long uneditted brainstorm about school

I'm going to revert to the tried and true blog form of the unedited (mildly edited) rant. I've let a few rants fly in emails this week and it felt pretty good, so let's see if it helps with this.

The topic at hand is my career, or more specifically my lack of career, and hypothetic musings on what kind of career I'd like to have. If you've been following along in this stupid blog of mine, you'll know that I entertain the notion of going back to school for a PhD, and I think of myself as some kind of scholar wannabe. In spite of the idea of school being in my head for years now, I haven't made a lot of progress towards actually getting there. Here's my current situation.

Most PhD programs have application deadlines between December 1 and early January for admission to the following fall semester. If I were to want to apply, I'd need letters of recommendation, which would require me giving a least 1 month notice to anyone who'd be writing on my behalf, meaning I'd need to ask them by November 1st for the early schools or December 1st for the later schools.

In other words, I'd need to know tomorrow that I definitely want to apply for a program that would occupy the next 5~8 years and basically define the rest of my life. I just don't think I can pull that off.

Moving away from the practical side, and back to the theoretical side, my most recent field of interest is Anthropology. When I wondered what my undergrad major would be as I was transitioning from high school to college, I thought I'd maybe do math. But I didn't register as a math major, I just registered as a "letters and sciences" major or something like that, which basically meant I didn't know what I wanted to major in. I took a very hard math class my first semester (real analysis) that I was definitely not prepared for, and it made me think I shouldn't be a math major. So then I was back to having no idea. I took a couple intro-level psychology classes, but they weren't very interesting. I had a friend who was majoring in finance, and he told me that being a finance major meant lots of easy classes and you could still make a lot of money with that degree. I didn't even know what finance was, aside from his description of "it is about how to make money with money, kind of like accounting, stocks and that stuff." So I became a finance major. What a terrible reason to pick a major - because it wouldn't be challenging. Eventually I added an economic degree as well, since I had liked my high school economics class, and there were some economics requirements for finance anyway. So I spent 4 years of college getting a double degree (150 credits) in 2 subjects that I really didn't care too much about, aside from some vague interest from my high school days. But the economics I took, I didn't even really like most of it, except for game theory.

The whole point of this rant was to illustrate that my early career/academic interests were math, psychology and economics, but I made no real effort to develop those interests. I just took the easy way out.

Since college, I've explored other areas of intellectual interest. I remember shortly after I graduated I decided to reread an archaeology textbook from a class that I enjoyed but didn't put a great deal of effort into. I reread some books that were part of a class I took my freshman year called 'Science and Pseudoscience' that was probably my favorite college class - books about skeptical thinking: "Why People Believe Weird Things" (Michael Shermer), "Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions" (James Randi), and "How We Know What Isn't So" (Thomas Gilovich). I read Stephen Hawkings' books (A Brief History of Time, The Universe in a Nutshell) and a few other books on string theory (Brian Green - The Elegant Universe, . I finally read Ayn Rand's masterpieces - "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged". Then I stumbled onto a book called "NonZero: The Logic of Human Destiny" by Robert Wright. That turned me on to evolution and evolutionary psychology and I really got hooked. I read his earlier book "The Moral Animal" and then I started reading Dawkins (The Selfish Gene, maybe others I don't remember right now) and Pinker (The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate). I was fascinated by this stuff, and I think that was about when I started blogging. I started reading other people's blogs about that time too, which eventually reopened my eyes to two topics that I'd avoided for a long time: religion and politics.

I finally had the interest and the courage to admit that I'm an atheist - an emotionally charged word that I had avoided for a long time for no good reason. It was quite liberating, and a lot of the world started to make a whole lot more sense once I flipped that switch. I also realized that I'm not politically conservative like I always thought I was, and I've taken more interest in politics and from a much more open-minded perspective. I got a subscription to Skeptic Magazine and read Shermer's "Science Friction," and even went to a meeting of a local skeptic group, though I haven't gone back yet.

I read Jared Diamond (Guns Germs and Steel, The Third Chimp, Collapse) and his books really made me start to see how good science can and should inform responsible modern living. I read very recent politically charged books (Sam Harris - The End of Faith, Chris Mooney - The Republican War on Science, Glen Greenwald - How Would a Patriot Act) and those made me realize how political movements, especially when fueled by religious fundamentalism, can just disregard good science and responsible political values and lead to human tragedy. And that re-opened my interest in understanding people, and making sense of religion. Recent reading included "Stumbling on Happiness" by Dan Gilbert, "Religion Explained" by Pascal Boyer, "A Devil's Chaplain" by Richard Dawkins. Continuing to explore politics, especially in light of understanding human nature and how the American system isn't all it seems to be, I read John Perkins' "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" and now I'm reading "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn.

