> "You are formally invited to A WAKE for THE RESEARCH SCIENCE CAREER of FRANCES HOCUTT FRIDAY from 7 PM to MIDNIGHT"
When I quit my PhD I had an Ungraduation Party! My wife made a cake and everyone sang Happy Ungraduation To You! It was sad and happy but overwhelmingly such a relief to get out
Good on you too not wrap your identity too much in a credential to allow yourself that decision and also having unconditional support from those close to you.
Thanks... I haven't thought about it in a long time, as it was difficult, but looking back it seems quite positive.
Three things:
1. Full disclosure at that time in my life I was rather bad at motivating myself to work independently for long periods. In hindsight starting a PhD was a bad idea for this reason alone.
2. The university closed the department I was in. I was transferred to another supervisor in another department, who was nice but saw his role as more administrative. After a while he then announced he was retiring so I was looking at moving to another supervisor again.
3. I turned out to be far, far more interested in writing software than doing research. E.g I wrote an open source unit testing library in Prolog to support my research tooling. I was learning Rails on the side. I went to the Hacker News meet-up in London, and the startup that was running them offered me a job, and the rest is history!
I had sunk multiple years into it so it wasn't easy. But in hindsight it was not even a close decision.
> We create meaning around the stress and soften transitions with rituals and rites of passage.
I graduated into the height of the pandemic, so I never had a graduation ceremony. Instead, they played a shitty video presentation over Zoom and my parents cracked open a beer and watched it on TV.
By the time I got invited back for a ceremony, I had already moved hundreds of miles away from my university. Obviously, I turned down the offer. I sometimes wonder if I'll regret that choice later on down the line.
The ceremonies at the beginning and the end—not a big deal. The part that matters is what you do there.
I think the celebrations are more for the parents, really. We live our lives in the bulk, the area, the day-to-day. We experience others’ lives at boundary transitions, the perimeter, the ending ceremonies.
I played college football which for the purposes of this conversation isn't a brag but call it a club. A big club. This was at a D3 non scholarship for the love of the game school.
Two weeks before school started I knew 110 students, 15 adult employees, and about 10 recent alums. It was great. I had easy access to people who could answer all my questions. What classes, what professors, what forms, what majors, what restaurants, how to move exams, parties, of age people, cars, parking, tutors etc. Can't recommend it enough.
My daughter is very indoors and "nerdy" for shorthand (So am I I just also do everything and played football). She loved DND. We lived about 12 miles from campus so as soon as she got in I found that they had DND club. I got her to ask to play in the discord early summer. She had a pack of friends by the time school started. A few freshmen and plenty of older classmates.
Can't recommend it enough. Also it generally accelerated me more than the time it took up
I didn't join many clubs when I was in university (in Germany). But for my first job I lived in Cambridge, and just attended clubs at the local university over there, and they mostly just let me in.
> I do regret that I didn't join any clubs in college until my last semester, and that I didn't make the kind of friendships I wanted
As a parent of teenagers, I struggle with how the hell to convey this to my kids. They are so engrossed in YouTube, stupid memes, and games that they don't join any clubs or sports at school; they don't seek out IRL activities; and my 17 year old has no interest in getting his driver's license. I have tried limiting screen time (and I took a lot of good lessons from Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation[0]). They've both got ample opportunities for therapy (depression runs in the family, the eldest has various diagnoses, etc.) and for engagement with peers.
They simply don't make and develop friendships. I have no doubt whatsoever that this will be a huge regret of theirs because they've already said that they wished they had more friends. It's infuriating and deeply saddening to see my kids want to be connected, to have everything they need to be connected, but to still not connect.
These ceremonies are meaningful if you invest meaning into them.
For my college graduation, the dean did something small to make the ceremony more meaningful. He asked us all to stand up, look back to our family, and applaud them for supporting us all these years. For me, looking back at my parents and thanking them for all they've done for me was a beautiful moment. And it was a full-circle moment for our family, the culmination of a long journey of immigrating to the US, moving around in search of stability. We had moved to be able to buy a house and to get us good, affordable educations. Both of those dreams were fulfilled at that time.
I don't recall much else from that ceremony. Not the speakers, but a few of the interactions afterward with my fellow students and their families.
Fair. I hope my kids invest some meaning in it (assuming I have kids someday). Or maybe I don't care if they assign meaning to graduation?
