Graduate Education

So graduate education makes you stupid. I think this is sadly true for everybody. Except for me, of course.

Academic success

Arnold King:

My tip on becoming a successful academic is to be careful how you define success. Any tenured professor has a great life by most standards. However, the default sentiment in academia is bitter jealousy. The folks at lower-tier schools think they belong at top-20 schools, the folks at other top-20 schools think they belong at Harvard, and the folks at Harvard think that they deserve more recognition than the other folks at Harvard.

While this is mostly true, it is hardly complete explanation. Academics are usually pretty smart people and they choose their careers for three main, partially exclusive, reasons.
1. They want to have a big impact (bigger than just a fat pocket)
2. They want to have comfortable, un-stressful life
3. They want the reputation associated with "tenured professor" status.

While 2 and 3 are not really interesting for me, the first point is the key. Money are not all for these people, and wages of professors are not that bad, either. The biggest goal is thus different - to make a difference. To push the knowledge forward. To figure out something nobody knows yet.

However, it is hard to succeed. Chances are that you will end up fifty-something, your published research is in the low-rank journals and/or not cited anyway. This is huge failure - you gave up money and other possible success two decades ago and for what? That only a couple of grad students read your paper?

New York 2

Second visit to New York was much pleasant than the first. Meeting students from downtown high school, traveling every day from poor district was certainly interesting. Unfortunately, at the end, I caught men' deadly disease - running nose. Despite the popular saying, it does not take one week (or seven days), but more like two weeks. That's why posting was so slow, recently.

Teaching Scinece

Why didn't they show us experiments like this


in our science classes?

Quality rules. Not.

One of my colleagues from UCSD office came to me with question whether I know anything about Stata. Yes, as a theoretical micro economist, I know (very) little* about Stata. And the reason why she asked was that she is going to teach a course in econometrics, heavily based on Stata, in two weeks.

I have to say that this was the last piece necessary to crack my mental health today. Why should I even try to write a decent paper/dissertation? The world is probably ruled by people like this lady, who are paid (and will surely embellish their CV) for doing something they have no idea about, who cannot possibly do a good job for the students yet do it anyway. When the rule "If you want to teach something, you should know something about it!" lost its power?

More broadly (and depressingly) - what I'm doing here? Why didn't I go to the beach (or National Park) like a friend from unnamed Central European country, who came as a grad student with a finished PhD. and who keeps complaining how little opportunities we have here in San Diego "to socialize". (BTW: he even complaints about how much people from his country complaint.).

I hate days like these...




* There is no field further away from Stata then theoretical microeconomics.

Cultural differences and free lunches

It is often said that there is no such thing as a free lunch. In fact, even free lunch at school for poor students has its price - shame.
To be honest, I quite did not understand where is the problem. When I was at school where subsidized lunches (not free, unfortunately) were available, everybody was happy to have them. Some people did not go to the lunch because they prefer to keep the lunch money, not because it was a shame.
It is a bit different in the US - one has to qualify, which means that at the same cafeteria, there are people who have to pay and those who don't. And those who don't are embarrassed by their (parents') poverty and allegedly prefer to be hungry.
This puzzles me. I would expect the opposite effect - those who get free lunches would boast that they saved more money; that they qualified for an extra benefit; that they get FREE! food. That was the way it worked in a poor country like Czech Republic.
But what do I know, I studied there in 20th century. It's probably similar to the US nowadays.

Ivy league

The schools in Ivory league (and a few more) are successful school. Not necessarily in the education they provide, but in getting money from their students and graduates. They are actually so successful that some of them have endowment exceeding $1,000,000 per current students.
I never quite understood why they hoard such huge amounts of money (Harvard has about $35 billion) instead of spending them*.
BTW: the endowments and profits of (non-profit) schools are untaxed. It is not really surprising that some people want to take such advantage away from them. And so they should.

* My Fulbright application to spend a year at Harvard was rejected despite the (promised) fee $8,000 to the school, invitation letter and basically minimal burden I would be (no, you do NOT get an office when visiting Harvard. You get a chair in the library). Instead, I went to UCSD, for free and met much friendlier (and better, as far as I can tell NOW) faculty. The reason for me not going to Harvard was a fight between faculty and department of economics about space, reconstruction (and who knows what else) which lead the DoE to reject visiting students as much as possible (exchange programs between Ivory league schools had to keep going, otherwise H. students might have trouble to be visiting elsewhere). There seems to be something rotten in the kingdom of Harvard...