Now that I've gone off and listed a lot of the books I've read in the last few years, I should bring it back to the point I've tried to make. The point of the book list which I may or may not have made obvious as it went was to track my intellectual interests as they've developed. To greatly simplify, if I had to summarize what direction my academic career would have been likely to take at each of a few points in time over the years, here is what it would look like:

math --> finance --> econ --> psychology --> philosophy --> anthropology

And so now here I am, thinking I'd probably like to be a professional academic, thinking that anthropology is most interesting field right now, and seeing application deadlines in the very very near future. But I also see that my interests have changed a lot in the last few years, and it seems reasonable to think they'll change again. But still, I think I feel more confident about anthropology now than I ever felt about economics, even when I was accepted to those programs, so... so... I don't know what that means.

In the next month I'm getting married and I'm turning 26. My life is moving in a direction where I need to start being more responsible, whether I'm ready for it or not. Anthropology tends to take 6~8 years to get a PhD.

So, to get back to practical, what do I do now?

One idea is that I could try to apply to a few anthropology programs that look interesting to me and that have later (Jan 1+) deadlines. That leave me enough time to apply, and gives me a few more months after applying to try to figure out what research are of most interest to me (I have general thoughts on this. Topics of interest: cognition, human evolution, evolution of human behavior, religion, rationality, laziness/productivity, tradition. Models that I think I'm most interested in: modern first world nations, non-human primates, and hunter-gatherer tribes. Over-arching research themes: humans not made for the modern world, persistence of irrational belief and behavior.) and how various programs fit with those interests. If after getting into a few places I realize there are others schools that might be better fits, or even other disciplines that might be more appropriate, I can decline the acceptance and apply next year.

Or I could just accept that I don't have enough time to apply the "right way" if there is such a thing, and spend the next full year really devoted to the mission of figuring this out once and for all. I could either keep doing the job I'm doing (I'm pretty sure they'd hire me full time) or maybe try to get a job teaching high school or middle school for a year. That would give me enough time to get in contact with professors at various programs and get a better feel for how I'd fit in at different places and maybe visit, versus applying now based mainly on the website information and maybe a few email exchanges if I get ambitious.

I'm genuinely not sure the best way to proceed, and I'm also handicapped by my own weaknesses, specifically laziness and introversion. I'm bad at working without imminent deadlines, and I'm shy about reaching out to strangers to express interest in their work. I'm also going to be travelling and not able to devote much if any energy to this from November 7 to 16 (our "honeymoon" in the Philippines) and I feel like that is another looming obstacle to proceeding with these matters (even though I'm very excited about the trip).

Applications are all going to require a personal statement, where I make my case about why they should let me into their program. So in order to write that I'd need to have a good understanding of why I'd want to get in, and why they'd want to have me. And I feel like I'd have to have that statement ready before I ask anyone to write me a letter of recommendation, so those people know why I want to do it. So I'd need to come up with that statement, or a good rough draft, pretty quickly, which is partially what this rant is hoping to get me thinking about. So if nothing else, I've gotten some brain dump out onto this screen and it might have something for me to draw from for such a statement.

Another obstacle is that many applications require a writing sample. I don't have a writing sample. I didn't have to write any respectable papers in college, at least not as the sole author, and my professional work has yet to require any writing that would be appropriate either. I could maybe find a way to turn my work that I'm doing now into a paper, but I'd have to figure that out pretty quickly too. Or maybe I'd just have to write a 10 page paper on some academic subject, which would take a lot of time, but could be fun I guess. Some programs don't require the writing sample though, so maybe that would be another criteria that eliminates schools from consideration for applying this year.

I think this is the end of my rant for tonight, and I think I'll stick with my plan not to go back and edit it. If you actually read this far, I'm impressed, and if you have any advice I'd be grateful.

EDIT 1: I am going to go in and edit parts of this. My first edit is to get all the book titles and authors right, and to include references to some books and other ideas related to skepticism that I forgot to include initially. They roughly correspond to the philosophy part of the timeline, as my specific philosophical interest was the philosophy of science.