Study; examinations; research
I found myself thinking back to my full-time education. While attending King's College, Cambridge, at the examinable subjects I worked far less than many of my colleagues and eventually got a lower second in my finals. I actually pick up technical things quite quickly and easily -- in NatSci 1A I got into the habit of actually listening to lectures instead of frantically transcribing them, then in our college bar afterward helping people to understand the material -- and it is more from that than actual detailed study that I even managed to pass.
Certainly not now having a doctorate has been disabling career-wise. For many years for the US Department of Defense I was successfully playing a leading role in advanced research. I found that I enjoyed it and was good at it. However, in looking for that kind of position elsewhere, between not being able to talk about the most interesting work and not on paper being obviously good at it, I wasn't an appealing candidate. There were small glimmers: for example, at Vecna one of the research team noticed that I was very good at helping him to write research grant proposals, but he had little authority to actually task me with that.
Some background would help: In advance of our GCSEs (examinations taken at around age 16 after five years of secondary school) my school drilled us with plenty of past papers for practice. (This was early enough in GCSEs that, especially for math, we also used O-level papers.) I remember early in my first
I do well in examinations. Under academic pressure I think fast and clearly so I generally interview well too. However, when I started my degree course at Cambridge, I had developed a strong aversion to revising courses in such detail that I could rapidly prove my mastery in examinations. I typically did actually know the material quite well for several courses, especially in the correctness proof courses, but even in those cases I had barely any experience of quickly translating the phrasing of the examination question into what they actually wanted me to do, and by the time of my final examinations my aversion was such that I didn't even bother being sure to turn up with enough ink in my pen to get through writing the answers. Basically, once I had the freedom to not study and practice for examinations, I hardly did.
I was aware at the time of this somewhat being a conscious decision. I was perhaps overestimating the degree to which I would forget such examinable detail through post-course disuse: certainly in adult life I've been surprised at how much GCSE French I still recall, though I've now forgotten much of my post-A-level math (like Laplace transforms) and opted for keeping the textbooks instead. I was reasoning that the most efficient use of my time was to understand the terminology, concepts, conclusions well enough to know when to apply them and to be easily able to pick up that final level of detail when actually necessary. And, that approach has served me well in actually doing things. I have a couple of small regrets there: I should have paid more attention in the later numerical analysis, queueing theory, and pi-calculus courses: I don't feel like I even have a complete enough conceptual grasp of those so I was probably too lazy there. And, I probably should have taken the databases course: I ended up studying relational algebra at Ohio State instead. I also feel like I should have bothered with enough detail in information theory to actually remember how to do Fourier transforms but at least I still recall the interesting results.
After a period of full-time employment I did take some masters-level courses at Ohio State and found myself actually able to bother there and got good grades; maybe the break from education had done me good. I also enjoyed mastering the detail for the later projects I worked on, studying military field manuals and similar, but that wasn't in order to prove anything to others.
I don't have larger regrets though, for a couple of reasons. One is how I spent my time when I![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
damerell to replace me at the original; I later acted as Aetion's sysadmin until we had grown enough to hire one.)
Another reason is that I know now that a more academic career would have ultimately been frustrating to me. I've written enough research grant proposals and seen enough irrationality in the system that I got sick of half-solving the problem already in writing enough detail in the proposal to show that I really could address the funders' needs and then having the funding decisions largely uncorrelated with the quality of the proposal I'd submitted. It quickly got to feeling like inefficiently casting pearls before swine. If I'd been working as a principal investigator in a larger organization then I know I would have also been spending a fair bit of time battling with internal administrative idiocy too; at the University of Dundee I am at least both junior and lucky enough to be mostly insulated from that, but I still know it's there. My research-group-leader friends remember fondly the days when they could actually get much real work done too and, even with less of that stress when I was actually managing projects myself, I remember months going by when I was having to do more
One might reasonably respond to the above:
Certainly not now having a doctorate has been disabling career-wise. For many years for the US Department of Defense I was successfully playing a leading role in advanced research. I found that I enjoyed it and was good at it. However, in looking for that kind of position elsewhere, between not being able to talk about the most interesting work and not on paper being obviously good at it, I wasn't an appealing candidate. There were small glimmers: for example, at Vecna one of the research team noticed that I was very good at helping him to write research grant proposals, but he had little authority to actually task me with that.
