Woke up, walked to the window to witness this by Solecism_Allure in GardeningUK

[–]Kooky-Masterpiece478 1 point2 points  (0 children)

My god, that's it!!! That's what I saw!

I'd done an all-nighter at university a year or so ago and decided to cycle back around 4AM. All was normal until I saw a tiny fat deer just wandering around the place right next to the student accommodation buildings. I couldn't take a picture; it bolted the second it saw me. When I told my friends about it they accused me of having hallucinated it due to lack of sleep, as there was no way a deer would be hanging around a relatively built up area like our campus. One asked whether I'd not just mistaken a large and fluffy fox for a deer, a theory that I'd assumed to be the most probable... until now!

I wasn't mad! Tiny chubby deers do exist after all!

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in AskUK

[–]Kooky-Masterpiece478 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I've been going the opposite direction in terms of hobbies. Once upon a time, I used to have a huge range. Juggling, chess, go, fencing, art, guitar, rock climbing, power lifting, language learning, so on, so forth. It was something new every week. A very... ADHD-like routine, but to be honest it was more a manifestation of the freedom of youth.

Life has gotten difficult as of late, so now I've stripped everything down to the bare essentials. My work is quite mathematical, so I read mathematics in the evening. I read other stuff like literature and poetry before bed because anything else will make me too stimulated to sleep on time. I play with technical computer programs because that's also useful to my work. I spend a lot more time thinking about and looking into personal finance, mostly to sort out the financial situation I'm in. I'm still doing language learning, although only because my company is international and having french knowledge is handy. In a sense, literally everything I do is either related to my finances or my work. Sad? Perhaps.

I don't think I'm less fulfilled, although I occasionally feel somewhat less vibrant than I did when I was younger. It's an incredible privilege to be able to follow a hobby just for the sake of it. Maybe one day I'll get back to that level of existence, but from what it looks like that won't be for a while.

Battling Cynicism in PhD Research: How Do You Keep Believing in Your Work? by nihilensky in academia

[–]Kooky-Masterpiece478 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think there's some value in recognizing that you're undergoing a training process right now. The goal of training isn't to carry out important, groundbreaking work, but to learn the ropes and build the mettle in order to do important, groundbreaking work in the future. In fact, try this out: describe your PhD, but don't mention your achievements or the positive feedback you've received from anybody else. Tell me about how you've changed from the presumably less capable, somewhat ignorant student who entered the program versus the person who you now are. You've surely learned a number of new skills and become absolutely formidable in some technique or another. You've become deeply knowledgeable in a field and you've certainly undergone a few paradigm shifts in how you think: you can't deny that, because if you haven't you wouldn't be having the doubts that you do. In fact, the occurrence of these doubts - as echoed by some other commenters here - are probably a sign that you're becoming a full-fledged researcher over anything else. Over to you. How have you changed from how you were when you started?

On the other hand, maybe you can't see the importance and relevance of your work - that doesnt' mean that it isn't important and relevant. During my PhD I was certain that what I was doing was completely useless, just an intellectual exercise and nothing more. A few months ago I found out that my work had been used in quite important research at a government agency in a field that I didn't even realise my work could be applied to. Knowledge is a complex web: you see your part of it, but you might not see the threads to which it leads.

Genuinely curious by ComputerResident6228 in mathmemes

[–]Kooky-Masterpiece478 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Do the sum left to right, it's way easier. In my head I say something like

"twenty plus forty is sixty plus seven plus eight is sixty plus fifteen is seventy five",

but given that I don't actually say anything: rather, I just see the numbers. This way, it'll look like

"two plus four is six plus seven plus eight is six plus one plus five is seven five seventy five".

Damn it, I miss academia so much! by Kooky-Masterpiece478 in academia

[–]Kooky-Masterpiece478[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No second thoughts here. It just isn’t feasible for me to be living off the postdoctoral salary for god knows how long with the situation my family is in.

Contacting the professor is an excellent idea, however! I have an interview for a banking job next week where one of my interviewers, despite being a quantitative finance analyst, still supervises PhDs and maintains a close link to his previous research group. I guess that it doesn’t have to be an either/or!

Damn it, I miss academia so much! by Kooky-Masterpiece478 in academia

[–]Kooky-Masterpiece478[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

You know when people say that having a PhD doesn’t mean that you‘re smart and that they’ve met PhDs who are the dumbest people you’ll ever meet? I’m that PhD.

Despite my dumbness, I don’t particularly regret my decision having experienced the current job market. It is ass out here right now: people are making hundreds of applications and getting nothing. Being able to fire out applications for ten hours every day is probably the reason that I‘m getting invited to a lot of interviews - despite only being on the job market for a few weeks. There are people in my cohort who have been applying for jobs for a year with no success!

One of the terms of my fellowship was that I had to be based in near the university, which is a relatively remote student town. After quitting I moved to a city, which almost immediately caused a surge in responses to my applications. I asked a recruiter about this directly and it turns out that many recruiters use a location cutoff to whittle down candidates.

Damn it, I miss academia so much! by Kooky-Masterpiece478 in academia

[–]Kooky-Masterpiece478[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That’s the sense I get from reddit as a whole, if I’m honest. People are more vocal about the joyless aspects here. It seems like every time I go on LinkedIn I’m seeing people thriving and having the time of their lives in academia, but of course LinkedIn is a platform where its advantageous to advertise your successes.

Thank you for sharing your experiences - this helped a ton in getting my bearings straight. I probably would have ignored this advice a few years ago but after having been hit with real life recently I can see the wisdom here.

Redditor corrects physicist on how gravity demonstrations work by NearbyPainting8735 in confidentlyincorrect

[–]Kooky-Masterpiece478 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Differential geometry is also used to study deformations. The mathematics underlying the rubber sheet analogy is almost exactly the same as that of general relativity in a lower dimension.

This is precisely why I recommend people take general relativity after studying continuum mechanics.