graduate school. (Admittedly, he wasn't happy during parts of graduate school, but the opening certainly indicates it hasn't gotten any better.) And the end includes the painful paragraph upon his realization: "Sound bites from that conversation echoed in my helmet as I twisted my bike’s throttle and left Rochester behind. I quit, as I cruised into Canada over Lake Erie. I quit, as I passed through Chicago and then through the farm fields of Wisconsin. I quit, across the flat nothingness of Nebraska. I quit, up into the snow-covered Rockies and back down through the melting heat of Moab, Needles, and Palm Springs."
(That's not to say that his decision to quit wasn't rational or reasonable. That's not to say that there are issues in graduate school with being open about the mental health issues and workloads involved.)
posted by Dalby at 11:47 AM on December 29, 2016 [5 favorites]
I'm reading his essay differently. The ending to me wasn't a happy: "I no longer feel like I was a failure since I in fact decided to quit instead of fail out." The ending was instead a bitter realization that: "I didn't actually give myself a chance to fail. I quit. The awful experience I had wasn't any different than this brilliant professor had when he was a graduate student. The only difference was that he didn't quit. He stuck with it. I didn't. I quit."
The author opens up about how he hasn't been happy since quitting graduate school. (Admittedly, he wasn't happy during parts of graduate school, but the opening certainly indicates it hasn't gotten any better.) And the end includes the painful paragraph upon his realization: "Sound bites from that conversation echoed in my helmet as I twisted my bike’s throttle and left Rochester behind. I quit, as I cruised into Canada over Lake Erie. I quit, as I passed through Chicago and then through the farm fields of Wisconsin. I quit, across the flat nothingness of Nebraska. I quit, up into the snow-covered Rockies and back down through the melting heat of Moab, Needles, and Palm Springs."
(That's not to say that his decision to quit wasn't rational or reasonable. That's not to say that there are issues in graduate school with being open about the mental health issues and workloads involved.)
posted by Dalby at 11:47 AM on December 29, 2016 [5 favorites]
I really liked this. We rarely talk about quitting, failing, and just plain changing in this life. He really fleshed out how it feels to invest so much in something while at the same time slowly realizing you no longer want to do that thing.
posted by latkes at 12:05 PM on December 29, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by latkes at 12:05 PM on December 29, 2016 [1 favorite]
quantum mechanics
Wouldn't it be great if that was a job? "What do you do?" "I'm a quantum mechanic."
posted by jonmc at 12:07 PM on December 29, 2016 [6 favorites]
Wouldn't it be great if that was a job? "What do you do?" "I'm a quantum mechanic."
posted by jonmc at 12:07 PM on December 29, 2016 [6 favorites]
After reading this, I no longer have any regrets whatsoever about going into engineering instead of cosmology. Thank you!
posted by monotreme at 12:49 PM on December 29, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by monotreme at 12:49 PM on December 29, 2016 [2 favorites]
You can become a quantum mechanic, but you have to hang out in ASCII dungeons and spend your time teleporting @ signs away by hitting them.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 1:07 PM on December 29, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 1:07 PM on December 29, 2016 [3 favorites]
Wouldn't it be great if that was a job? "What do you do?" "I'm a quantum mechanic."
I think it's in the film Forbidden Planet, where one of the characters is described as "the best darn quantum mechanic in the universe."
posted by njohnson23 at 1:10 PM on December 29, 2016 [2 favorites]
I think it's in the film Forbidden Planet, where one of the characters is described as "the best darn quantum mechanic in the universe."
posted by njohnson23 at 1:10 PM on December 29, 2016 [2 favorites]
I left academic math after one postdoc; the promise of doing another one or two and then maybe - just maybe - landing a job in a place like Tulsa didn't really do it for me. Furthermore, I had spent some time doing education work in east Africa, and came back with a very, very different idea of what positive impact means than I had when I started grad school. The aspiration of having a one-off idea that lasts a thousand years (like Einstein's 'weightlessness' moment in the essay) is romantic, heroic, and ultimately pretty infantile. There's a huge gap between what's being worked on at the frontiers of mathematics and what's actually happening out in the world; and in fact, I think math is largely failing to explore new problems arising from new application areas like machine learning. There's a lot of cultural assumption that physics will provide the problems, and it's kinda been a dry few decades for physics... As this essay hints at.
