It's 2 am and I am tired, so forgive my inablility to write properly please.
I am writing this in wake of the fact that in less than a month i will be
officially starting my physics phd. A career in stem isn't considered the
best thing you can do with your time on this earch where I comm from. If you
have the means to attain a college education, it is expected that you would
pursue something that makes you money, which, you know, makes sense.
The current 'meta', if you will, is to do either engineering or computer
science or medicine. or something in finance. these professions would allow
you to enter the job force and start out with a relatively high salary
(or so they say. i know many CS majors who graduated with me and are jobless)
A degree in physics, or science in general really, is almost looked down
upon. Its what people do when they can't get into an engineering college.
As such, I have had to explain to a lot of people (from relatives to strangers
on the train) my reasons for choosing the consolation prize of college
degrees. So i thought i'd write down something about that, because i think
my reasons have changed over 4 years of studying this discipline in a way that
would perhaps surprise younger me, and in a way that i don't completely
understand myself.
my initial answers used to be something along the lines of (this is gonna
sound really pretentious. bear with me please)
physics is the study of everything at the most primal level. how subatomic
particles interact with each other determine literally everything that
happens in our world, from the revolutions of the planets to human behaviour
everything, from why wars are fought to why people love each other.
everything boils down to simple mathematical formulae that govern our
universe. and that's beautiful.
thinking about this 6 years later, its. i mean. i was a child. this is a very
naive view of the world. and overly simplistic. and also just plain out wrong.
but it is beautiful. and that beauty, the idea that we could understand the
universe and our place in it by placing it under a microscope and looking
really really hard still appeals to me. it still is a part of the reason i
choose to remain in the field, even though it occupies a much smaller place
in the pie chart.
Relevant xkcd, which sums up why this isn't really a good reason perfectly
Now I have 4 years of collge experience under my belt, and i think my current
reasons are much simpler.
I like doing physics
Specifically, experimental stuff. I couldn't last a day as a theoretical
physicist. I like putting together stuff and tinkering with electronics and
writing shitty python code to analyse data and shitty latex documents that talk
about the stuff i put toghether and the data i analysed.
And like, now people ask me, why not be an engineer then? and yeah, that makes
sense. that's what engineers do, right? or at least certain kinds of engineers?
Here, the naiveity (?) comes back. The counter i've come up with to the
engineer question is that the work you do as a physicist is in service of
somethng that i value. the idea that youre on the precipice of human knowledge
in your field. everything you do slightly pushing on the boundries of our corpus
of things we know about or think we know about. and that's pretty cool! sure,
its childish, but i want that to be the thing that drives my work as opposed to
shareholder profits or whatever.
Speaking of which, another thing that i like about academia is the lab
environment! which sounds weird. if you've heard anything about the culture in
academia, you've heard that it is really toxic. publish or perish. supervisors
using grad students and postdocs as practical slaves while they get the credit.
and yeah, to some extent that's true. but academia is not a monolithic
homegenous thing. its made up of people, and the people i've had the fortune of
working with have been the most amazing people i could have asked for.
This might just be the specific condition of the lab i used to work at, but
the culture around work and work life balance was so nice. my labmates were more
like friends to me than coworkers. we used to go rock climbing every week,
my PI invited us over for breakfast every now and then. I used to go to his
house to gawk at his hifi audio setup and we woud sit around and plug in
different pre-amps with different speakers and try and see what the differences
in sound were. (he had this tube pre amp that was really really really cool!)
and all of us were united by our passion for whatever we were working on at any
time.
The lab i worked at also helped me redevelop my reason for liking physics.
One fateful night in sophomore year i was working late in the lab thinking about
why i was still doing physics. it had been 2 years of uni, and i hadn't figured
out what subfield i wanted to go into, which is something I thought would have
happened by then. my original reason for liking physics was starting to fall
apart the more i thought about it. if i couldn't even figure out whata sub-field
i wanted to go into, how would i apply to grad schools? which field would bring
me closer to my goal of understand the universe? it was pretty bad, i was on the
verge of tears. turns out my internal agony was apparent on my face, for a
research assistant on his way out asked me if everything was ok. I broke down
trying to explain what was going through my head. he gave me the best advice
i have ever gotten about choosing what to do.
He told me to forget about subfields. focus on what you're doing. do you like
computer simulations? mathy stuff? electronics? what do you enjoy doing in the
moment that you're doing it? let that decide where you go. and even then, no
matter what you end up going into, figure out how you can shoehorn in the work
that interests you into your routime. because that's what you'll end up doing
during 90% of your time.
