The hopeless ones become college professors

Many people justify their choice of pursuing graduate school by a desire to explore new ideas and satisfy their intellectual curiosity, an euphemism for goofing off.

These students use graduate school as a cultural hack… they turn what might be perceived as an asocial behaviour (e.g., spending 4 years writing a Perl compiler in JavaScript using Bayesian inference) into something that is tolerated and even encouraged.

I think we need outlets where such smart people can go and do their things for a time. Indeed, most corporations do not want to collect employees who write Perl compilers in JavaScript using Bayesian inference.

College can be a good place to park smart people until they find something productive to do. And the hopeless ones become college professors.

Published by

Daniel Lemire

A computer science professor at the University of Quebec (TELUQ).

3 thoughts on “The hopeless ones become college professors”

  4. The really hopeless ones compete against hundreds of other PhDs for academic jobs in the middle of nowhere. And lose.

    100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School
    100rsns.blogspot.com

    Reply

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