Two Cents About Grad School

Some months ago Felix Salmon wrote his excellent article with a cost-benefit analysis of getting an advanced degree in the humanities. This inspired me to summarize my own thoughts. I am not a graduate student in the humanities, but rather a medical student, and I just finished my first year. However, I did have a "real" job for 13 years before I went back to school. With that knowledge, weight my advice accordingly. I find that a lot of the same blind spots suffered by Salmon's hypothetical humanities student also afflict my younger classmates. However, I think there are several ways that students entering and studying in graduate programs, professional or otherwise, can avoid doing themselves a disservice.

1) Be sure to consider the economic future of your profession and your financial goals. You are not too good to worry about the mundane laws of supply and demand. They surely apply to you just as well as they apply to your mechanic. There's a difference between chasing dollars for their own sake, and being able to afford an apartment in a middle class neighborhood without a roommate when you're 49. You're choosing your lifestyle now, and you won't always be in your twenties or thirties. Think about that carefully.

2) Don't overspecialize or commit to an academia-only field. That ensures a lack of career options and mobility. Lack of control over your schedule and work location is one of the top factors damaging to happiness. Also, consider economics again. You're not special. Academia is not special. Do yourself a favor and free yourself of this bias.

3) Make sure to have frequent contact with people not in your program or university. Better living through induction! Talking face-to-face to people in bars or coffeehouses in other parts of town, and friends of parents, and people in any non-university-related social group - especially happy people - is absolutely invaluable. Get out into the great outdoors. Try something new that you're not good at. Don't be one of those people who lives for years in an interesting town or region of your country for years and barely leaves the academic ghetto. (I can't tell you how many Berkeley grads I know who have no idea about the amazing parks less than five miles from their doorsteps.) Having friends and activities in different social circles is another proven way to de-stress. The politics in your department and obstacles that you thought were all-important will suddenly seem really temporary and trivial, and you may just have an epiphany about what it is you're really trying to accomplish, in your project or your life.

4) Don't buy into the twenty-something myth that if you have interests outside of work and/or are usually happy, you aren't "serious about your career". This is just as true for twenty-somethings outside of grad school.

5) Don't go to grad school just to avoid the post-college depression. If you're on a career track that doesn't require a graduate degree, congratulations. Don't get one. When at age 23 you're suddenly for the first time not surrounded by age peers with whom you can socialize effortlessly, it's normal to get a little depressed. In fact I'm surprised "post-college depression" isn't a well-known institution of our culture by now. In 2010 it's probably a softer landing than it was in 1996 because technology makes it easier to stay in touch and meet people who share your interests, but it's still there. Be honest with yourself about your motives, and don't go back to college to be around other young people - you can do that for free.

The Bad Stripe Continues: Overall Well-Being

In an overall well-being survey, the Bad Stripe that jumps off of maps of the U.S. of well-being, health indicators, and economics is again unfortunately represented.

Read more about the Bad Stripe here, here and here. Looking at the reverse of the map above, the photonegative of the Bad Stripe stands out in this map of frequent mental distress (Kentucky comes up worst.) In addition to the relations there, the Bad Stripe is also the boundary between three geographical social networks built by Facebook users, and it also tracks the boundary between Baptists and Methodists judging by geography-associated tags on the internet. It's tempting to speculate about the link between being a cultural boundary zone and an emotionally depressed area and what the causality might be.

Even Now Athletes Are Rushing to Join North Korea's Sports Teams

After the 7-0 World Cup loss to Portugal, that can only be sarcastic. It's truly remarkable that more countries don't try to emulate the Dear Leader's management brilliance.

Will China Eat Our CleanTech Lunch?

That's the title of an article from Xconomy Boston. The worst position the U.S. could end up in is still being oil-dependent 50 years from now while China is not only weaning itself off oil, but developing and controlling the technology to do so.

Atlas Smirked

"We all lied on our timesheets. If I got lucky and finished three surveys in half an hour, I’d go home and get drunk in the afternoon and pretend I had spent four hours knocking on doors that no one answered. If I was too efficient in getting surveys filled out, I’d run out of work in my area and get let go, so I was really just following my rational self-interest like Ayn Rand would have told me to."

- ZING! A census worker describing his job in Viceland

The Iroquois Stickball Team and Real Sovereignty

They used Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) visas. To put it bluntly, countries like the U.S., Canada and South Africa that have "sovereign lands" arrangements with pre-European inhabitants are playing a game. We relax a few laws and call you a "sovereign" nation. It works fine, as long as there is no one involved besides the "sovereign" government and the surrounding, real government, and everyone plays the same game of pretend. It seems especially ridiculous when you consider that there are plenty of Native Americans who have no Federally recognized status as such just because they've never been "Federally recognized". That is, your Indian nation only exists if the U.S. government says it does. (In Northern California, Wintus are still not recognized, whereas the Feds did recognize some business partners who wanted to open a casino in San Pablo, CA.)

Where the rubber meets the road is when something happens that requires a foreign government not playing this game to recognize their sovereignty - as happened here. This would be bad enough even if people hadn't previously entered the U.K. using a Star Trek Federation visa (if you have the link, send it.)

That being the case, if American Indian reservations want to be recognized internationally, they have to start behaving like actual sovereign nations, and this means (for one thing) if you want to use your own travel documents, establish the relationship ahead of time, instead of assuming that the U.S. will do it for you. I've often wondered why Indian reservations in the U.S. don't push the issue more, and experiment with more than just gambling laws. Anecdotally, it certainly seems to me that gambling on rural reservations isn't contributing positively to the trade balance with the outside world; it seems that the vast majority of people gambling are from the rez, and the only wealth movement (not creation) is going from the pockets of people on the rez to the few people on the rez that own the casinos. I recall a case in the 80s or 90s of a reservation in Oklahoma that was pissing off the Federal government by offering wacky interest rates on loans and bank accounts, though I don't remember the details and can't find it now.

The real reason to support reservations pushing the issue with the Federal government is not to create anarchy but because it would provide a great opportunity to improve our democracy; there would be pressure on Federal institutions, and the closest thing to competition that government has. Why not more and more dramatic experiments than just gambling? Drug decriminalization is an obvious one, but what about foreign relations (begin relations with China and see how the Feds like that), medical research, numbered bank accounts, various internet safe-havens? It would be pretty awesome if the Navajo Nation offered its own Phase I drug research facilities. If that sounds potentially exploitive, you can mandate a certain level of investment in the local economy or a certain number of local employees like Thailand did when every corporation and his brother started doing HIV research there. And I'm sure lots of people (especially foreign pharmaceutical personnel with lots of currency!) certainly wouldn't mind a work-related excuse to be in the proximity of Canyon de Chelly and Monument Valley.

Other Primates Have Developed Other Forms of Political Satire

Read about them here, hat tip Tyler at Marginal Rev. On the whole I prefer Jon Stewart, but then again I'm human.