Blessed by the Potato

The question of the day is “What do you do with a PhD?” (After you’ve already gone to the bank and insited they put “Dr.” on your cheques, that is).

Graduate school is a long, arduous process, and it can be all the more demoralizing when there’s no clear goal at the end of it. Heck, the “default” career option, continuing in research, doesn’t even really have much of an end, at least not within a tangible timeline. After doing a PhD and getting a small handful of papers published, you’re typically expected to do a post-doc, which is basically doing a PhD all over again on a yearly contract while writing your own grants. You look constantly for professorship openings, which can be at some pretty far-ranging universities… and if you do land one of those, there’s still no real security for a decade yet, until you magically get tenure. And the whole time you have to deal with the peculiar headaches of research: broken equipment, misleading results, constant racing to get results out ahead of the nebulous “competition”, the grant cycle, funding shortages, not to mention short-term contracts, moving around, and research-dollars salary. Whoa, no thanks folks, if we learned nothing else during the PhD, it’s that the academic research path is not for us.

The other side of the academic coin is a good option though: teaching. Research makes you plumb the depths of a subject, looking to push the boundries of knowledge and explore all the subtle pitfalls that it contains (even if that is through a process of falling in every one of them). Teaching forces you to take something and break it down into its components, constantly looking for new ways to view, explain, and apply it. The two complement each other rather well: you can get so bogged down in details in research sometimes that you forget what exactly it is you’re doing; teaching can help bring that back into focus (and also provides you with a constant stream of new questions to investigate from fresh minds). The two complement each other well — but you don’t have to do research to teach. In fact, the vast majority of the teaching that goes on is done in elementary and secondary schools by people who only need a bachelor degree and a teaching certification. So really, the time spent getting that graduate degree really wasn’t necessary… seems kind of a waste, and if you’re in the middle of your PhD, it’s no way to stay motivated to finish.

Back to university research: being a tech is an option. You trade upward mobility and self-direction for stability. Again, actually finishing a PhD isn’t always necessary, though.

There are lots of opportunities in industry. Researchers, of course. Job stability can come a lot sooner, and you can settle in since moving around isn’t typically necessary (most companies only have one research park working on one topic, and would hate to lose an egghead to the competition). While funding is usually a vastly different game, with equipment magically appearing before the desire is even uttered aloud, the research can be very results-driven, which can be extremely stressful. Especially if you haven’t seen 7 am as anything but “really really late, man” for decades. Beyond that, being someone who can talk the talk can be useful in the middle-management type roles; someone to talk to the engineers so they don’t have to talk to the customers. A “people person”. Along the same lines, if you’re good at interviewing and padding a resume, you can try to leverage your decade of higher education into some vague form of legitimate experience and catapult up the ranks (even in completely non-scientific fields). But god, can you imagine being 30 years old with no experience in corporate life (or life in general!) and trying to jump right in to any kind of management role? That leaves sales, which can also require someone who can talk the talk, especially when it comes to pitching high tech things like drugs, medical equipment, or long distance plans (shudder). This route can lead to the pitfall of being “overqualified” though — it can be tough to convince an employer that you want to work outside your field out of anything other than temporary desperation.

Then there’s the stay-at-home option: cookbooks sell better if written by someone with a PhD. Discounting that, more school is an option sometimes as well. Extra training can take one from medical research into actual medical practice, or medical physics (that’s a very competitive alternative, though).

Unfortunately, I don’t have any answers — I don’t know what I want to do myself when I “grow up” (though suggestions are welcome). It can just be a little demoralizing sometimes not really knowing what’s ahead (or worse yet, seeing the path ahead and realizing there isn’t enough hair left to lose). Some have suggested the old trick of asking yourself what you’d do if you won the lottery and didn’t have to work. In that case, I’d probably still tinker with science, still keep up-to-date with Scientific American and maybe even Nature, and likely even keep my brain sharp by doing obscure calculations (like figuring out the time for a hybrid car to pay itself off, or the real-world speed vs fuel economy curve)… but there is no way I’d keep up the discipline to go through with rigorous experiments or hinge my hopes and dreams on something likely to go horribly wrong due to random chance. Plus any science writing I did would likely be of a fictional or popular variety (or even advocacy?) rather than technical.