I always cared about school, but I saw it as a means to an end. I knew what I wanted to do from a pretty young age, the path to get there was pretty clear, and I went down that path and now here I am, happy that I made it. So, for me, the ceremony really was just a formality because I knew the real reward would be all the exciting stuff I get to do with my education.
But, now I'm considering having a family in the next few years, and someday I might want to show them photos from my graduation. I can't do that, though.
If it makes you feel better, my college graduation was the only one where my school decided to have an outdoor ceremony...in May in the deep south.
Needless to say, wearing a black gown over dress cloths is not great when its 95F and humid out. For our families of all ages, sitting in the football stadium for hours in the middle of the day was even worse. Multiple people were taken to the hospital for heat stroke.
Graduation was a decent excuse for my uncles and brother to come into town for a visit, but I would have happily celebrated graduation at a Mexican restaurant with air conditioning and a margarita without the big ceremony.
As someone who also graduated during the pandemic an moved across the country.
Maybe man, but honestly it just isn't the same as actually getting to say goodbye to your friends.
Out of all of the things that went poorly that year, ppl missing their graduations is definitely pretty low on that list, but on a personal level it just really sucked having your entire social circle just disappear out of your life basically randomly.
Ironically, several of my friends and I got COVID at our delayed graduation ceremony.
And they did multiple years of graduations at once, which made it exceptionally long. By the midway point even the professors onstage in their regalia were all scrolling on their phones.
I skipped mine. Graduating college was not something that I was necessarily proud of. I wouldn't dare try to take that feeling away from someone else though. For me? College was just an obstacle -- a chore -- that was just a step in a much longer journey.
Before leaving every job I've had, every one, I worried, I agonized, I second guessed myself...
And every new job, every one, within a short time, I thought "I should have done this sooner!"
I think we need to have a bias for moving forward, and I think it is healthy.
That said, I remember a friend who immediately quit their job (for a legitimate reason) without having another job lined up and regretted it. They told me they should have stayed cool, lined up another job first, and then quit.
I made a similar move and felt a similar sense of loss. I wish I had had the mental clarity at the time to throw fun parties instead of just trying to keep life together. I'm comforted by the fact that in my new career there are great people, just like there were in academia, and that my friends who stayed there are either (a) truly great scientists (b) struggling basically with the same things (money, politics, , people, "work") that most people in most white collar jobs struggle with.
I'm afraid I can't relate. I initially invested a lot of time in my first choice of career (over a decade) and just left last year. I walked out the door, said goodbye, and the next day it was out of my mind. That being said, I think the key is keeping a strong mental separation between "passion for a field of work" and "predetermined path by society to actualize that passion". The latter, in my opinion, is something that one should never get attached to.
If you wanted to become a doctor, say, and flunked out of school, how would you find another path to become a doctor; start again in another country? Sometimes the cost of failure is high.
It is, but sometimes there is no choice but to do something else. And the cost of my own "failure" was high, though I wouldn't label it as a failure. That word is barely in my vocabulary...I prefer to consider it as a learning experience.
A few years ago I left a tenured position and transitioned to industry. It was quite a mixed bag of feelings, including grief for a career that I had identified myself with. It’s very difficult not to identify ourselves with our jobs.
Not to highjack this topic, but she was recommended (like to many others of you no doubt) quite a bit in my Youtube feeds over the last few months; and the first few videos I watched seemed to be solid enough. Yet as I watched a few more, I couldn't shake the feeling that she's so out of left field that she's not just a 'quirky renegade' anymore, but rather a quack who dresses up her quackery with just enough 'real' physics to make it all sound very convincing. (By that I don't mean that she says factually wrong things, but that her conclusions or extrapolations from established facts seem to me, well, outrageous). However, I don't know enough physics to be able to tell if this is a correct feeling, and the Youtube comments are, as usual, one big fanboy fest, which is true for any large enough channel - even those of flat earthers and similarly delusional content).
So my question is - just how serious should she (and others like her, who denounce 'mainstream' academia as much as those other fringe groups who go on and on about the corruption of 'mainstream' media) be taken? Anyone have an opinion on this?
>So my question is - just how serious should she (and others like her, who denounce 'mainstream' academia as much as those other fringe groups who go on and on about the corruption of 'mainstream' media) be taken? Anyone have an opinion on this?
