“Lambda, but for graduate school”pic.twitter.com/5rbIwpJMCj
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Thanks—I think this is totally right and an important corrective. OTOH, in most programs there’s a lot of time-wasting bullshit required, and not nearly enough good-enough mentoring. Seems likely to only get worse in academia; could a different context do better?
I don't think you can mass-produce good mentoring, unfortunately. Buddhist history surely confirms this.
Jesuits seem like they had a pretty reliable process for making new Jesuits at least until recently.
Yeah, but turning children into Jesuits is a form of abuse.
You could probably provide it much more cheaply by sending people to luxury prisons where the only entertainment available is study materials in their chosen subject. And a supply of amphetamines would help. But I don't think it would go much faster.
Yes, there’s a process of personal transformation required, which inherently takes a few years. I wonder if one could do that while also part-time employed, e.g.? I dunno, maybe it’s just not feasible. It seems potentially valuable enough to be worth brainstorming about.
Starter-level actuaries are traditionally given 1/4 time at their jobs to study for exams (and expected to devote a lot more time outside work). It was concentrated misery but I learned more effectively in that environment than in grad school.
I was _so goddamned bored_ by the job that I started sneaking off to do more mathematics.
failure is, to my mind, an essential part of the PhD process, and it's hard to fail fast
And writing very hard. I see the above as the greatest x from my 2+3 years as a postdoc. I do think however that you could set people on paths where they continue to think actively.
Also not sure it can be scaled. Is the “apprenticeship” aspect crucial to the Ph.D. experience? If so, there may be a reason why class sizes are small (by which I mean the class of an advisor and their students)
PhD is a union card. Only thing it offers that you can't get elsewhere is certain job opportunities.
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