One room syndrome

Interesting commentary by 17th century on the One room syndrome. Many Ph.D.s have lived through this and know the feeling. You have to sit at your chair, in the same damn room day after day after day. You can imagine that what you’ll produce will be like a movie that people will pay to see… Hmmm…. not so in my experience. The reward is mostly just that: you become a “doctor”. Some of the time, it might good for your ego, and it helps getting some kind of jobs and contracts. But it ain’t a movie and it doesn’t bring you any kind of fame (99% of the time).

Once you become a “true” researcher (read: actually paid real money), things change a bit, at least for some of us. Sitting in the same room is just one piece of it, then you have meetings, networking, endless emails, administrative duties, funding proposal, students, and so on. Many people find they no longer have any time to sit in a room, especially the poor folks who get a 4-4 teaching load. Then, you have industry, where you end up doing pretty much what everybody else do. In my case, this meant a lot of programming (and I got good at it too!) and getting stressed out about having real people depend on your work.

My Ph.D. was a rather interesting experience. I basically lived totally isolated. I chose to cut ties from the university and from everyone else so I could focus on my work. Did it work? Yes. Was it a good strategy? Probably not. I would run every day, I would spend too much time on the Web, but I ended up finishing my thesis and it was ok. I was even lucky enough to have a job waiting for me (if you call a post-doc a job, but that’s for another day). I recall that I made all these sacrifices because I thought that the good life was waiting for me after the Ph.D.