>finally graduate>look back and notice most accomplishments in the field come from right-time right-place and not being poor>most people are so drunk in survivorship bias they can't visualize the problems in Academia and actually reproduce them>most of these are also rich kids who never had to grow up out of the "NO I'M RIGHT AND IF I'M NOT I'LL SPERG OUT" phase>despite the nonexistant pressure to make a living, these people somehow still bury themselves in a hole by anxiously obsessing over their research, resulting in Frankenstein papers/careers with buttloads of data but no cohesion or conclusion>Not rich so I had to rely on the research grant agencies which paid me less than a minimum wage, accumulated over a year of no grant due to delays by their part and got our draft rejected after months of no response>Both these agencies and the department are of public servicemen who won at life so they pretty much forgot what it's like not having a massive salary, some of them even dared being bitchy about their jobDid I get unlucky with my first experience or is this the norm? I'm well aware my lab was infamous for being especially disorganized, and it didn't help the most senior people in there were difficult to deal with, to say the least. I also noticed these career scientists are completely unbalanced people who only really care about competitive performance and will absolutely neglect any other part of their lives, especially interacting with others or exploring a higher meaning in their lives. I'm also curious if other anons in here have also made the decision of pausing their science career to avoid committing the same mistakes as these people. I prefer working on fewer things but that are actually meaningful to me and feel complete, as opposed to spamming projects and regurgitating data. The problem is, I'm being pressured by my team to publish my work, even if it's incomplete and, to fulfill it, I'd pretty much have to survive a postgrad with them.
>>17007286>not being poorVery important point no one is actually talking about.East or West, academic career pays you only the barest minimum not to die.It is possible to make a decent salary, but only being a high-rated professor, usually closer to your fifties.
>>17007286What field?
>>17007286That's the way it is, anon. You now realize in this world only trades and etrepreneurship exists. Science has been a consequence of those, not the other way round. Entrepreneurship is about finding and fostering talent, sure as fuck shouldn't be rewarded in the proportion it is, but that's how it works, so even bad entrepreneurship is more relevant than good talent.And in fact, trades reward whoever is most specialized in them. The trade of being a researcher will reward asshole autists. The trade of being a doctor will reward obsessive assholes and adrenaline nutjobs. The trade of entrepreneurship will reward egomaniacs with charisma. There's no room for a balanced life in any of those, well maybe there's a niche for those in youtube lifestyle gurus.Now the decision is up to you. Research is an economy of publishing, not different from marketing, do you want to be a data marketer? If you like "truth" you can start your own lab and pursue the genuine kind of research you know and love, but then you will need the entrepreneurship to find the rich people who value it. The middle ground means being forever a dissatisfied data puncher. Choose, OP.
>>17007863So much text, so little substance.
>>17007871Just have GPT to summarize it for you dumbass.
>>17007871Life just be nuanced and multifaceted like thatBut I must admit that he does sound retarded
>>17007286It is normal. The primary function of the university is to preserve knowledge much like a library, and part of it is to renew it by teaching students, part of the students would research or teach other student, and part of them don't want to do anything else in life and be professers. Most research is just further validation by data, some developing on existing tool framework, very little creates new paradigm.It is so uninvestable that the money given to them is called donation(private) and grant(gov), that the return being larger than equal value is not even expected. The other end of the deal with the donation is to give rich man's unsociable autistic son a title and keep him in good company with the staff in the labyrinth of the university.A university is as stable, backwater and unventilated as a pickle jar. You won't find freshness there.The competitiveness of gaining or using superior technical knowledge starts to diminish after the age 30. Past prime is better spent either managing from behind the scene or being owners and investors to resources that any scene needs.
