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jrtomIt's a mixed bag.
I've been anticipating this birthday for a while. Not because I did anything particularly cool for it--the highlight of my evening involved an hour's drive to help a friend's sister with a flat tire and some impressively stuck bolts--but for a few reasons related to the fact that it's my 33rd birthday, in particular.
The rabid Tolkien fans in the audience (and even some of those that don't actually foam at the mouth, such as
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red_frog, who was kind enough to mark the occasion) will remember that The Long-Expected Party took place not merely on Bilbo's eleventy-first birthday, but Frodo's thirty-third--the year at which hobbits were said to have "come of age".By some measures, I'm doing pretty well. I have an amazing wife, and a "sucker child" 6-month-old son, who both think I'm pretty cool. I'm not making a lot of money (now) but I have no debt and in fact I even still have money left over after getting, in the last year, a nice bicycle, a nice computer, and LASIK surgery. I've gained a modest amount of professional recognition for my work on various projects, and I expect to have pretty good prospects for getting a job in industrial research when I'm done with my degree. And so on.
On the other hand I'm, well, 33, and haven't yet completed my Ph.D., though I've been in three different graduate schools for a total of eight years. As a result, I'm still living in an area that I don't like very much, and which is far away from almost all of my friends. This is particularly annoying because I'd picked my 33rd birthday as the target by which I would be done: it seemed appropriate given the connotations, and I figured that four years here would be enough to get my degree, given the head start I already had.
It would be nice, perhaps, if I could blame this tardiness on externals. Some of it I can, I suppose; at my Ph.D. advisor's behest, I've spent a fair amount of time since I've been here helping other people out with their research problems and projects, without actually getting credit for it. But really, it's down to the choices I've made, and while I think that some of the delays have been worth what they cost me in time, some of them are just a result of me goofing off a lot. The worst parts are when I'm goofing off doing something I don't even really enjoy: I'm not technically obsessive-compulsive, but there's certainly a touch of that in my personality.
And, in truth, I have few excuses for not making progress. Megan has been incredibly supportive, despite the fact that every year we're here is another year that (a) I'm not making serious money, (b) she's working at a job that she finds professionally frustrating, (c) we're living in a place she doesn't like much that's far from her friends and family, (d) we don't have a house of our own, and (e) she has a husband that spends his evenings working. (I do much of my best work at night in any case, but it's also hard, under the circumstances, not to feel like I need to be working all the time--which is one reason why I don't want to go directly to an academic position once I'm done.) She's paying for most of the child-care costs--despite my previous flights of fancy that suggested that I could look after Corwin full-time while doggedly pursuing my degree, I'm not terribly productive (that is, even less than usual) while I'm his sole caregiver, so we have him in day care for three days a week. Padhraic--my advisor--has been very good about funding me and is a good person to work with. UCI gave me credit for all the teaching that I'd done at UBC and the UO, and for all my non-AI class requirements, so I was able to pass my area exam after my first year. Heck, last summer my internship at HP consisted primarily of me pursuing my own research agenda, but with access to data that I couldn't get elsewhere and a much better salary than my usual grad student stipend.
I know that I've learned a lot, and that I have experience and skills that most freshly minted Ph.D.s probably lack. And I have been, and am, extraordinarily fortunate in most aspects of my personal life--and I don't just grudgingly acknowledge that fact: I believe it.
But if I don't finish my Ph.D. while I'm still in my 33rd year, I'm going to be really pissed.
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(no subject)
Date: 29 July 2005 04:09 (UTC)God luck on finishing, Josh. Stalled sucks.
(no subject)
Date: 29 July 2005 12:41 (UTC)(It's not so much stalled as it is glacial--things are moving, I'm finally starting to get publications out the door--but your sympathy is appreciated nonetheless.)
happy birthday
Date: 29 July 2005 07:57 (UTC)t.
