This month’s Best Person in the World is Richard Lenski, a biologist at Michigan State University.
All posts tagged academia
Science Times roundup
All three above-the-fold cover stories in the NYT Science Times this week hit on different aspects of what’s becoming a major interest of mine – the interface between the harder sciences and more right-brained aspects of being human.
The main article is about mindfulness meditation being used in therapy. I find this interesting, but the article points out that the science supporting whether it is beneficial is pretty thin at this point, and there’s a risk of it becoming a fad.
Next is an article about a new curriculum at Binghamton University (NY) aimed at putting the sciences and humanities in dialogue. I was not encouraged by the inane statement by one of the creators that “There are more similarities than differences between the humanities and the sciences,” but otherwise it looks very good.
But perhaps most intriguing was an article on a woman who is marketing a placebo for parents to give to their children when all else fails Continue reading →
What to do: Grad school vs. music
I know better than to fully trust these what-to-do-with-my-life epiphanies, but I had a set of realizations that startled me today.
- I’ve been in academia my whole adult life — 4 years at a New England liberal arts college, 1 at a big European university, and 1 working at and attending a big Boston university.
- If I went the grad school route, I’d be spending at least three (MA) and as many as seven (PhD) of the “best” years of my life in the library — from 25 until 28 or 32. (I’m including the year of prep that would precede an actual program.)
When I think of those things, spending the rest of my 20s reading, say, John Rawls feels incredibly unappealing. Especially considering that, despite being a Total Genius(tm), I think I’m a little too ADD to really succeed in academia, at least at this point in my life.
What do I really want to do with my 20s? Play music, that’s what. That’s what I was all about before college, and it’s only been through accidental circumstances that I stopped playing then.
I can envision a future where I play music for a few years, and somehow, tastefully, combine it with my more intellectual interests, and eventually go back to academia if it feels like the right move. Like Greg Graffin did. [Actually, he did both at once. Hmm...] But I don’t think you can do it the other way round.
