Comment on We gotta be more encouraging
socsa@piefed.social 2 days agoThis is the entire point of academia though. If you were in a math PhD program you would have much better access to the resources to build the background knowledge you need to explore this topic, and then you would literally be paid to research it, and then possibly paid to manage a whole team of people interested the topic, and paid to teach classes on it and publish book chapters, and so on. People have this misconception (not saying you do, but this is a very common sentiment) that academia is this ivory tower which gate keeps knowledge, when the reality is that it’s just a framework for enabling knowledge discovery. The reason most people outside of academia don’t publish original research isn’t some conspiracy. It’s because engaging in original research is a full time job which often requires a lot of money and resources normal people don’t have.
AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
I know :( the issue is I’m in ME and school is fucking expensive. Oh and I am working in a research lab getting paid for my work, not much though.
I would love nothing more than to stay in school and get like 82 different degrees in various topics. I would love to do a PhD in math, and one in physics, and one in cs, and linguistics, and psychology…
But the world forces me to specialize if I want to have enough money to live well. I chose ME because I knew it had a lot of overlap with a bunch of different fields. And yeah I’m taking grad level math and cs courses, but like you said, lots of the stuff I’m interested in is PhD level stuff.
Also Idk if you’re in America, but the money for research here is getting scarcer every day. It could likely be more effective for me to sell my soul to a defense company and then build my own personal lab with that blood money to do research I want to do than it would be to get a PhD and be a professor and simply hope the projects I want to work on will get funding.
Of course that’s assuming the country doesn’t fully collapse (or kill me) before I enter the job force. And assuming I could work for a defense company without deciding to kill myself out of guilt of building civilian killing murder machines.
Anyway, point is that you are right but I lack the financial security to justify trying to get a PhD in math right now.