Grad School
I've realised that many of my friends, especially those in this blogging community, are currently in grad school, or have strong desires towards doing grad school sometime in the future. This isn't totally surprising, considering the schools I've been to and the friends I've made from those schools. Admittedly, being sort of a geek myself, quite a large proportion of my friends are geeks too. And I mean geek in the sense of having a strong passion for intellectual pursuits of one form or another. Amidst the numerous people who after university think they've had enough of school and can't wait to start work, my friends and I mostly wish that we were still in school.
Indeed, I wish I still were in school. Hence the idea of grad school crosses my mind ever so often, despite probably not being able to do so any time soon. But there are a couple of considerations.
1) Turning my back on CS for policy work reduces my chances of doing CS grad school by many orders of magnitude.
2) I've never been particularly brilliant in CS for that matter. I found the concepts fascinating and enjoyed the work I did. But in Stanford, things were frequently above my head, and many of my colleagues had amazing minds which worked way faster than mine. So how to do grad school in a field like CS, where brilliance really counts?
3) So no CS grad school in the forseeable future. What about other fields of study? Too premature to be contemplating that.
4) At the end of the day, I feel that what I miss about school most is simply learning. I like cool ideas, and I feel excited about learning new stuff, not just in one particular field but any field at all. But that's not what grad school is about is it? Grad school is about depth, about extending human knowledge beyond what is known. YL mentioned to me before that if learning cool new stuff is what I wanted to go into grad school for, then perhaps I would be going into it for the wrong reason.
But all this is behind me now, since circumstances have dictated the kind of work I would be involved in for the next few years. I wonder if I could be betraying myself sometimes, but I guess there is no way in modern society to screw productive work, and spend the rest of my time learning stuff, getting inspired by cool professors, and just exploring the huge body of knowledge that man has accumulated over generations.
Unless I become a male equivalent of a lady of leisure... :P
5 Comments:
You have such a romanticized vision of grad school. Grad school is work; underpaid technicians if you are in engineering. Worse still if you are in the humanities.
Were you from RJ? and SO1?
www.livejournal.com/~nilsinelabore
Well, if you stay on in the admin service, they'll send you off for some MPA programme or other I'm sure. And I suppose if you get rotated through ministries every few years, you get to learn something new every few years. Although none of it will have anything to do with artificial intelligence or RSA encryption or semaphores or concatenation etc.
I've tended to view grad school as something you go for to get this stamp of approval from another set of old men (and women) so that you can join the club of researchers and be free to do whatever research some other rich old men will give you a grant for. Very feudal really - apprentice (grad student), journeyman (postdoc), master (principal investigator). And above all of you, the wealthy patron, preferably of royal lineage.
Romanticised vision of grad school? Hardly :). I guess what I didn't make clear enough was the difference between being in school, where you have fun taking classes, and being in grad school where, as you say, you're the underpaid technician.
Having said that, my little experience doing CS research was not one where I became an underpaid technician. I guess it's different if you're in a more experimental field, where you're essentially the extensions of the arms and legs of your Prof. I found that my group was pretty much able to work pretty independently and make design choices for ourselves, reverting to our Prof occasionally for guidance. But I guess I could just have been lucky.
And YL, bravo! RSA! Semaphores! Concatenation! You're sounding like the housemate of 3 CS majors that you are :P.
No lah, it's a personal challenge. Quest for knowledge and all that stuff, it's flowers-and-chocolate type periphery. I mean, you have to want to see the end-result in mind to even start on the darn thing, because along the way the emotional roller coastering can just break you down and take you out. It's happened to many a guillible young idealist. But really, if you can envision yourself getting through it relatively unscarred, you could look back, and the feeling of exhilaration and just the sheer sense of accomplishment, I think that's just marvellous. And for me that is what is going to make it all worthwhile.
And oops, I forgot to mention that yes, I'm from RJ, but no, I'm not from S01 but rather S03.
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