I know nothing about her but the video on her experience in academia is spot on. It's a pretty common experience among STEM academics. You will face the point where you have to compromise your academic "purity" and curiosity for trendy topics to survive. This also implies publishing "bullshit" papers and "bullshit" grants. Only certain types of people make it through that.
Very seriously indeed if you value higher education and research.
Lot's of people do. Over a decade ago now, Ben Ginsberg wrote "Fall of
the Faculty". Political scientists like Wendy Brown have picked apart
not only the evidence, but done deep analytical work on the reasons
for the disintegration of academia in the West. Even Peter Thiel (who
I profoundly disagree with on almost everything) has given knock-down
commentary that I find impossible to ignore on how academia went to
seed, and is now unfit for teaching, learning and honest research.
From a personal perspective; I worked in universities for over 30
years. What we have now is unrecognisable from the institutions I
started teaching at in the early 1990s. Almost all human values have
been expunged and replaced by a puppet show of performative theatrics,
led by MBA educated impostors and career administrators. It is fake to
the core. I no longer recognise these places as universities. I've
seen brilliant colleagues go crazy, retire early, turn to alcohol and
drugs, commit suicide, or just wander off to live in the mountains and
grow vegetables. I refuse to believe all those smart and dedicated
people are/were "weak". Academia is a very toxic place and I would not
advise any "smart and sensitive" person to go into that life if you
value your health.
When you consider how much it costs a nation to educate someone to PhD
level and then look at the churn and attrition, it's a massive bonfire
of wealth.
I've written numerous pieces in the Times Higher on specific failings
of universities, but one cannot halt a juggernaut of change with words
alone. Now I am left only with curiosity at how higher education will
change and what will come after.
My response has been to conduct and publish my own research
independently outside the "academic system" and to start my own
companies for teaching. By my standards, both are successful.
Can you give any examples of her promoting "quackery"? I don't know how you can admit you are weak in physics but nevertheless sense she is phony.
My biggest criticism of hers is that she is cynical and spends too much time tearing down other ideas rather than promoting anything.
But overall she does great things with showcasing the more ridiculous side of academia. She is adept at taking published research and showing that it is quackery. She shows how they manipulate data and mislead the media, often for more research money. I also applaud her counterpoint in particle physics regarding the waste involved in building yet another gigantic particle accelerator. It's a POV I wouldn't have considered, but I agree that the money could be better spent in other areas.
I'm not a physicist so I can't answer that question, though personally I trust in her expertise and really loved her book Lost in Math, but many of her most recent videos and tweets are not about physics at all but instead about nuclear power, capitalism, climate change, not having children, trans athletes, AI and so forth. The lure of punditry...
As an expert in at least some of the things Sabine makes videos about (string theory), Sabine is a contrarian who, if you are not otherwise an expert on what she is talking about, it would be best to avoid.
Sabine, like many contrarians, takes advantage of the fact that there are smart and convincing criticisms of many mainstream ideas, and she does her best to rely on those criticisms. However like all contrarians she presents a biased and exaggerated view of things in order to stoke engagement, and unless you are an expert it can be difficult/impossible to determine whether the view she is giving is balanced.
This is a classic issue with string theory critics, because string theory has many legitimate problems with it, but many of the critics are intellectually dishonest and you probably shouldn't listen to their criticisms on principle (but even I must admit it's quite hard to find good quality intellectually honest criticism of string theory which is digestible, so these contrarians tend to be the only loud voice).
In Sabine's case it is not so bad, because it is clear from some of her other positions that she is basically a crank. MOND and superdeterminism are basically crank physics at this point but she supports them purely because she is a contrarian. On this evidence alone you should not trust anything she says on any other subject, otherwise you're falling for a kind of Gell-Mann amnesia.
I've seen similar reactions and I can't help but think she's intentionally communicating provocatively to make people engage their brains.
You shouldn't just "take her seriously", you should take what she says *critically*. Hear the information and opinions, then decide for yourself whether to accept them.
Readit News
When I quit my PhD I had an Ungraduation Party! My wife made a cake and everyone sang Happy Ungraduation To You! It was sad and happy but overwhelmingly such a relief to get out
Good on you too not wrap your identity too much in a credential to allow yourself that decision and also having unconditional support from those close to you.
Three things:
1. Full disclosure at that time in my life I was rather bad at motivating myself to work independently for long periods. In hindsight starting a PhD was a bad idea for this reason alone.
