Blessed by the Potato

So one of my professors is talking openly of retiring in a few years, and about how I’m going to be one of his last students (yeesh, he’ll never retire if he waits for me to finish my doctorate!). Recently, he was looking at his pension plan, the money he put away for himself on his own, etc., and ran the math.

He says that if you go through school and get your PhD, then go into academia, get a pension and retire, you’d be worse off than if you simply dropped out and got a decent paying job, and put the money away. Even though by the time you were of retirement age you would have a pension and be making more (by his calculations) it just didn’t make up for that 6-10 year head start at such a huge lead. Of course, his calculation assumed that if you did go get a good job, you’d continue to live like a grad student “and no one would willingly live like that. Once you have the money, you’ll go out and spend it, you won’t save it for the long term.” He also didn’t mention that he left out how very lucky you’d have to be in the academic path to only spend a year or two in post-doc, and to pick up a decent paying, pensioned position in your 30’s.

This is all stuff I knew, but hadn’t been hit over the head with it from people who did make that choice.

My dad talked about some of that this weekend too. My sister’s having a little bit of trouble in school, so we’ve been talking about how important it is to stick with it, and how vital education is… and then after she was gone, we talked about how very little it’s worth, and how perverse it is that after your master’s degree, the longer you spend in school, the less valuable you become.

Reminds me of the great Simpsons episode when Bart was playing with the pony tail he cut off a grad student in the theatre.

Bart: “Hey, look at me, I’m a grad student. I’m 30 years old and made six-hundered dollars last year.
Marge: “Don’t make fun of grad students, they just made a terrible life choice.”

I’m not quite 30, but I’m close enough that I’m starting to question just what exactly it is I’ve gotten into. At the beginning, I’d hoped to breeze through and be done and ready to start one of those family things when I was 30. At the time I was stupid and arrogant, thinking that I was smart and hard working, and actually thought I could finish my degree a term early (that is, I started in January, a bit of an off-term, and hoped to finish at the same time as the people who started in September that year). Now I’m 26, I noticed in the mirror this morning that my grey hairs are no longer a small pocket of unrest on my brow with some scattered dissidents in the fringes, I’ve got riots and organizations forming on both sides of the globe. I feel old, and it’s strange how it sort of hits you like a sledgehammer at times. I’m only a day older than yesterday, but today all of a sudden, I feel it.

I’ve gone off talking about my hair, and I don’t mean to be too vain about it. I know that I am being a little vain about it, although I honestly don’t think other people can really tell. Aside from the one prominent group on my forehead, all the others seem to be behind other hairs, so they really only show when my hair is sitting a little funny. Plus, my normal hairs are a little shiny, so it’s hard to say for sure whether that’s white hair you’re seeing, or just a particular reflection sheening off a youthful black one. (And the less said about the very obvious problem with my aging hair, around back, the better).

I was so busy with my thesis when I turned 25 that I just never really had time to get into a good quarter-life-crisis funk. I don’t really have the time now, but I guess this sort of thing won’t wait forever.

My goals in life were never very lofty. Scratch that — I did have some lofty goals, but at the same time realized how improbable they were, and they lived side-by-side with more realistic ones. For example, I wanted to be an astronaut and a science fiction writer, but knew those were pretty much impossible. I did, however, think that even if I could never live off being a writer, I might have at least written a novella or two to print off and chuck at my friends for want of something less valuable to throw. And I figured I might have had a freelance article or short story published in a magazine, so I could at least be a serious hobbiest. I am fairly pleased with how the website has developed, especially since I went to the all-out blog format: it’s a lot easier to put up a ton of unreadable garbage when you don’t feel any compulsion to make it fit into any overriding heirarchy, or to have individual articles/rants stand on their own in any sort of timeless fashion. Getting people to call me doctor figured in there to some degree, but I reasoned I would be done by 29, or 30 at the latest (4 years left on that deadline: it’s been done before… but in this field?).

Anyway, enough of that for now, since there’s not much I can do about any of it except stare in the mirror and shake my head.