Now I know that it is a _PhD_ which makes gods of men.
I know you're joking, but...
When I was halfway through my Ph.D. I formulated a hypothesis: The proximate challenge that keeps you from graduating is that you have to write a thesis. But the ultimate challenge to getting your Ph.D. is this: You somehow have to learn to understand, deep down, that all your romantic notions about the Ph.D. are bunk, that you will be exactly the same person on the day after you get it that you were the day before, and that you need to stop waiting for the day when you feel like a god and just write something down and get on with life.
It may take you years to accept this, and it may drive you to drink, but after you get to that point you can graduate.
Only then will you be able to live with the fact that your thesis looks like crap to you. Your thesis will always look like crap to you. Either you will have figured out absolutely everything and your thesis will look incredibly boring to you, because you've moved on, or -- vastly more likely -- your thesis will look woefully incomplete because, geez, there is so much that you couldn't figure out, and you're just so stupid!
Or, most likely of all, you will think both of these things at the same time.
Similarly: Being the world's foremost expert on a particular scientific problem is a lot less exciting in real life than it seems in the movies. In fact, being on the frontier of science feels like being totally, hopelessly lost and confused. Why this came as a surprise to me I'll never know.
When I went to do mathematics at Chicago I figured I was the smartest person alive. There I was, facing the gargoyles of my dreams; a poor kid aspiring to a better life by shrugging off the accent I was born into and the mentality of defeat so common among the poor. But I had gone too far, became too confident and failed horribly. I was sure that the world had failed--I was too good--and that everything was bullshit. I left, walked away from a full scholarship because I had overcome the constrains of my life before and Mathematics and University were no different. I took a job at a small software shop in Portland, OR instead, enrolling part time at PSU doing computer science.
I failed at both, as you might expect. The world wasn't wrong, I was. While I could program, I had no discipline. While I had intellect, I had no ability to learn. The world was not wrong, I was. All of my anger and suffering and frustration were my fault. From the defeat of my new University and my new job I learned that my romantic notions of most things were not reality. Enrico Fermi, on whose stairway I bounded up, did not simply decide to conjure nuclear fission under what is now a library. He worked for years, a thing which I had never done.
The novice says to the master, "Coal is black." The master replies, "No, it is not."
The intermediate says to the master, "Coal is not black." The master replies, "Of course it is."
The masters say among themselves, "It is coal."
I hold no romantic notions as I held when I were a boy; I have not become a cynical man. Life is suffering and pain. Life is joy and love. I have built a business from nothing and sold it for a profit. I am now very poor. Life is life and that is beautiful. What we learn, what we truly learn, we so incorporate into our being that we cannot perceive it as unknown to all. We are the streams into which a man steps: never the same, yet always the same.
To gain mastery over the frontier of science is to gain mastery over nothing, over one's self. It is confusion and pain and truth and beauty.
It came as a surprise because up to that point, someone had the answer. Even if you had great teachers and even if you're a problem solver...at the end of the day, someone had done what you were doing.
I think that's why most people I know that are on "the cutting edge" are very humble: either they got "it" right and know 40 people just as smart that went in one of 40 equally promising directions and got it wrong. Or they're one of the 41 people still trying to figure out just where the heck they can go from this apparent dead-end.
The hopelessness and confusion that comes at the frontier of science is precisely why I stopped studying biochemistry for my bachelors degree. By the first 300 level course, people begin to start asking relatively simple questions that are not yet known to mankind. It freaked me out. I couldn't imagine ever discovering new knowledge and subsequently dropped out and into computer science...
Ah, but the spice of life is staring into the Abyss of Unknowing and recognizing your very self in it! The most beautiful questions of mathematics and computer science so very often start out "Does there exist..." and we are left with no answer other than, "Who knows!" The world is wide and strange and we are very small indeed. That is beautiful to me.
hmmm... maybe thats the upside of a masters degree. You have that "come to jebus" moment the day after you graduate, but without all the nasty research and writing.
I know you're joking, but...
When I was halfway through my Ph.D. I formulated a hypothesis: The proximate challenge that keeps you from graduating is that you have to write a thesis. But the ultimate challenge to getting your Ph.D. is this: You somehow have to learn to understand, deep down, that all your romantic notions about the Ph.D. are bunk, that you will be exactly the same person on the day after you get it that you were the day before, and that you need to stop waiting for the day when you feel like a god and just write something down and get on with life.
It may take you years to accept this, and it may drive you to drink, but after you get to that point you can graduate.
Only then will you be able to live with the fact that your thesis looks like crap to you. Your thesis will always look like crap to you. Either you will have figured out absolutely everything and your thesis will look incredibly boring to you, because you've moved on, or -- vastly more likely -- your thesis will look woefully incomplete because, geez, there is so much that you couldn't figure out, and you're just so stupid!
Or, most likely of all, you will think both of these things at the same time.
Similarly: Being the world's foremost expert on a particular scientific problem is a lot less exciting in real life than it seems in the movies. In fact, being on the frontier of science feels like being totally, hopelessly lost and confused. Why this came as a surprise to me I'll never know.