Long after taxi companies in Vancouver and Victoria set mileage records with their Toyota Prius, Toronto finally has a few hybrid taxis.

I’ve long been a proponent of hybrid cars, and they are ideally suited to use as taxis (well, the ones that are big enough: the Civic and Insight are a bit small). Hybrids gain their biggest gain over conventional gas-only cars in stop-and-go city driving, which is where cabs spend most of their time. The ability to run the A/C and radio with the engine mostly off also helps reduce pollution coming from those trains of idling cabs outside subway stations. Also, as the article mentions, with the extreme number of miles that taxis accumulate hybrids pay for themselves a lot faster than other cars. While battery life is a common concern among potential buyers, it’s much less of an issue for taxis since they tend to go through cars in much shorter amounts of time, and battery degradation happens at least party due to time elapsed along with use (mileage/recharge cycles).

I know that you usually don’t get your choice of cabs when you call for one, but if I did I know I’d request the hybrid cab every time.

Now, if only we could get the message out to the other cabbies that while they use up their Taurus or Crown Vic before moving up to a hybrid, that driving around like total fucking idiots costs them more in gas, we’d all be better off.

Also, for Ontario Citizen’s: January 31 is the last day to get your comments in for the Citizen’s Assembly on Electoral Reform! (Look for mine soon)

Canada Customs just phoned to let my mom know that her car was found on a container ship in Halifax. It’ll take some time to get it back here, but it’s good to hear! (Of course, it would have been better to find my brother’s car, since the insurance company was going to buy a brand-new one for my mom with her better coverage). Beyond that I don’t have any details — we don’t know if a large bust was made, or if my mom’s car was just lucky. We don’t know if there’s any damage to it (though if it’s on a container ship to be resold, they probably handled it gently).

Anyhow, I have to leave for my dentist appointment now — getting that tooth I cracked back in December fixed with a new crown :(

Also, I saw something I haven’t seen for a long time on the drive back last night: a guy talking (loudly) on his cell phone in the public washroom. (Then leaving without washing his hands because of course, he only had one free. Ick).

I was really getting into using Sunbird and Icalx to have a synched calendar at work and at home (two big paper ones always end up having things on just one or the other, and small paper ones go missing and can’t be pointed to when coworkers wonder where you are). However, sometime a few days ago Icalx.com has vanished from the tubeosphere, and hasn’t come back up yet. :(

It looks like I’m going to have to look into an alternate way to get this going, because I liked it. If anyone has any recommendations for a WebDAV server, I’d like to hear them, otherwise I may have to see how hard it is to install the WebDAV extensions on my own server…

Update: Hurray, it’s back up with no data loss!

The police called last night around 1 am, and of course it was the first time in a year when everyone was in bed early so no one answered. We just called back and they had a bit of good news for us: the GPS locator in my dad’s car worked and it has now been recovered! Unfortunately, the police computer system is currently down, so they can’t give us any details (arg!). We don’t know if the car’s been damaged, we don’t know if they recovered the other two along with it or not, we don’t know if this lead to a big bust with someone in the driver’s seat or a big warehouse full of stolen cars, or if the display said “tracking active” and they dumped it seperately. Actually, I think I’d like to make a hack for those multifunction displays in cars that comes up after say 5-10 minutes of driving with “recovery tracking active” just to see if it would foil some thieves…

At any rate, the police still have to do their forensics on the car, and then we’ll be able to pick it up later tonight or tomorrow morning. It’s a big relief for my dad, who wasn’t able to find the details of the insurance policy for that car, as it means he won’t have to worry about whether he was covered for the replacement cost, or just the depreciated value of it. My mom’s car we know is covered for full replacement (and even if not, it’s less than a year old so there’s been less depreciation).

Update: Just a bit more information: we know now that the car was recovered in 33 division and will be moved to 32 division for forensics (so it didn’t get too far away…)

Update 2: Well, there are fingerprints on the windows which we don’t think are ours, so the cops have taken those, and aside from the cash my dad keeps in his car, nothing seems to be missing. There is some damage to the centre console (likely trying to tear out the GPS), but we haven’t seen it yet. It has been confirmed that the Mercedes GPS tracking helped find it (dumped in a neighbourhood near Cummer & Bayview), so as much hassle as they gave us to start the track, it did actually work! They are at least partially forgiven for that…

And no sign of the other two cars :(