So yeah, i choose to do experimental particle physics, because in the program
i am entering, i get to fuck around with fancy cryostats and dilution
refridgerators and make PCBs and solder stuff and work in clean rooms. cool
sciency stuff! and we might find dark matter, who knows? even if we don't, in
the process we'll end up learning other stuff and procedures and techniques to
do things better and more efficiently and maybe it will be useful to someone
doing something else in the future. and i get to do that surrounded by amazing
people.
it sucks that it doesn't pay as well as it should. and phd work and postdoc
work is extremely gruelling and repitive and you're overworked and underpayed.
oh well. at least we have the union
thanks for reading all this. again im typing this as i think it up, and
haven't really edited ths at all. let me know if you liked it! or hated it idk.
=> spaghettifiedcat@proton.me
Now I have 4 years of collge experience under my belt, and i think my current
reasons are much simpler.
I like doing physics
Specifically, experimental stuff. I couldn't last a day as a theoretical
physicist. I like putting together stuff and tinkering with electronics and
writing shitty python code to analyse data and shitty latex documents that talk
about the stuff i put toghether and the data i analysed.
And like, now people ask me, why not be an engineer then? and yeah, that makes
sense. that's what engineers do, right? or at least certain kinds of engineers?
Here, the naiveity (?) comes back. The counter i've come up with to the
engineer question is that the work you do as a physicist is in service of
somethng that i value. the idea that youre on the precipice of human knowledge
in your field. everything you do slightly pushing on the boundries of our corpus
of things we know about or think we know about. and that's pretty cool! sure,
its childish, but i want that to be the thing that drives my work as opposed to
shareholder profits or whatever.
Speaking of which, another thing that i like about academia is the lab
environment! which sounds weird. if you've heard anything about the culture in
academia, you've heard that it is really toxic. publish or perish. supervisors
using grad students and postdocs as practical slaves while they get the credit.
and yeah, to some extent that's true. but academia is not a monolithic
homegenous thing. its made up of people, and the people i've had the fortune of
working with have been the most amazing people i could have asked for.
This might just be the specific condition of the lab i used to work at, but
the culture around work and work life balance was so nice. my labmates were more
like friends to me than coworkers. we used to go rock climbing every week,
my PI invited us over for breakfast every now and then. I used to go to his
house to gawk at his hifi audio setup and we woud sit around and plug in
different pre-amps with different speakers and try and see what the differences
in sound were. (he had this tube pre amp that was really really really cool!)
and all of us were united by our passion for whatever we were working on at any
time.
The lab i worked at also helped me redevelop my reason for liking physics.
One fateful night in sophomore year i was working late in the lab thinking about
why i was still doing physics. it had been 2 years of uni, and i hadn't figured
out what subfield i wanted to go into, which is something I thought would have
happened by then. my original reason for liking physics was starting to fall
apart the more i thought about it. if i couldn't even figure out whata sub-field
i wanted to go into, how would i apply to grad schools? which field would bring
me closer to my goal of understand the universe? it was pretty bad, i was on the
verge of tears. turns out my internal agony was apparent on my face, for a
research assistant on his way out asked me if everything was ok. I broke down
trying to explain what was going through my head. he gave me the best advice
i have ever gotten about choosing what to do.
He told me to forget about subfields. focus on what you're doing. do you like
computer simulations? mathy stuff? electronics? what do you enjoy doing in the
moment that you're doing it? let that decide where you go. and even then, no
matter what you end up going into, figure out how you can shoehorn in the work
that interests you into your routime. because that's what you'll end up doing
during 90% of your time.
So yeah, i choose to do experimental particle physics, because in the program
i am entering, i get to fuck around with fancy cryostats and dilution
refridgerators and make PCBs and solder stuff and work in clean rooms. cool
sciency stuff! and we might find dark matter, who knows? even if we don't, in
the process we'll end up learning other stuff and procedures and techniques to
do things better and more efficiently and maybe it will be useful to someone
doing something else in the future. and i get to do that surrounded by amazing
people.
it sucks that it doesn't pay as well as it should. and phd work and postdoc
work is extremely gruelling and repitive and you're overworked and underpayed.
oh well. at least we have the union
thanks for reading all this. again im typing this as i think it up, and
haven't really edited ths at all. let me know if you liked it! or hated it idk.
=> spaghettifiedcat@proton.me