stimulant

G: I love the money! I love looking at it!

***** is thinking about a PhD in economics. SAIS has made her terrified of applying for a job.

Note that more advanced education has made someone more wary of the job market.

The perceived need for an advanced degree to remain competitive is a growing problem. The fact that a diploma is a commodity means that the spiral of credentials’ devaluation will only increase until the feedback loop between skills acquired and jobs available is closed by something more useful than a piece of paper.

More later on the long history of people’s attempts to wrangle the “PhD glut” (since 1982!).

Big science is like religion, you just gotta do what the people before you did.

G: Well I mean, it wasn’t like I was at all productive during my summer. I should have been here [at MIT] you know, doing shit.

At the Student Center, amidst throngs of people. Her two friends consoled her.

Her test went poorly, apparently.

The next twenty minutes were spent tearily complaining about the test and the teacher and her other classes. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this.

People pay money to feel shitty, because feeling shitty is — via masochism (or is it machismo?) — is seen as a necessary consequence of doing something hard. This in turn does a tremendous disservice to the vigor of their relationship with learning.

Not that there’s anything new here.

On the craziness feeling guilty about not doing homework:

B: I think I can get paid [by MIT, via scholarship] $2000 per semester to feel guilty.

G: I can’t even calculate the probability of like a roll of the die. I’m just praying I didn’t fail.

Is that for a good reason? Is it annoying, to you guys? If so, let me know.

Until then, all posts beginning with “comment:” will be exactly that: comments I’ve posted elsewhere, linked and recorded. It’ll even have its own category, along with a newly created category for all those “overheard” posts.