2. The university closed the department I was in. I was transferred to another supervisor in another department, who was nice but saw his role as more administrative. After a while he then announced he was retiring so I was looking at moving to another supervisor again.
3. I turned out to be far, far more interested in writing software than doing research. E.g I wrote an open source unit testing library in Prolog to support my research tooling. I was learning Rails on the side. I went to the Hacker News meet-up in London, and the startup that was running them offered me a job, and the rest is history!
I had sunk multiple years into it so it wasn't easy. But in hindsight it was not even a close decision.
I graduated into the height of the pandemic, so I never had a graduation ceremony. Instead, they played a shitty video presentation over Zoom and my parents cracked open a beer and watched it on TV.
By the time I got invited back for a ceremony, I had already moved hundreds of miles away from my university. Obviously, I turned down the offer. I sometimes wonder if I'll regret that choice later on down the line.
I do regret that I didn't join any clubs in college until my last semester, and that I didn't make the kind of friendships I wanted
The ceremonies at the beginning and the end—not a big deal. The part that matters is what you do there.
I think the celebrations are more for the parents, really. We live our lives in the bulk, the area, the day-to-day. We experience others’ lives at boundary transitions, the perimeter, the ending ceremonies.
Two weeks before school started I knew 110 students, 15 adult employees, and about 10 recent alums. It was great. I had easy access to people who could answer all my questions. What classes, what professors, what forms, what majors, what restaurants, how to move exams, parties, of age people, cars, parking, tutors etc. Can't recommend it enough.
My daughter is very indoors and "nerdy" for shorthand (So am I I just also do everything and played football). She loved DND. We lived about 12 miles from campus so as soon as she got in I found that they had DND club. I got her to ask to play in the discord early summer. She had a pack of friends by the time school started. A few freshmen and plenty of older classmates.
Can't recommend it enough. Also it generally accelerated me more than the time it took up
I have particularly fond memories of the Diplomacy club: https://www.cambridgesu.co.uk/organisation/7831/
As a parent of teenagers, I struggle with how the hell to convey this to my kids. They are so engrossed in YouTube, stupid memes, and games that they don't join any clubs or sports at school; they don't seek out IRL activities; and my 17 year old has no interest in getting his driver's license. I have tried limiting screen time (and I took a lot of good lessons from Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation[0]). They've both got ample opportunities for therapy (depression runs in the family, the eldest has various diagnoses, etc.) and for engagement with peers.
They simply don't make and develop friendships. I have no doubt whatsoever that this will be a huge regret of theirs because they've already said that they wished they had more friends. It's infuriating and deeply saddening to see my kids want to be connected, to have everything they need to be connected, but to still not connect.
[0] https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/book
For my college graduation, the dean did something small to make the ceremony more meaningful. He asked us all to stand up, look back to our family, and applaud them for supporting us all these years. For me, looking back at my parents and thanking them for all they've done for me was a beautiful moment. And it was a full-circle moment for our family, the culmination of a long journey of immigrating to the US, moving around in search of stability. We had moved to be able to buy a house and to get us good, affordable educations. Both of those dreams were fulfilled at that time.
I don't recall much else from that ceremony. Not the speakers, but a few of the interactions afterward with my fellow students and their families.
I always cared about school, but I saw it as a means to an end. I knew what I wanted to do from a pretty young age, the path to get there was pretty clear, and I went down that path and now here I am, happy that I made it. So, for me, the ceremony really was just a formality because I knew the real reward would be all the exciting stuff I get to do with my education.
But, now I'm considering having a family in the next few years, and someday I might want to show them photos from my graduation. I can't do that, though.
God I have such a difficult relationship with my parents. Yes, their methods worked, but damn, I'll need years of therapy.
Needless to say, wearing a black gown over dress cloths is not great when its 95F and humid out. For our families of all ages, sitting in the football stadium for hours in the middle of the day was even worse. Multiple people were taken to the hospital for heat stroke.
Graduation was a decent excuse for my uncles and brother to come into town for a visit, but I would have happily celebrated graduation at a Mexican restaurant with air conditioning and a margarita without the big ceremony.
I could not tell you a single thing about my graduation ceremony.
Grandma was a bit miffed. Rituals are what you make of them. :)
Maybe man, but honestly it just isn't the same as actually getting to say goodbye to your friends.