Re: happy birthday
Date: 29 July 2005 10:24 (UTC)And incidentally, learn from my mistake: the very first exit going N after the I-5/91 interchange (Manchester) does not, as far as I could tell, give you a direct way to get back on I-5 in either direction. Use Beach Boulevard instead. :)
(no subject)
Date: 29 July 2005 11:44 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 29 July 2005 12:41 (UTC)Happy Day of Bees!
Date: 29 July 2005 21:09 (UTC)Translated from Judson-speak, "Happy birthday - you rock. And don't worry too much about the grad school + baby thing, that's pretty much what happened with my parents and it turned out just fine." :)
HUGS!
-J
many happy returns
Date: 2 August 2005 22:32 (UTC)Seriously, Ph.D.s are overrated except insofar as they allow you to do what you want. Perhaps among the "experience and skills" you've accumulated is a very good idea of what you want and how to get there, which I suspect you'll find quite useful in the years ahead.
Best to you and yours and may you live to 111.
Re: many happy returns
Date: 2 August 2005 22:46 (UTC)Not at all. I'd say that I've been getting increasingly annoyed at myself for how long this is taking for about two years now.
Seriously, Ph.D.s are overrated except insofar as they allow you to do what you want.
Mmm...in a sense. In another sense, there are personal reasons why it's important for me to finish it. I'd say that I might have had a decent chance at getting hired by HP after my internship last summer, if I'd wanted to "deprioritize" finishing my Ph.D. But I've had such consistent problems with displaying sticktoitiveness that I have to prove to myself that I _can_ finish it.
Some more thoughts on this subject... (http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jmadden/essays/whyphd.html)somewhat outdated in a few respects (I'm now leaning towards industry research), but the basic themes are still true.
Perhaps among the "experience and skills" you've accumulated is a very good idea of what you want and how to get there, which I suspect you'll find quite useful in the years ahead.
Mmm...more like a decent idea of how to find out what I want and how to get there--an algorithm for discovering goals, rather than a goal. I have no idea what I'll be doing in 15 years; my current field--mathematical social network analysis--is changing _very_ quickly.
Anyway, thanks. Incidentally, did you have any particular base in mind for that "111" figure? (Base 60 sounds good... :> )
an algorithm for discovering goals?
Date: 3 August 2005 08:30 (UTC)As far as I understand myself, I agree with most of the statements in your essay. My main point of contention right now is whether they form an accurate representation of how academia actually works (at least, the sector in which I find myself right now) at the postdoc level and above. Perhaps in your corner of academia, they do.
And I was thinking base 10 for the eleventy-one figure, but if you wanna rearrange the digits I won't tell Old Nick. :)
Re: an algorithm for discovering goals?
Date: 4 August 2005 23:56 (UTC)For instance, I've decided that it would probably be best, for the time being, for me to have a job that involves me mostly working "on-site". Working at home occasionally has its points...but it means that I _always_ feel like I ought to be working, and also has more than the usual number of distractions. I'd like to be able to come home and feel like I can relax.
I'd also like to have the option of working from home at least sometimes, but this is probably not that difficult to swing in the kinds of places I'm considering (industrial research).
I want to do research in a group that has people that like to work and write papers together. The quality and pace of my work improves considerably when I have people to bounce ideas off of that actually have a stake in the project themselves; it also makes it much easier for me to get work out the door (both in terms of getting things in shape and writing papers). Exempli gratia: there's one research project that I've been working on for over a year now, off and on. Circumstances have caused me to be working on this with another student; he's mostly doing scut work, but the fact that his ability to get stuff done depends on me getting data to him helps to motivate me. As a result things are moving much faster now, and I'd say that it's likely that I'll be drafting a paper on this research by the end of the summer.
This means that working in academia, right now, is overall probably not what I want. I'm not saying I won't consider it, but much as I enjoy teaching, it takes over my life, and I'm sort of hoping to get some of it back when I finish here.
(Now all I need to do is to find an industrial research lab in Portland or Seattle...)
I agree with most of the statements in your essay. My main point of contention right now is whether they form an accurate representation of how academia actually works (at least, the sector in which I find myself right now) at the postdoc level and above.
Not sure what you mean by this. Which of the statements are you thinking about in particular?