The Lively Academia

Research is anything but Nerdy

I remember getting my position as a research assistant this summer, and it felt great! It’s one of the things I’ve always wanted to do and I now had the opportunity to do it. Earlier this year (well at the beginning of my school-year) I felt like I either had to go out into industry and get a job there, or I could stay on campus and keep working on things I find that were really cool and on the bleeding edge. Either way, I had to pick and choose between the skills I wanted to acquire and commit time to get better at them. I could choose between working as a developer for a company or work on research with a lab group I really respected. So, I asked my career advisor (which I’m incredibly lucky to have), he said something like this:

So I did, I decided I wanted to get good at the technologies I wanted to use (and be working with) and started getting better at using them. I got to know the people I wanted to work with better. For the technical people out there, I got into Emacs (Don’t worry I still use Vim and VsCode mostly). I went to graduate classes (not because I was smart, but because I talked to the profs). I got to see what it was like (imagine a deserted classroom, with only the people who actually care about the course in the room). I found myself doing the same things people do anyways to get industry jobs. I networked, I gained skills and I genuinely cared about the work and the people.

Sure my pay isn’t the same as working in the industry. But I find I like what I’m doing. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t want to work at a high-paying job (I wouldn’t mind more pay, I’ve got bills), but I don’t think that is the important part of getting a job or even doing one. I’m not going to pretend that I like every single aspect of my job, there are flaws, but I like most of it and it feels alright to me if I’m doing what I want to do.

Sure, people can say that I’m wasting my time being theoretical about things and doing things that the “real-world” doesn’t care about. I think that’s rubbish, I think that what I’m doing helps a community grow (my lab) in one way or another, which has small effects in the field that compound over time. If we look at the history of academia, most things that started out in it that were only meant for “experts” found footing in our day to day lives. What physicists did for a “side-project” became a field (i.e: computer science), what became abandoned for decades due to lack of computing resources became the spark for a new revolution (AI). But it didn’t take a year or ten for those things to become mainstream, they took a lot of time (if you call 20–50 years a long time, research can take maybe 100 years to become applicable sometimes or never).

I honestly don’t think research is a good place for people who don’t want to do it. It’s like a war of attrition to get your work to reach a good place. You go in risking a lot of things. You risk looking extremely stupid in a place where intellect is valued, you risk finances and a whole lot more. I’m trying to say it takes guts to do it, just like it takes guts to build a Startup, just like it takes guts to do anything that has a very small chance at success. It takes guts to keep going even though you’ve failed over and over again. That’s what research is, yes people who go into it are generally smarter than the average human, sure it takes a certain type of person to even pursue a career in it, but it’s not the most important part. It’s about how much you can take and keep moving forward.

I remember talking to a professor one day about his work and I decided to bring up somethings I was doing with my courses. I was taking more than the necessary Math courses I needed. I felt it was the right thing to do because it helped me gain more background in research. I asked something like this “Is it a good idea, that I take these courses. I sometimes feel like I’m not in the same boat as my friends, and I feel like I’m too distant from them”, he replied like this:

And that’s pretty much all there is to it. If you think something is right you might as well forge ahead.

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