The academic career is very tempting for a lot of people. For me it was about pursuing my main passion, to enter into a fascinating world and to learn how to contribute to my field through my research. This post is not to tell you why this is the best choice since it is personal. I could say that if you are about to choose this type of career only because you don't know what to do, then you are probably going to waste a crucial part of your life. However, I don't know you, I don't know your skills, your ability to adapt to a situation, your passions, therefore I can't say if one motivation is better than the other or, as too many people do, say if your motivation is "wrong".
This post is about a series of things that I would like to know a few years ago.
Behind the shiny walls of what seems to be the perfect job, there are some traps waiting for you down the road. Yes, it is a job that gives you a lot of freedom, you can wear comfortable clothes, you don't have a real time schedule, sometimes you can work from home, you will travel around the world, you will meet a lot of people (even brilliant one) from many different cultures and, most of all, you will do what you love.
The downsides to this perfect picture are not the obvious one. Yes, you will never be rich, but who cares. Yes, no time schedule very often is translated to working every day at every waking hour, compromising a lot of aspects of your personal life. But, again, this is very personal, regardless the type of research and colleagues, most of the factors that determine how much extra time you will dedicate to your job are up to you, they depend on who you are and what you really want to do.
However, many young researchers, from time to time, feel too weak to wake up in the morning, too weak to face their day, too weak to meet anyone, too weak to sit down and fight their research problem back. Why is that?
One reason could be that when they throw themselves in such an amazing adventure, many people underestimate how profoundly unstable will be their position. You will soon realize that the available positions for your next career step are not so many, that your contracts will almost always have an expiration date and for many people that expiration date is within 6 months. Keeping your academic career alive will mean to accept those contracts, no matter how scaring could it be to do it when you are in your thirties, to change country several times, leaving everything and everyone behind.
Your friends will say that they are going to visit you, but it will be more and more difficult for them to follow you and, let's face it, some of them will not even try from the very beginning. Yes, it is again very personal, but I can say that it is an easy situation to be found in the experience of others.
On top of that, there is the research. The research is frustrating by definition, most of the time you will not understand what is going on, you will try harder and harder, but no, the results will not be good. In other words, you will feel miserably most of the time, but the reward, that warm feeling that hits you when you realize that you found something, it's so satisfying that you will completely forget about the sea of shit where you were swimming till the moment before and ask for more. Like a drug addiction.
All these emotions pile up in a young researcher experience and sometimes are translated in the so-called impostor syndrome. It is understandable to me why this can happen. You dedicate your everything (or at least the best of you, because what you do is beautiful) to the research, giving up to many normal aspects of human interaction, and you realize, very often too late, that to survive in the jungle of unstable positions you will most likely need a strong network of professional relationships rather than a strong scientific background. Therefore you may start wondering if you are obtaining your positions because you are good or because you met the right people. You start to fear that your toy can break down at any time and you will be in your late thirties, too qualified to do anything else, unable to pursue your dreams.
This is very depressing and depression is the reason why some young researchers do not face their day from time to time. But I'm not writing to discourage any future academic, I'm writing to remark that you have to care about networking since day one of your master's degree. Because we all want a world where scientific merit is all that matters but for the time being this is the game's rule.
More importantly, I'm writing to tell you that you are not alone, that what you feel is perfectly normal and can be overcome. Not only because part of what I wrote regards something that I have experienced or I'm experiencing, but also because I've observed these things in almost everyone I've met in the academic world, from Ph.D. students to accomplished professors on top of their field. (yes, when you go to international conferences and you get drunk with accomplished professors, you find out that you are not that different from them, as expected).
Since the competition is very often brutal, no one is willing to show any bit of weakness. I think that sharing those feelings, at least admitting that they exist, is the way to face the systematic error that plagues one of the most innovative and visionary jobs. We do not have to underestimate how many valuable scientists are not doing research right now because they let their depression win, as well as we do not have to underestimate how many not so good scientists are surviving in the jungle of applications because they have cool friends. The High School should be over already.
In conclusion, I believe that if by sharing a common feeling we can make someone feel better about himself or herself, than it is worth sharing it. More generally, it is a problem that is damaging the research in many ways (as you can imagine, but I will dedicate a post on this issue), i.e. it is compromising the development of our understanding of nature.
In a few days, the new season of Game of Thrones will be aired on HBO. I'm looking forward to this moment since the very second the last, disappointing, season ended.
A small disclaimer before beginning: I don't care about the differences between the books and the TV show since they are two different means to entertain the public, some differences are required. I like a story that flows smoothly, I don't care if it is different than the book.
