Academia

As much as I love music, there's a reason I never could have made a career out of it. Music, in both performance and consumption, is something I do for myself. It is therapeutic to me. I love doing it, but, except for rarely, it's not something I can do in order to meet the needs of others. Oftentimes my ability to perform and other people's desire to listen have overlapped positively, but if I felt like I was somehow beholden to others in my performance, I would grow resentful and lose what love I have for it.

Essentially the same thing holds true for computer science.

I adore designing systems to solve problems. I love analyzing these systems to try to improve them and make them do their job better and generalizing them to a wider variety of tasks...but it's not something I can readily make myself do, and it's certainly not something I can make myself do because somebody else is expecting something from me.

For some reason, when I signed up for grad school, I was under the delusion that academia was a place where I could go to find novel problems of interest to me and seek guidance from a field of experts as to where to start looking to solve them. I thought it would be self-directed. I thought it would be freeing.

Nope.

I get here, and I'm subjected to the frantic energy of brilliant but frazzled men who live and die not by the intrinsic value of their work, but by the whims and opinions of their colleagues. These are men who want me to pursue my own interests, but at their pace and in the manner that they see fit because they know that their careers hinge, in part, on my potential for brilliance.

I don't work that way, at least not in this discipline. I come under sudden pressure to satisfy the needs of others in this regard and I crumble. I fall into depression, and I fall even farther behind. I can't be effective if I'm spending as much time figuring out how to convince my advisors that I'm doing good work as I am actually working.

I'll give it the rest of the semester and probably the year after that -- long enough to get my Masters -- but I'm not sure this is going to happen without taking an unnecessary toll on me. At least not here. Mostly, I think I may need to find a career doing something I'm capable of and enjoy doing for others.

So, who wants to help me start a cafe/brew-pub? I'll manage the food part of the menu and take the day shift. In the evenings, I can hang out with and lead a double life as an eccentric inventor/writer/musician. It will be fun. I promise.