It's pretty common for lifer academics to have a kind of myopia about their problem area and how it sits in relation to the rest of the world. They're often people who have had their eye on the prize of an R1 tenured position for pretty much their whole lives, and taking a hard look - or gaining experience beyond that track - would almost certainly detract from getting there. You end up with a certain lack of diversity of outlook in academia as a result. And for the individuals, often a lack of management experience, which can be detrimental for the grad students. I was struck that the advisor in this essay didn't have discussions with the author about the shape of the discipline, the kinds of ways that people succeed and fail at it, until after the student had left. And I've seen far worse examples first hand.
These days, I'm mainly SWE'ing on problems that will be greatly useful in places like east Africa, and pushing around some more combinatorial machine learning problems on the side, thinking a bit about what a research program in that direction might look like. There's not much space for me to go and pursue such a program in academia, though, with the million other postdocs who haven't taken some time in industry, and my interests which don't fit neatly in the kinds of silo'ed categories that hiring committees grapple with. (This was already an issue as I was doing my last round of academic applications; my ideas were too close to stats for some of the math departments, and my math phd dissuaded some of the stats departments.) But ultimately, I'm doing good work which will have a positive impact on a lot of people, and still using my math brain in a positive way. And I'm certainly nowhere near as unhappy as this author sounds. At the end of it, I'm pretty glad to have hopped off the merry-go-round, and avoided rotting in obscurity and irrelevance in Tulsa, or someplace like it.
posted by kaibutsu at 1:39 PM on December 29, 2016 [8 favorites]
It's pretty common for lifer academics to have a kind of myopia about their problem area and how it sits in relation to the rest of the world. They're often people who have had their eye on the prize of an R1 tenured position for pretty much their whole lives, and taking a hard look - or gaining experience beyond that track - would almost certainly detract from getting there. You end up with a certain lack of diversity of outlook in academia as a result. And for the individuals, often a lack of management experience, which can be detrimental for the grad students. I was struck that the advisor in this essay didn't have discussions with the author about the shape of the discipline, the kinds of ways that people succeed and fail at it, until after the student had left. And I've seen far worse examples first hand.
These days, I'm mainly SWE'ing on problems that will be greatly useful in places like east Africa, and pushing around some more combinatorial machine learning problems on the side, thinking a bit about what a research program in that direction might look like. There's not much space for me to go and pursue such a program in academia, though, with the million other postdocs who haven't taken some time in industry, and my interests which don't fit neatly in the kinds of silo'ed categories that hiring committees grapple with. (This was already an issue as I was doing my last round of academic applications; my ideas were too close to stats for some of the math departments, and my math phd dissuaded some of the stats departments.) But ultimately, I'm doing good work which will have a positive impact on a lot of people, and still using my math brain in a positive way. And I'm certainly nowhere near as unhappy as this author sounds. At the end of it, I'm pretty glad to have hopped off the merry-go-round, and avoided rotting in obscurity and irrelevance in Tulsa, or someplace like it.
posted by kaibutsu at 1:39 PM on December 29, 2016 [8 favorites]
This was a very nice article, even if it brought back very uncomfortable flashbacks from grad school. Not just sleeping on the floor and 15 hour days and circumnavigating the clock, but the panic that everyone else could do the math better than I could.
“Now you know what makes theoretical physics so hard,” he said. “It’s not that the problems are hard, although they are. It’s that knowing which problems to try and solve is hard. That, in fact, is the hardest part.”
This is true not just for theoretical physics (where I think the pickings have been getting slimmer and slimmer) but in all of science. As an observational astronomer, there are so many things I could chase after, and so few of them are likely to pay off. Did the people working on the Sloan Sky Survey really think that they could become the most highly cited project ever? Didn't the BICEP2 team feel the same way, only to see their hopes dashed?
