reflections on "coming of age"

[jrtom]

It'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 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.

Comments

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

(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.)