I do not think that hindsight is 20/20. Over the past three to five years I frequently wonder whether my career path of choice is the right one for me, but am still undecided. I wonder if I had met with some sort of career planner in college if I would be on the academic career path right now. I see the benefits of what I am trying to accomplish now and also the benefits of life as a teacher (what I see in hindsight as my likely Plan B). CF was saying today that it seems as though people who are good students but not outstanding in high school become teachers and students who are good but not outstanding in college become professors.
One, I was slightly insulted; two, I think that certain people are just good at certain things and go with it.
And I often wonder if the bad times in graduate school were really worth it. I wonder why I cannot get myself to sit down on weekends and do the reading and writing I really should be doing. I wonder if I get lucky with jobs and do not push myself enough to be a successful scientist. I wonder if I have gone too far with my education and training and would have been better off with a focused masters degree and a career started earlier in my life.
But while I am sure that I would have been happy taking a different path, I am constantly reminded that had anything gone differently, I would not have met CF. I would gladly give back the hard times before him, but look forward to figuring out the hard times to come with him.
1 comment:
I'm not sure about CFs dataset. At my current small liberal arts school, the profs in the sciences were all very high achieving undergrad students at their colleges which were actually quite reputable. Personally, I had a very high GPA upon graduation from a very tough ivy-league level school.
However, in my post-doc, I definitely did a lot of soul-searching. As you seem to be doing, about if I'd really gone down the right road. There were times that I wished I'd just gotten a masters and continued in biotech. But in the end, all is well with the road I took after all. I work tremendously long hours, BUT I really do love it. I had the stubbornness to get my PhD despite many set backs. But I had way too many days and weeks of bad experiments to do it for the rest of my life. And it is sooooooooo much more rewarding to me to have students horizons expanded and get them learning and excited about break throughs in science.
The main thing is to keep asking yourself those kinds of questions and just keep self-examining. :-)
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