“I want to be a C. scientist” That’s what I told my brother, with an impish grin. He was visiting Bombay from New York, circa 1997, during a break from his studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He was pursuing a degree in Computer Science. He asked me what I wanted to be when […]
Category: Musings
The Day You Became An Academic Writer
I went from being a good writer to being an academic writer after five years of grad school. I couldn’t believe how convoluted it was. I’ll tell you the main tricks here so you don’t have to waste half of your life in academia. Academic writing is about self-aggrandizing and duplicity. The main technique is […]
Academia or Industry? A Societally Significant Choice
This is the final installment of a four-part series of posts I’m writing to crystallize my own thoughts on “The Question”: Academia or Industry? The question is framed dichotomously, but what it really is getting at is something deeper: You’ve deferred being an adult for a while now, but what do you want to do […]
Academia or Industry? A Professionally Profound Choice
This is the third in a series of posts to unwrap my thoughts on this oft-asked, simple, but notoriously difficult question. The question is framed dichotomously, but what it really is getting at is something deeper: You’ve deferred being an adult for a while now, but what do you want to do with your life? […]
Academia or Industry? The “Dichotomy”
So, academia or industry? In a previous post, I explained what that meant and unwrapped all of the hidden options [1]. I feel as though that post was incomplete, though. It was impersonal: just a summary of the choices and how those choices differed along a few dimensions: amenability to Research, pay, intellectual freedom, work/life […]
A Letter to My Younger Self About Dealing with Rejection in Academia
Hi, younger me. You don’t know this yet, but the path you’ve chosen is one of brutal, unrelenting rejection. You’ve coasted through everything you’ve done in life so far. But you’ve met your match in academia. Everyone here is just as smart, if not smarter. They’re just as hard working, if not more so. Hence […]
Crises as catalysts for change
In the past few weeks, there have been a number of mass shootings in the US. In turn, gun control has again emerged as a central discussion point among politicians vying for the 2016 U.S. presidency. The arguments have been predictable: Many Republicans have been vocal that strict gun control regulations would not have prevented […]