Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
August is "let's explore grad school possibilities month." Or, at least, the first half of August is; depending on outcome, the second half of August is "Omigod, let's frantically review for the math GRE."
Psych would be the easiest to resume, probably the quickest PhD, and is a known quantity. On the other hand, the last time I knew that particular quantity, I ran screaming from it, my life in tatters, and straight into what seemed like the welcoming arms of a glamorous government career but which actually turned out to be the gaping maw of a soulless bureaucracy. But, y'know, maybe just right subject, wrong time...
Linguistics both fascinates and frightens me. As a discipline, it just seems...wrong...for something to encompass both phonology and computational neuroscience, as if some Martian explorer looked at our maps and nonchalantly drew a circle around half of Europe and part of the Atlantic and said, "Well, there's your problem: THAT'S what a continent should be." It makes me worry that maybe the field approaches what I think are the nifty questions in a way that sidesteps what I find compelling about them, like analytic philosophy does. Or that I'd get lost in such a huge field and wouldn't have the gumption to avoid the stuff I didn't like (like phonology or learning Navajo), which is what ended up happening in psychology (intentionality? small group behavior? what was I thinking?). Plus, both extremes of the subject repel me. I can't do -- can't fathom -- the computational side (while surfing for programs, I accidentally ended up on the MIT website, panicked and quickly closed the browser while looking around guiltily -- they don't SAY they use their freakish brains to secretly monitor the quantitative IQs of their visitors, but like I'm going to believe some cyberdragon isn't about to challenge me with a "404: Your mathematical acumen must be THIS high..."). And yet, while fleeing that, I wouldn't want to sail too close to the wasteland of postmodernism, either. Would it be wrong to enter an academic discipline declaring "I'm heading squarely for the middle path"?
Then there's all these cool programs I didn't even know about: history of consciousness. Medical anthropology. Ethnobotany.
Then there's the thought of spending the next five years in penury and the five or so after that scrambling to come up to a fraction of my current salary and then not that much time til thinking about retirement (being a late bloomer sucks).
Decisions, decisions. But tonight we take up Sperber and Wilson's Relevance to test-drive the semantics/pragmatics option a little bit more -- ok, first we finish The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and then we take up Relevance -- and trust that the rest will fall into place.
Psych would be the easiest to resume, probably the quickest PhD, and is a known quantity. On the other hand, the last time I knew that particular quantity, I ran screaming from it, my life in tatters, and straight into what seemed like the welcoming arms of a glamorous government career but which actually turned out to be the gaping maw of a soulless bureaucracy. But, y'know, maybe just right subject, wrong time...
Linguistics both fascinates and frightens me. As a discipline, it just seems...wrong...for something to encompass both phonology and computational neuroscience, as if some Martian explorer looked at our maps and nonchalantly drew a circle around half of Europe and part of the Atlantic and said, "Well, there's your problem: THAT'S what a continent should be." It makes me worry that maybe the field approaches what I think are the nifty questions in a way that sidesteps what I find compelling about them, like analytic philosophy does. Or that I'd get lost in such a huge field and wouldn't have the gumption to avoid the stuff I didn't like (like phonology or learning Navajo), which is what ended up happening in psychology (intentionality? small group behavior? what was I thinking?). Plus, both extremes of the subject repel me. I can't do -- can't fathom -- the computational side (while surfing for programs, I accidentally ended up on the MIT website, panicked and quickly closed the browser while looking around guiltily -- they don't SAY they use their freakish brains to secretly monitor the quantitative IQs of their visitors, but like I'm going to believe some cyberdragon isn't about to challenge me with a "404: Your mathematical acumen must be THIS high..."). And yet, while fleeing that, I wouldn't want to sail too close to the wasteland of postmodernism, either. Would it be wrong to enter an academic discipline declaring "I'm heading squarely for the middle path"?
Then there's all these cool programs I didn't even know about: history of consciousness. Medical anthropology. Ethnobotany.
Then there's the thought of spending the next five years in penury and the five or so after that scrambling to come up to a fraction of my current salary and then not that much time til thinking about retirement (being a late bloomer sucks).
Decisions, decisions. But tonight we take up Sperber and Wilson's Relevance to test-drive the semantics/pragmatics option a little bit more -- ok, first we finish The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and then we take up Relevance -- and trust that the rest will fall into place.
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