I’m going to a conference in San Diego two weeks from Friday. The hotel I’m staying in is a Westin.
Westin is part of the Starwood Hotels chain, which I designed part of the website for as a freelance project last year.
I should get a discount or something đŸ™‚
I’m turning 23 in exactly one week. Every year around this time, I like to look back on what I accomplished.
Most years, I can point to a bunch of awards, accomplishments, research, musical pieces, etc. When turning 22, I was still in shock over my admissions results, but willing to spin the wheel one more time. I remember being rather miffed that I was doing work that the University of Pennsylvania could take partial credit for, since that university wouldn’t accept me in admissions, wouldn’t let me study what I wanted, wouldn’t provide me training under faculty who I wished to study under… but seemed content to have me do their research for them. I had to travel there at the time too, which wasn’t fun. I remember wanting to complete my “Let’s Compose!” initiative, which I eventually just reduced to the “Ecossaise” IRC client. I wanted to finish my research on the divisor function and explore the connections between the divisor function and the Riemann hypothesis via Robin’s Theorem (not that I anticipated anything coming out of that particular theorem); this was before I fully adopted the view that the society that doesn’t let me do my math research in peace doesn’t deserve the advancements anyway. I also got to look back on graduating first in my class, winning the CS award, being inducted into honor societies, tutoring, playing in my first concert, composing my best pieces, etc. It was productive. I was glad at where I was, if not where I was headed.
But that was last year.
This year? An MS, 3 unpublished papers, one workshop presentation, one website for a client, one website for myself, 3 musical pieces, and 7 pieces of art or poetry, all of them having to do with the loss of freedom or the necessity of suffering. Obviously, one can tell what my creative outlet… and my life… has become. It’s a lot of art, but otherwise a fairly unproductive year. And not because I’ve been working on the art; my research usually comes first. I’ve simply been stalled most of the year, usually by circumstances outside of my control.
It’s been a bad year, and what small success I’ve had has been in spite of my school, rather than because of it. One paper and the MS were for Temple; the other things were completely independent. The MS was such a trifle that I barely count it an accomplishment; after what I did at Monmouth, a simple 12 graduate credit per semester load is a laughably small amount of work in comparison (so long as the classes are right; I do more work in the one class I’m in now than I did in the four I was in last Spring). Our actual publications are being held up more or less indefinitely by the people whose only function on the team seems to be to take credit for the work, which invariably falls flat on my head, as it has in every group I’ve ever participated in. I haven’t received emails from one of these people (the one with the classifier) for over a month. And people wonder why I hate group work. I don’t mind it if everyone pulls their own weight, but group work almost always translates to “do the entire group’s work”!
This school has so thoroughly screwed up the last year of my life that I have no words to describe it. I’m most likely going to defend my dissertation before we publish anything there. It would be laughable… if it were happening to someone who didn’t care. It’s all just a charade. Graduate school is meaningless.
I applied for a Ph. D. so I could receive scientific training. I’ll graduate rather soon, because now that I have a topic, I intend to write this dissertation so fast that I’ll break records (the only thing to do when your school is such a mess is to leave ASAP!), but what then? I’m certainly not going for another Ph. D. to make up for it. I’m not going anywhere near academia ever again if I can help it. I am certainly not going to subject myself to postdoctoral work, which would just be a continuation of what’s happening here. I probably will still lack the training I require to do serious research, unless what’s in demand is basically just paper-writing. So that probably leaves software development.
Which I could have done with an MS, in which case I’d have just graduated from Columbia (or probably any one of the ivies, as I had no trouble gaining admission to Columbia’s MS program and they’re as competitive as any of them. I just couldn’t get into the Ph. D. programs at any of them).
So this year was a complete waste, except for the fact that I received a meaningless piece of paper. Auspicious. I bet that’s what the rest of my life is going to be like, too. Collecting meaningless pieces of paper. Lots of people would like that.
But that’s a pathetic life.
I have essentially become the hub that everyone goes through in the Metasquares community. My insights and advice are valued by all parties. This is a good thing; all sorts of opportunities open up when you literally have all of the information there is to know.
My thought patterns are not quite as unique as I had previously thought. Henri PoincarĂ©’s thought processes appeared to resemble my own.
After seeing how faculty are hired in academia, I realize that all of my problems were predetermined as soon as I wrote the word “Algorithms” on my personal statement for grad. school.
I just read an article on Slashdot about the “power of algorithms” (really about involving both humans and machine learning in solving problems, which is a far cry from theoretical study of algorithms, but the article just demonstrates that most people can’t distinguish between the two). My first thought is that the growing awareness that the article summarizes arrived approximately a year and a half too late for me, as the root cause of my problems with graduate schools (both regarding admissions and independent learning opportunities) last year seems to stem from my choice of algorithms as a (“cold”) field of study.
The tide of increased awareness arrives at a perfect time for me to obtain a very cushy job in industry after obtaining my doctorate. Unfortunately, this is (a) not going to be a problem for me in any case, and (b) not really my goal. I want to do good science and creatively solve the big problems. Unfortunately, despite demonstrating considerable talent in the areas I want to go into (of course; I wouldn’t choose them otherwise), I haven’t been able to receive the slightest modicum of institutional training in those fields. In fact, I’ve met active resistance while attempting to procure such training. Autodidacticism is good, but it only goes so far, especially for a verbal learner such as myself.
And I still maintain that the research community is slighting a very powerful field that still has much room to expand.
This semester, I have a professor who likes to assign a backbreaking workload every week. There are two things wrong with this approach:
The first is that students stop taking the assignments seriously after about the first month of class if the workload is too heavy. What ends up being submitted afterwards is invariably halfhearted, since no one wants to put an unreasonable amount of work into a problem that they may not get the correct solution to anyway. This doesn’t affect grades at all, since the relative ranking of students is preserved even as the mean work quality decreases. The result is that the entire class seems to start falling behind on assignments.
