Attempt number 2138791 to restart this place...
Despite the amount of grad students I run into, the average folk I encounter or interact with is really still a normal working person. Some, if you're my age, are about 3-4 years into their career. Others have been at it for a while. Some, certainly, are still students. I've gotten tons of "so...what it is that a PhD do?" over the last few weeks, and I'm always not totally sure how to answer that the best.
I think one difficult thing with cross-background small talk is that people often find it difficult to relate. On the surface, there is very little similarity between my "job" as a PhD student and my peers who are full time programmers or are in management rolls. But actually, there are tons of similarities... We use the same tools (coding IDEs, compile time, SVN, putty, SSH, code queues, code merge, design paradigm, data migrations, long hours looking for the missing ";"), need to deal with the same kind of constraints (big projects with little manpower or resources, lack of expertise for self and/or support staff, having to chose between doing something myself because I know it best or delegating it off but needing them to learn a bunch of things first before you can get the results you need, making decisions myself vs passing the decision to higher-ups, pressing deadlines to my coworkers). Even reading and writing peer-review stuff has a parallel, in people needing to read technical documents and project reviews. Just need to find a better angle to present your work/thoughts/struggles and sometimes it becomes that much more relatable.
Sometimes, when I'm chatting with some of these people about work, we inevitably hit topics where I pretty know nothing about (I can only pretend that PhD is like a manager for so long), but that's really not that bad. I would have learned something interesting from the conversation if we start talking about things I don't know. The spirit of academics is to expand one's knowledge, after all, and I'd like to think this extends a bit beyond what MATLAB can afford me. Certainly one big thing I've been learning from grad cell, and various different socials that brings me outside of my little campus office.
3 comments:
oh my goodness jlin makes an appearance!!
I was talking to a friend this weekend and I discovered she was doing an PhD in CS. I asked her what does a person do with a PhD in CS? She simply replied, "Research... or teach."
It's nice to read some of the parallels of what you do with "normal working people" despite not understanding any of the nerdy lingo.
Haha. I certainly can't say this works out for everyone I meet. But I guess this was another way of saying "perspectives is everything"
Quite a few of attempts.
It equates to 24 days, should you have made an attempt every second of those 24 3/4 days.
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