Out of all of the things that went poorly that year, ppl missing their graduations is definitely pretty low on that list, but on a personal level it just really sucked having your entire social circle just disappear out of your life basically randomly.
And they did multiple years of graduations at once, which made it exceptionally long. By the midway point even the professors onstage in their regalia were all scrolling on their phones.
I think you made the right choice!
But over here (southern and western europe), graduations are not like in the american movies. Never regretted not assisting.
As a data point, I skipped mine to sleep in; no regrets 11 years later
How many people regret not buying a high school ring?
And every new job, every one, within a short time, I thought "I should have done this sooner!"
I think we need to have a bias for moving forward, and I think it is healthy.
That said, I remember a friend who immediately quit their job (for a legitimate reason) without having another job lined up and regretted it. They told me they should have stayed cool, lined up another job first, and then quit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKiBlGDfRU8
So my question is - just how serious should she (and others like her, who denounce 'mainstream' academia as much as those other fringe groups who go on and on about the corruption of 'mainstream' media) be taken? Anyone have an opinion on this?
I know nothing about her but the video on her experience in academia is spot on. It's a pretty common experience among STEM academics. You will face the point where you have to compromise your academic "purity" and curiosity for trendy topics to survive. This also implies publishing "bullshit" papers and "bullshit" grants. Only certain types of people make it through that.
Very seriously indeed if you value higher education and research.
Lot's of people do. Over a decade ago now, Ben Ginsberg wrote "Fall of the Faculty". Political scientists like Wendy Brown have picked apart not only the evidence, but done deep analytical work on the reasons for the disintegration of academia in the West. Even Peter Thiel (who I profoundly disagree with on almost everything) has given knock-down commentary that I find impossible to ignore on how academia went to seed, and is now unfit for teaching, learning and honest research.
From a personal perspective; I worked in universities for over 30 years. What we have now is unrecognisable from the institutions I started teaching at in the early 1990s. Almost all human values have been expunged and replaced by a puppet show of performative theatrics, led by MBA educated impostors and career administrators. It is fake to the core. I no longer recognise these places as universities. I've seen brilliant colleagues go crazy, retire early, turn to alcohol and drugs, commit suicide, or just wander off to live in the mountains and grow vegetables. I refuse to believe all those smart and dedicated people are/were "weak". Academia is a very toxic place and I would not advise any "smart and sensitive" person to go into that life if you value your health.
When you consider how much it costs a nation to educate someone to PhD level and then look at the churn and attrition, it's a massive bonfire of wealth.
I've written numerous pieces in the Times Higher on specific failings of universities, but one cannot halt a juggernaut of change with words alone. Now I am left only with curiosity at how higher education will change and what will come after.
My response has been to conduct and publish my own research independently outside the "academic system" and to start my own companies for teaching. By my standards, both are successful.
edit: grammar
My biggest criticism of hers is that she is cynical and spends too much time tearing down other ideas rather than promoting anything.
But overall she does great things with showcasing the more ridiculous side of academia. She is adept at taking published research and showing that it is quackery. She shows how they manipulate data and mislead the media, often for more research money. I also applaud her counterpoint in particle physics regarding the waste involved in building yet another gigantic particle accelerator. It's a POV I wouldn't have considered, but I agree that the money could be better spent in other areas.
Sabine, like many contrarians, takes advantage of the fact that there are smart and convincing criticisms of many mainstream ideas, and she does her best to rely on those criticisms. However like all contrarians she presents a biased and exaggerated view of things in order to stoke engagement, and unless you are an expert it can be difficult/impossible to determine whether the view she is giving is balanced.
This is a classic issue with string theory critics, because string theory has many legitimate problems with it, but many of the critics are intellectually dishonest and you probably shouldn't listen to their criticisms on principle (but even I must admit it's quite hard to find good quality intellectually honest criticism of string theory which is digestible, so these contrarians tend to be the only loud voice).
In Sabine's case it is not so bad, because it is clear from some of her other positions that she is basically a crank. MOND and superdeterminism are basically crank physics at this point but she supports them purely because she is a contrarian. On this evidence alone you should not trust anything she says on any other subject, otherwise you're falling for a kind of Gell-Mann amnesia.
You shouldn't just "take her seriously", you should take what she says *critically*. Hear the information and opinions, then decide for yourself whether to accept them.