The second problem is more fundamental for a course populated entirely by Ph. D. students: we need to write our dissertations. We don’t have time to waste on excessive coursework. The work is due sooner, so it takes priority of necessity, but that prevents us from getting our research done.
Not that anyone in my group is even giving me the courtesy of responding to my emails, much less actually doing work on the paper they’re placing their names on.
First, happy Autumnal Equinox and Yom Kippur. If you are fasting, may your fast be an easy one.
On a more personal note, I’ve decided to go into industry post-graduation, which means I will most likely disregard my advisor’s suggestions, tempting as they might be, of taking up a postdoc at CMU. I’ve had a bias for a while, but it’s now definite, and only very strange circumstances will alter my decision. Part of it was more passive recruitment, this time from GE, Exxon-Mobil, and AT&T – all great companies, all great jobs, the credentials that set me apart (in particular, the fact that I had the highest GPA in my class) are taken into account in the hiring process, and I probably don’t need to worry that I won’t pass the interviews if I demonstrate programming and analytical abilities but can’t recite the CYK algorithm from memory (ala Google, which would have been an excellent place to work, and to continue my own research, if it had worked out).
Again, we need to contrast this with the academic response to the same credentials (plus a perfect GRE score, four glowing letters of recommendation, and a model personal statement that the companies didn’t even see!), where rejection from all of the schools that could have given me a real education (for the first time since 4th grade) forced me into Philadelphia, a city I loathe so deeply that I structure my entire schedule to minimize my time there (conflicting frequently with my advisor, who attempts to maximize my time in the lab, which also has the side effect of minimizing my productive time by jamming a 3+ hour daily commute into the works). It’s something that still burns within me, for the effects of the decision are permanent: I’m not receiving earnest scientific training, I’m not working in theory, my efforts to acquire proficiency in other fields are being severely and quite deliberately suppressed, I still haven’t defined my relative proficiencies or limits (or even learned study habits!) because I’m still effortlessly outstripping my class, and on top of it all I’m being pushed into traveling for 3 hours to one of my least favorite places on the planet at every available opportunity. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to get over it; it’s completely altered the course of my life, my career, and my scientific output, and not in a good way. This is why I can’t even talk about it without the discussion degenerating into a rant. It was just absolutely unjust for someone with my proven ability and purity of intent to be denied a high-quality education, essentially left to wither, on the crux of his scientific career.
It’s not just a bias against past slightings, however. I’d put those aside in terms of career but for one thing, which I am noticing more with every passing day: the career of a scientist is socially constructed. You are nothing if you are not revered by your peers. One of my own theories (my 19th psychological postulate) states that a caste’s attitude towards you is a reflection of its own social values; an immediate corollary is that entire sectors will have rather consistent attitudes towards you over time. I wouldn’t formulate it if I didn’t believe it; my past reception by both sectors is a reflection of the direction my career will take.
And then there’s the research environment. I firmly believe that, for a theoretician, the lab is the last place to go to do research. Einstein had it right – stay in the patent office and devote your mental resources to your theories. Communication is a distraction. Travel is a distraction. The unfamiliar environment is (initially) a distraction. The lack of tools can be a distraction. Relying upon other people can be a BIG distraction if you’re not fortunate enough to end up with people who can be bothered to pull their own weight (a recent journal paper was completed in January, save for one experimental result which I must rely on the UPenn people on our team to produce, as they have the classifier that can produce it. Guess what? It still hasn’t been published!)
Here’s one that most people miss: devoting long stretches of contiguous time to research is a distraction! Think too much about a single approach for too long and you become entrenched in one mode of thought. Again, we have a historical precedent of the effectiveness of just thinking about other things, this time in Edison.
So yes, I do believe that industry would give me a better environment than academia. It also provides a useful fallback option, in the form of a development position, in case I become so disgusted with the way research is done that I decide to leave it altogether.
Though incapable of reproducing on their own, viruses do contain DNA, and, more importantly, act functionally as life because they participate in evolutionary processes. They can indeed split off into new species, and there is a hypothesis that life began with them (although if they require cellular machinery to replicate, I fail to see how they could have preceded cells). Therefore, I consider them living. You may disagree, but I simply wanted to make my reasoning clear.
Despite the great variation in my academic experience as I made my way through the echelons of formal education, one invariant has curiously remained: I was always alone. Not in the sense of having no friends, as I’ve always had 1 or 2 close friends, and have made more since college, nor due to an inability to socialize, but in terms of academic study groups, idea passing, and generally communicating with other people about my work. It isn’t that I can’t do it – quite the contrary; I found out that I could pass ideas very effectively when I began to tutor – but rather due to the fact that I usually tend to find myself in a social group all my own. In grade school, I was so unpopular that I was picked on even by the people at the bottom of the social ladder. In college, I tended to provide help rather than ask for it, there were only 6 of us, and I barely studied in any case (yes, the same college that I graduated from with the highest GPA in my class – not only did I get a 3.96, but did it without studying). In graduate school, the classes are slightly harder in places, though I still barely study, but race has now become the dividing factor. I’m literally the only American student in the classroom, and as soon as the professor walks out, different conversations begin in all sorts of different languages, but never in English). All of the students are nice and polite people to work with, and will converse in English if I speak to them, but it’s clear that they’d prefer to associate within their social group.
And that leaves me. Alone on the top of my class. Again.
I don’t know whether being forced to derive my own answers has enhanced or diminished my abilities, but it has certainly become a key component of my academic identity regardless.