I'm doing 30 things
I’m now two weeks into semester #3. I changed a whole lot of variables, and this new experience has indeed been very different than the previous two.
I transferred from the Math department to Computer Science. I crashed the orientation of the Informatics department and found that their subject matter actually does fit very well with my interests, so I chose my classes on the assumption that I am getting a Ph.D. in Informatics. I went on a lab tour, and met two professors who are doing work that might be a perfect fit with what I want to do. This semester, I’m taking only readings courses, where you read a few papers every week and write reaction pieces and that sort of thing. I’ve also been sitting in on a course about translations of Eugene Onegin, which is a refreshing departure into art and language.
My current frustrations:
1. Still an awful lot of context-switching. I want to focus on something, and the academic schedule chops up attention. Each topic requires immersion and sustained focus: say, a few days or a week. Breaking this focus a couple times a day is agonizing. I feel like my creativity and intelligence are shut down, and I’m getting a bit crabby. Nowhere near to the degree of last semester, happily, but it’s still frustrating. The rhythm of my life here does not fit me.
I notice the focus-chopping even in the lab where I am an assistant instructor. Each lab gets 50 minutes in the students’ schedule. That’s not enough time to get very far. The students are thus pressured to hurry. These labs really require several hours, but the students have many other demands on their time. I learned programming by writing tens of thousands of lines of code, in hundreds of little projects of my own design, all very patiently, in sessions that usually lasted many hours—sometimes a couple hours just making notes with pencil and paper, sometimes many hours at the keyboard. Come to think of it, I actually dropped out of high school in order to get the time to do this; even high school had too much of a hurry-up-and-do-something-else rhythm.
2. The classes mostly consist of lecture and discussion. The discussions are mostly unstructured semantic arguments. Someone says something, someone else objects that a word could also mean something else: “But isn’t (blank) also a kind of ‘realism’?” This kind of word-splitting at the expense of substance is what gives the academic world a bad name. Deservedly.
I want to do actual stuff. Discussing and arguing are certainly worthwhile things, but only in small doses, and only with some structure. Real learning happens mostly by doing, and it’s most fruitful with a mentor who can help you get unstuck when you run into problems, or show you an approach you’re missing. I’ve seen some of this in college, but not a whole lot.
An observation: In one class, a very broad term came up. The handout said that the first thing we need to do is make a definition. What? The first thing is to look at some interesting concrete examples that motivated people to distinguish something that they thought worthy of a name. Starting with vague definitions of a vague term just led to vague semantic arguments with no real substance. I think this is the basic trap of the academic world: predefining and pre-arguing and preparing, but not doing.
Running through the major literature and writing short reaction papers to the readings does strike me as a very good use of time, though. It’s getting me up to speed on what sorts of ideas “go without saying” in this community.
3. I met Douglas Hofstadter. We had some conversations in which it became clear that our interests overlap extraordinarily. Well, this is not such a surprise, given that when I was 16, I immersed myself in Gödel, Escher, Bach (back when I had time to get immersed in things). I also really liked the cultural vibe of his research group: warm, slow-paced and absorbed, thoughtful, genuine. Tuesday, we had another long conversation, in which I asked how I might convert some of these interests into a project that would yield some sort of result. That is, I want to move past “thinking interesting but vague thoughts” and make something: a research paper, a computer model, or something, since I don’t yet have a feel for what academic research really is. I could not seem to get the idea across to him. He seemed to think that I was pushing some dismally careerist approach that would make certain that I’d get hired as a professor after grad school. Maybe I misunderstood him; maybe he’s been criticized for doing work that doesn’t fit the standard “metrics” of academic productivity and he heard my request as pressing on a sore spot.
At one point, he said, “Last week, I was thinking you might be a good fit for my research group, but now I’m not so sure.” I sent him a long email a couple days later, telling my frustration. Haven’t heard back. Maybe I’ve just ticked him off some more. I’m worried that I’ve just blown the best opportunity in academia to pursue my quirky set of research interests.
On the positive side, he expressed his doubts about whether I belong in his research group when it came out that I had only read parts of his book Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, which tells exactly what his research group does, how they do it, and even the software architecture that they use to do it. I’ve been reading it, and my jaw drops at how relevant it is to my interests, how enlightening about matters where I’ve gotten stuck, and how it opens up new lines of thought for me.
