A returning student
We face the question of the future, and try to avoid it.
One of our tutor’s former students returned to visit this week (though probably not because we recommended it), an unexpected pleasure. She now has a year at Berkeley under her belt and, unable to choose, is double-majoring in Molecular Biology and Statistics.
She was always bright, energetic and organized. Our tutor’s efforts went mostly toward channeling her energy into useful directions, and getting her to find answers by rigorous means rather than relying on intuition. She was going to do well in any case; we like to think our tutor helped her into a higher trajectory.
The discussion between the returned student and her former tutors turned to next steps and medium-range plans, and our colleague realized he had nothing important to add. In part this was because he has no background in Molecular Biology, and the sociology of each science is different. What would be good advice for an Astronomy postdoc might not be useful for someone in the life sciences. And he realizes that the mistakes he was liable to make she wouldn’t even consider, and her mistakes would not have occurred to him. But in large part he realized that he has no good feel for the future. That is, the uncertainties in the way the world will play out in the next decade or two are greater than any firm ideas he has.
Perhaps this is because he is, like the rest of our consultants, a dinosaur. He has seen several near-certainties fail to happen, and many near-impossibilities come to pass. It brought to mind an episode in our astronomer’s career.
He attended a meeting in which a senior astronomer had made a dismissive comment about the difficulties new PhDs faced in getting a job. Unhappy with this attitude, and with the career guidance most graduate students received, he sought to do better. After a bit of analysis, our astronomer wrote a piece of advice for them on the subject. (It’s really too long and wordy for a web page, and he intends to rewrite it eventually.) One point was that the subfield the student chose to study was terribly important to later success, and the one area in which the student received the least advice.
Thinking to remedy this, he asked several senior astronomers which subfields they thought were promising. He phrased the question something like, “If you were starting out in astronomy today, what would you study?”
Not a one responded. Not even a heavily-qualified, half-hearted, “Well, it looks like gravitational waves might open up, if things work out right,” could be coaxed from anyone. We suppose they were wary of doing injury to someone else’s career. But it’s telling that they were all so uncertain of where their own specialty was likely to go. The most experienced and successful people in the field are reluctant to give advice; who, then, should a student listen to?
