After reading Kuhn, visiting the ICP and talking to friends, one thing became clear to me: From an individual point of view, science is often slow, frustrating and not at all like childhood thoughts and popmedia depictions. This is a problem for two kinds of people: Those who started out as idealists but ended up cynical, seeing science as just a job, and those who are about to choose their path and who have second thoughts. I am in the latter camp and I feel like I have ample company. What’s one to do in this situation?
You know the situation. Someone is presenting his research, PowerPoint slides up, room slightly darkened, and what you understand best is what he communicates nonverbally: “I don’t care either. I know that the question my research answers is not the kind of question that keeps me from falling asleep at night, but hey, it’s not as if that’s what I’m living for.” — at the same time, he goes on talking about the effects of auditory priming on the calcium ion concentration in parvocellular neurons of the chimpanzee lateral geniculate nucleus. If you were thinking in words, your thoughts would be along these lines:
“I want to learn about the world, but this does not feel right. It’s not the fact that what’s presented is a minuscule piece of detail — I care about details. But the reason I care about details is because they are necessary to piece togetherthe larger picture. I want to find answers to the big questions. To study, to travel, to get to know people and to exchange ideas sounds perfect, but then I see those who call themselves ’scientists’ and, most of the time, I don’t want to live their lives.”
“I don’t want to spend two years working on a project where the result is a 2% improvement of efficiency in some manufacturing procedure and a journal article. At the same time, I don’t want to deceive myself by pretending to tackle the big questions while all I’m engaged in is philosophical word games. I don’t want to solve puzzles for the sake of puzzle-solving. Enjoyment from puzzle-solving has never been my primary motivation for doing science. It may be part of my motivation, but a necessary condition for me to enjoy what I do is to feel that it is significant. I want to believe in choosing science, but reality always gets in the way.”
So, do you choose an academic career, hoping that things will be different for you, or that, by then, you have changed enough not to notice anymore?
“Academia” is a name for a set of standard solutions to standard problems. You don’t have to accept all of them, or any of them, to do science. It’s just the most convenient way. It appears to me that, if you don’t want to, you do not need to make any choices in life — there is always a most convenient way. Once you start out (and you did not have a say in that decision), there is a default answer to almost every question life poses, conditioned on how well you perform at certain tests and on what you state as your interests.
If ‘knowledge’ is high on your list of interests, here’s what to do: Finish high school, get a bachelor’s degree and don’t forget to take some jobs at your university (you want experience in teaching!), write your bachelor’s thesis about a topic that’s somewhat familiar to you (even if it’s not the thing you really want to do — after all, it’s only three months of your life) and get a bachelor’s degree. Next step, join a master’s program, internship included, during which you publish a few papers (research experience is crucial!). Your master’s thesis ends up using knowledge you already have from working on your bachelor’s thesis (because there is not enough time to start from scratch) and luckily you manage to suppress any thoughts about how your research is taking more and more directions that are not truly yours, for the sole reason that that’s what you’re an expert in. By the time you are working on your PhD thesis, you’re thinking that you are probably the only person that understands why one would spend years working on the problem you are trying to solve, and sometimes you are close to admitting that you do not understand it yourself, but rationalization goes a long way. By then, a significant portion of the possibility that once lay before you and that you didn’t appreciate at that time is already gone.
You can deviate from the most convenient way, of course, but only a small minority does. The sad thing about the whole situation is that there are people who want to do science but for whom the most convenient way is soul-crushing, while alternative choices are not an option (think money, acceptance, etc.). Therefore, they either don’t end up in science (despite their interest and motivation) or they do choose academia and suffer from the restrictions it imposes, fighting against the windmills of institutionalization that, like Dementors, suck out any sense of purpose until it’s just a job, fight over, next generation please.
(This is a gloomy way of seeing things, but to me it’s a real problem in search of a solution — not necessarily or primarily for personal reasons, but because, for some people, academia does not live up to its promise, the primacy of the pursuit of knowledge. I believe that it could and should, since they tend to be the kinds of people that would make good scientists.)
