Pursuit of Fortune

If you take the sacred things,

The things that we hold dear,

Empty promise is all you'll find,

So give me something, something to believe in

--The Offspring, "Something to Believe In"

Well Christmas is over, and although my family is very focused on the important aspects of the holiday (love, spending time together, and consuming lots of turkey) it's still hard to escape the onslaught of Shock and Awe consumerism that permeates our lives from Halloween until Boxing Day. Or is it Boxing Week now? Anyway, it all seems to burn itself out by mid-January, until it's time to start Easter shopping. So having been marinated in Wal-Mart commercials and Future Shop flyers for the past two months, I thought I'd reflect a bit on the most common reason that people think I'm going back to grad school, which is the pursuit of fortune.

In our culture, people are often judged as successful or as failures based on their income and the worldly posessions that come with the paycheque. So almost everyone that I've told about my plans has said something to the effect of "wow, I guess you'll make a ton of money when you finish, eh?" We tend to see education as means to an end, and we tend to assign value to the various degrees, diplomas, and certificates in terms of the salary attached to them. So a B.Sc. in engineering is about 60,000 units of goodness, a B.A. in education is about 45,000 units of goodness (but is guaranteed to increase in goodness by 5% per year...thank YOU, unions!), and that certificate in 20th century African philosophy? Well...let's just say that "Do you want fries with that" is worth about 6.5 units of goodness per hour. But the truth is that education, especially graduate school, shouldn't be viewed through a lens made out of $20's.

In my opinion, grad school is something that you should do if you truly feel like you need to understand more about the world that we live in. Whether you study engineering, one of the pure sciences, English literature, or African philosophy, you need to go into it wanting to explore questions that don't have any answers yet, and you need to be aware that you might not be the one to find the answers. Money should be the last thing on your mind, since you need to focus all of your energy on your job as an academic researcher, which is to fundamentally advance the knowledge of your community. And odds are, you're not going to get rich doing it. Here are some interesting facts about the program that I'm going into to illustrate my point.

1. The average Ph.D. student takes home about $1700 after taxes. Average rent in the area around the school (or areas easily accessible on the subway) is about $700-$800 per person, and the average grocery bill is about $200 per month. Add utilities ($100), phone ($50), cable ($50), internet access ($50), and health care ($150), and you're left with about $300 for fun stuff like clothing, transportation, and maybe the occasional calzone from Cinderella's.

2. The average M.S. graduate from this school working in industry makes about $76,000 per year which works out to about $4200 per month after taxes (in the U.S.).

3. The vast majority of Ph.D. graduates continue to work in academia as post-doctoral researchers for about 5 - 10 years (where they earn about $40,000 - $50,000), and eventually become professors (where they'll crack $80,000 if they're lucky).

4. If our same M.S. graduate gets a 5% raise every year for 5 years, he would earn approximately $97,000 per year.

Finally, my accountant girlfriend was telling me one day that there's a huge opportunity cost associated with going back to grad school. Basically you take the difference between what you could earn by staying in industry and what you will earn as a student, and multiply that by the number of years that you plan to be a student. In my case, it works out to something like $177,000. Even if I go back to industry after graduation, and earn 20% more than I earn right now, it will take me about 9 years to recoup the opportunity cost. So basically, you are MUCH MUCH MUCH better off NOT going to graduate school if your goal is to make a lot of money.

Well, this posting is already way too long, so I'm going to wrap it up. Fortune is the main motivation for doing a lot of things...for me, it was the biggest motivation for getting that B.Sc. in the first place. But if you want to live in the land where textbooks don't exist and nobody's got an answer key, forget about dollar signs because they're a long, long ways away.

Pay attention to the cracked streets and the broken homes.

Some call it slums, some call it nice.

I want to take you through a wasteland I like to call my home.

Welcome to paradise.

--Green Day, "Welcome to Paradise"

Daveisms

Will it ever stop? Yo, I don't know

Turn off the lights and I'll glow.

To the extreme, I rock a mic like a vandal

Light up a stage and wax a chump like a candle.

--Vanilla Ice, "Ice Ice Baby"

A list of Daveisms, to balance out the way-seriousness of that last post!

"Man I gotta Dave out of this meeting."

"Shit, has anyone ever managed to Dave out on one of these grant proposals?"

"OCT of human skin??? I can't believe Optics Letters Daved out on that review!"

"Let's Dave on over to the food trucks for some pizza."

"He totally Daved out of cleaning the lab again!"

"My f'ing piece of ass laptop just Daved out on my f'ing thesis!"

"Martin St. Louis is totally Daveing out of this season and it's costing me in the hockey pool."

"Boy did the Conservatives Dave out when they picked Harper to run the show."

It's no surprise to me I am my own worst enemy.

'Cause every now and then I kick the living shit outta me

The smoke alarm is going off and there's a cigarette

Still burning, please tell me why?

--Lit, "My Own Worst Enemy"

Pursuit of Perfection

This place is so empty, my thoughts are so tempting

I don't know how it got so bad.

Sometimes it's so crazy that nothing can save me

But it's the only thing that I had.

--Sum 41, "Pieces"

This weekend a friend from one of my previous lives as a happy, blissfully ignorant telecom engineer came to visit me. It was a good weekend, but it brought back a lot of memories for me. Talking about all the fun that the group of us had in the summer of 2000 (before everyone finished undergrad) and then from 2001 to 2002 (before everyone went their separate ways after Ottawa's high-tech sector collapsed) made me wonder what happened to all of that happiness. Please don't think that I'm at all unhappy now...I have a wonderful family, a wonderful girlfriend, and I've been blessed so far in life with opportunities that make me wonder if (when?) some kind of cosmic "conservation of momentum" law is going to catch up with me. But what happened to the person that was perfectly happy with a B.Sc., perfectly happy applying that B.Sc. to technology that mostly just increased the download rate for illegal MP3's, perfectly happy being a small part in a huge machine and never wanting or needing more than a nice paycheque and for the rain to stay away during the ultimate games on Parilament Hill?

Well, I think what happened to me and so many of my friends is that we fell victim to the pursuit of perfection...a lot of us went back to school, trying to perfect our education. And for me, the first place that the pursuit of perfection led to was a realization that I knew nothing about the world, scientifically or spiritually. And for someone who thought that he had a pretty good handle on everything, that was very a scary realization. I think that most people who go into graduate studies have a similar experience, and different people handle it in different ways. For me, I spent a year desperately trying to do everything perfectly to prove to myself and everyone else that I did know something. Of course that led to stress, anxiety, health problems, and close to zero progress in my research.

Luckily I had a couple of amazing people in my life at the time that got me through it all, and I realized that the solution was accepting my limitations and dealing with the fact that I couldn't possibly operate on the same level as some of the other people in the lab.

The result? Acceptance of the fact that I didn't really understand very much, getting back to a relatively good state of health, and two first-author publications. I'm never going to be perfect, and it seems like the pursuit of perfection only leads to self-destruction, so this time around I'm going into the program knowing that I suck and hoping to maybe suck a little bit less in 3 years. And even if I still suck the same amount, at least I'll take time to enjoy the chowder!

Everything is bleak, it's the middle of the night

You're all alone and the dummies might be right.

Outside the darkness lurks

My music at work, my music at work

-- The Tragically Hip, "Music @ Work"