(Yeah, yeah, shut up and calculate. Nice title choice.)
posted by RedOrGreen at 3:14 PM on December 29, 2016 [2 favorites]
“Now you know what makes theoretical physics so hard,” he said. “It’s not that the problems are hard, although they are. It’s that knowing which problems to try and solve is hard. That, in fact, is the hardest part.”
This is true not just for theoretical physics (where I think the pickings have been getting slimmer and slimmer) but in all of science. As an observational astronomer, there are so many things I could chase after, and so few of them are likely to pay off. Did the people working on the Sloan Sky Survey really think that they could become the most highly cited project ever? Didn't the BICEP2 team feel the same way, only to see their hopes dashed?
(Yeah, yeah, shut up and calculate. Nice title choice.)
posted by RedOrGreen at 3:14 PM on December 29, 2016 [2 favorites]
....the panic that everyone else could do the math better than I could.
In case anyone wants more context, I went to grad school with RedOrGreen, and I spent most of my time panicking about the fact that I'd never be as good at math as he is.
posted by BrashTech at 3:37 PM on December 29, 2016 [3 favorites]
In case anyone wants more context, I went to grad school with RedOrGreen, and I spent most of my time panicking about the fact that I'd never be as good at math as he is.
posted by BrashTech at 3:37 PM on December 29, 2016 [3 favorites]
Fwiw, the "be failed" comment was directed at the advisor, who was still doling out hope to the author retroactively. As long as you are capable of getting papers published, it is not in the interests of an advisor to do a reality check for starry-eyed aspirants, and very much in their interest to keep stringing people along as long as possible.
posted by benzenedream at 4:23 PM on December 29, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by benzenedream at 4:23 PM on December 29, 2016 [2 favorites]
this article is universally applicable to anyone who's in the position of needing to feel fulfilled in their work, and is willing to work themselves to death to be excellent at it, but who also expects that work to reward them emotionally and financially for their efforts. it's very rare to get out of one's avocation the same or more that one puts into it. i think it might be easier to be the kind of person who is fine with putting just a little effort into their job and expects just as little in return, and focuses on other things.
posted by wibari at 4:24 PM on December 29, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by wibari at 4:24 PM on December 29, 2016 [1 favorite]
Tulsa is actually really nice, thanks. Obscure academically, I'm sure, but there are far worse places to be relegated. It doesn't hurt that you can actually live well there on meager pay, unlike most places that are notionally, but in practice not actually, more exciting.
posted by wierdo at 6:25 PM on December 29, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by wierdo at 6:25 PM on December 29, 2016 [3 favorites]
Yeah, apologies, wierdo; I should know better. I'm well aware that medium-sized college towns can be great - I loved living in Eugene, which is about the same time - but can also be trying when moving there beyond student age. Community takes time to build, and moreso as one grows older.
posted by kaibutsu at 9:13 PM on December 29, 2016
posted by kaibutsu at 9:13 PM on December 29, 2016
Wouldn't it be great if that was a job? "What do you do?" "I'm a quantum mechanic."
'We can offer you a position, but we can't guarantee your velocity.'
posted by sebastienbailard at 12:44 AM on December 30, 2016 [24 favorites]
'We can offer you a position, but we can't guarantee your velocity.'
posted by sebastienbailard at 12:44 AM on December 30, 2016 [24 favorites]
I went to grad school in philosophy with the goal of landing at a R1 school and doing research primarily. The first job out of the gate was at a teaching-intensive state school. And I discovered... I love teaching! It's marvelous. I need time to do my own stuff, too. But helping first-generation students understand the great questions is so fantastic I really cannot say. Thank God I didn't get what I wanted out of grad school.
posted by persona au gratin at 2:46 AM on December 30, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by persona au gratin at 2:46 AM on December 30, 2016 [4 favorites]
I'm a mathematician who happily "quit" after a post-doc. I have a 14 year old daughter who is pretty good at math. The two things I tell her over and over is that (1) math is hard and she shouldn't think that if she's struggling the problem is with her and (b) the most important thing is identifying good problems. Seems like lessons this guy learned the hard way
posted by TheShadowKnows at 7:22 AM on December 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by TheShadowKnows at 7:22 AM on December 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
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