maverick_starstrider said:
My point here is that your arguments have an odour (for lack of a better phrase) of reverse rationalization and cognitive dissonance (as opposed to sound evidence).
You say that as if that's a bad thing. OF COURSE, I'm reverse rationalizing and impacted by cognitive dissonance, and that's a bad thing because ? Well...
And I'm not arguing, I'm just telling stories.
My goal is to be productive. If I feel miserable about myself and can't get out of bed, that's not good for anyone. If I write a story in which I end up being the hero in my one's life story, and it get's me out of bed and *doing* stuff, then GREAT!
The advice you seem to be relating is that the road from grad school to "real world" is through categorically and systematically crushing ones self-esteem and dreams/goals to get yourself in the right "mindset".
That's not the advice that I'm giving at all. I'm not crushing my self-esteem. I look in the mirror and say "well there is a miserable, loser, and failure" and then I laugh because I've learned to not feel miserable about "failure."
Also you don't need me to crush your dreams, reality will do it. You have to realize that your fate is decided by *THE COMMITTEE* and one day *THE COMMITTEE* is going to reject your application.
The thing to do is to figure out what to do after your dreams get crushed. For me, it means picking up the pieces and dreaming new dreams. What you quickly find is that a lot of the problem is that you aren't dreaming your dreams, you are dreaming someone else's. It may be your parents or your professor, or your elementary school teacher. Part of how I got through this was to figure out where I got the idea that being a physicist was so important. I ended up in a room with Jesuit priests and a traitorous general standing on the Great Wall of China, with James Burke and Carl Sagan in the background.
However, reading between the lines (and given the fact that your name has "quant" in it, though that may be unrelated) suggests that you might have had a bad go of post-grad life and cognitive dissonanced that that must be the only/normal way it can go
Actually my bad go was at the start of grad school. I've done pretty well post-grad. There is no *normal* or *only* way to do things. I've done something that works great for me. It might work badly for you, but you need to find your own path. The only thing I can do is to tell you what I did. If you read what I write and say to yourself, "Wow! I don't want to do what this guy did!" then I'm glad to be useful.
I'm in some ways the *anti-impostor*. I don't have any formal title, but I *feel* like I'm a real college professor.
Now it very well may be true that a succession of crippling personal defeats ended up putting you in a position/mindset to achieve your own personal victory. However, I don't know if I'd sign off on it as "sound advice".
I've learned not to give advice (because most of the advice that I've been given has turned out to be bad). I tell stories. The reason my stories are important is that the odds are against you. Five in six people going into Ph.D.'s will "fail" to get a tenure track position, and the life of a junior faculty isn't that pleasant. If you keep telling yourself that you are special and you'll beat the odds, then that's fine. But statistically most people that think that they can beat the odds won't, so that explains why my experience might be useful.
.)