To some extent, my favorite season remains the first one. It is true that the events, or some characters, are more entertaining in other seasons. I could cite the marvelous behavior of Tyrion Lannister as Hand of the King, reaching its perfection in the Blackwater siege in season 2. Or the rise of Daenerys' power as well as the development of the dozens of subplots, or at last, the most entertaining season, the fourth one. However, in the first season we have 10 episodes where we can find two powers, pure and stupid honor on one side and politics on the other, that give start to a dance to their own survival. A dance that, episode after episode with no exceptions, moves the plot in an avalanche of events that is still, 5 seasons later, falling down and growing.
We can arrive at one of the reasons why I enjoy this show so much, its structure is extremely solid, it never required a "reboot" of events, in the first season they set the paste, the tone, the main plots, and everything is a pretty straightforward consequence of that. Of course, if you design your seasons to be a series of events that leads to the main one in episode 9, the risk to become predictable is concrete, but one thing is saving the show from that. Game of Thrones is a painful show for the viewer because it reminds us that no matter how fictional are the characters we are looking at, reality will punch you in the face and smash your skull. We start caring about a character, fascinated by its potential, the legend that is slowly drawn around it. As soon as we see that potential realizing, reality comes, that little fucker, and we realize that you can be the best badass ever, riding your horse with your shiny muscles under the sun, killing people with your bare hands, but you will die for an insignificant infected scratch. No matter how extreme is your power, and the nature of it, you will surrender to the events, you will be thrown back in the mud with the rest of us.
The disappointment that the last season gave me is for sure due to the high expectations. Every season somehow managed to surprise me, the fifth is not surprising, there are cool shots, epic moments and battles, but none of these things really surprised me like in the past. So on one side I settled the bar too high. On the other side, everything is painfully underwhelming!
We start with a flashback, a prophecy that takes out every tension from two story lines: the young Lannisters have to die eventually. One of them does it, the other is so meaningless that we don't care. On the other side of the sea, we can appreciate how boring is ruling with respect to conquering and we have to force ourself to ignore that the legendary Unsullied can't handle untrained fighters. In the meantime we see how giving power to homophobic religious fanatics can mess up with the political equilibrium, how unexpected!
The best episode takes place beyond the Wall, epic battle, epic Jon Snow, epic giant, etc. The last two episodes, however, do not live up to that. The feeling is that the producers tried to fill in too many events, too many emotions, they wanted to shock us like in the past, but they forgot to build up the tension, the expectations and to give us the necessary time to absorb the shock. One story line after the other reaches its high impact moment in a couple of episodes that we can surely define enjoyable, but do not reach the potential that the events presented should have reached in our minds. The main reason is that in the past seasons, the peak was always reached in a moment of silence, with different levels of surprise effects. These two episodes are loud, almost a white noise of crucial events. In other words, too much, too fast. I wasn't even THAT displeased when I saw Jon in the snow.
In conclusion, one bad season can happen to anyone, so I expect a sixth season that settles the bar high again. We can thus expect good things happening around the third or fourth episode, after an appropriate introduction.
All of that to say that, depending on how much I like what I will weekly see, we can meet again on this pages to comment what HBO will feed us.
A new blog wasn't for sure a necessity, on the internet. So I decided to start a poorly written one.
These pages will contain whatever I will like to share with my 3 friends, in a language that not only is not mine, but not even their.
So far so good, this blog has no theme, it wasn't necessary to the survival of humankind and it will be, for those that can speak English properly, a reason to bleed from their own eyes. However, I hope it is going to be useful for me, that I treated my past blogs like lousy sex partners, happily left behind with a shade of shame. Now that I can be defined a grown up, I have the occasion to show some grown-upness.
The goal of the blog is not clear to me yet, but I guess every non-professional blogger like myself is sharing the same untold reasons to spend hours of their lives to type streams of words that you can read on your toilet. Every one of us feels the need to leave a little mark on the internet, something that contains some aspect of their life, something that, with a little bit of presumption, you think is worth to be there, because everyone should read it. Going deeper and deeper in our soul, whatever it is, we throw pieces of it, in the hope that someone will figuratively share with us a few moments of their equally empty life.
Like pedophiles throw candies to kids.
Or simply to write somewhere that aliens invented Coca-Cola to control our minds and make us spread chemtrails all over the sky. Just to see how many of you will come to this page for this reason.
In conclusion, this is just a first post, so I can see how it looks in this theme and to pass the sadness of an empty page. I can't make any promises on what you will find on this pages, there will be some reviews of tv series, books, movies, scientific articles, things that I pretend to do just to look like a guy with a life, an occasional haiku. It will be funny, or not, for sure most of the times I will think that it is. I really don't know yet, but I'm lazy and I have to start somewhere.