Some background would help: In advance of our GCSEs (examinations taken at around age 16 after five years of secondary school) my school drilled us with plenty of past papers for practice. (This was early enough in GCSEs that, especially for math, we also used O-level papers.) I remember early in my first
realGCSE already having to fight the thought,
I've already done enough of these, surely, and just buckle down and do yet another. The same pattern repeated for A-level pure and applied math: very many past papers, which I got very good at doing, but by the time I was done with all that I never wanted to see another paper again.
I do well in examinations. Under academic pressure I think fast and clearly so I generally interview well too. However, when I started my degree course at Cambridge, I had developed a strong aversion to revising courses in such detail that I could rapidly prove my mastery in examinations. I typically did actually know the material quite well for several courses, especially in the correctness proof courses, but even in those cases I had barely any experience of quickly translating the phrasing of the examination question into what they actually wanted me to do, and by the time of my final examinations my aversion was such that I didn't even bother being sure to turn up with enough ink in my pen to get through writing the answers. Basically, once I had the freedom to not study and practice for examinations, I hardly did.
I was aware at the time of this somewhat being a conscious decision. I was perhaps overestimating the degree to which I would forget such examinable detail through post-course disuse: certainly in adult life I've been surprised at how much GCSE French I still recall, though I've now forgotten much of my post-A-level math (like Laplace transforms) and opted for keeping the textbooks instead. I was reasoning that the most efficient use of my time was to understand the terminology, concepts, conclusions well enough to know when to apply them and to be easily able to pick up that final level of detail when actually necessary. And, that approach has served me well in actually doing things. I have a couple of small regrets there: I should have paid more attention in the later numerical analysis, queueing theory, and pi-calculus courses: I don't feel like I even have a complete enough conceptual grasp of those so I was probably too lazy there. And, I probably should have taken the databases course: I ended up studying relational algebra at Ohio State instead. I also feel like I should have bothered with enough detail in information theory to actually remember how to do Fourier transforms but at least I still recall the interesting results.
After a period of full-time employment I did take some masters-level courses at Ohio State and found myself actually able to bother there and got good grades; maybe the break from education had done me good. I also enjoyed mastering the detail for the later projects I worked on, studying military field manuals and similar, but that wasn't in order to prove anything to others.
I don't have larger regrets though, for a couple of reasons. One is how I spent my time when I
shouldhave been studying. First, I hung out with friends somewhat. This might sound like a waste, but at sixth form I was still quite shy and mostly spent time with people in the school's computer room; I actually had the keys to it, opened it up in the morning, locked it up at night, and supervised people who were using it. By the end of my freshman year at King's I was on reasonable speaking terms with most students in my year, cross-clique, and in later years was branching out to other colleges and striking up conversations with tourists. This kind of social development was important practical education that I needed. The other is that, with some substantial help from Peter Benie, I spent a lot of the time learning non-examinable things about the Internet, UNIX™, and Debian GNU/Linux, plus some BSD; after a couple of years my summer work earned me enough to buy my own PC and start running Debian myself. That sysadmin foundation has served me very well since. (I was later offered a sysadmin job in the Department of Chemistry but they took so long to formally offer it that I was headhunted and took work elsewhere and they then found
damerell to replace me at the original; I later acted as Aetion's sysadmin until we had grown enough to hire one.)Another reason is that I know now that a more academic career would have ultimately been frustrating to me. I've written enough research grant proposals and seen enough irrationality in the system that I got sick of half-solving the problem already in writing enough detail in the proposal to show that I really could address the funders' needs and then having the funding decisions largely uncorrelated with the quality of the proposal I'd submitted. It quickly got to feeling like inefficiently casting pearls before swine. If I'd been working as a principal investigator in a larger organization then I know I would have also been spending a fair bit of time battling with internal administrative idiocy too; at the University of Dundee I am at least both junior and lucky enough to be mostly insulated from that, but I still know it's there. My research-group-leader friends remember fondly the days when they could actually get much real work done too and, even with less of that stress when I was actually managing projects myself, I remember months going by when I was having to do more
managementwork than the invention and coding that I enjoyed and excelled at. A lot of that other work was useful experience, everything from negotiating collaborations to writing consulting agreements, but that was a benefit of working for smaller companies where I could take on more responsibility myself instead of having to coax semi-competent colleagues into doing their jobs and pushing back against their impeding me from being able to get my work done.
One might reasonably respond to the above:
Well, that's nice, even if I believe that you're good at getting difficult technical things done, you couldn't bring yourself to study for examinations, now you can't get to do interesting research work and even if you did then other aspects of your job would annoy you too much, so where does that leave you?I have thoughts on that but not for this entry.
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