andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-835 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: A few months ago, in response to some reflections from Steve Hsu, I wrote the following: I’ve long been glad that when I went to college in the 80s, I was at MIT rather than Harvard. Either place I would’ve taken hard classes and learned a lot, but one advantage of MIT was that we had no sense–no sense at all–that we could make big bucks. We had no sense of making moderately big bucks as lawyers, no sense of making big bucks working on Wall Street, and no sense of making really big bucks by starting a business. I mean, sure, we knew about lawyers (but we didn’t know that a lawyer with technical skills would be a killer combination), we knew about Wall Street (but we had no idea what they did, other than shout pork belly prices across a big room), and we knew about tech startups (but we had no idea that they were anything to us beyond a source of jobs for engineers). What we were all looking for was a good solid job with cool benefits (like those companies in California that had gy
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1 A few months ago, in response to some reflections from Steve Hsu, I wrote the following: I’ve long been glad that when I went to college in the 80s, I was at MIT rather than Harvard. [sent-1, score-0.146]
2 Either place I would’ve taken hard classes and learned a lot, but one advantage of MIT was that we had no sense–no sense at all–that we could make big bucks. [sent-2, score-0.374]
3 We had no sense of making moderately big bucks as lawyers, no sense of making big bucks working on Wall Street, and no sense of making really big bucks by starting a business. [sent-3, score-1.662]
4 What we were all looking for was a good solid job with cool benefits (like those companies in California that had gyms at the office). [sent-5, score-0.077]
5 I majored in physics, which my friends who were studying engineering thought was a real head-in-the-clouds kind of thing to do, not really practical at all. [sent-6, score-0.072]
6 We really had no sense that a physicist degree from MIT degree with good grades was a hot ticket. [sent-7, score-0.402]
7 And it wasn’t just us, the students, who felt this way. [sent-8, score-0.077]
8 My senior year I applied to some grad schools (in physics and in statistics) and to some jobs. [sent-10, score-0.443]
9 I got into all the grad schools and got zero job interviews. [sent-11, score-0.378]
10 The kind of places that were interviewing MIT physics grads (which is how I thought of applying for these jobs in the first place). [sent-17, score-0.448]
11 And after all, what could a company like that do with a kid with perfect physics grades from MIT? [sent-18, score-0.354]
12 I’m just glad that big-buck$ jobs weren’t on my radar screen. [sent-21, score-0.35]
13 I think I would’ve been tempted by the glamour of it all. [sent-22, score-0.077]
14 If I’d gone to college 10 or 20 years later, I might have felt that as a top MIT grad, I had the opportunity–even the obligation, in a way–to become some sort of big-money big shot. [sent-23, score-0.252]
15 As it was, I merely thought I had the opportunity and obligation to make important contributions in science, which is a goal that I suspect works better for me (and many others like me). [sent-24, score-0.279]
16 Recently I checked Hsu’s blog and noticed this item on “exuberant geeks”: Never before have the economic and creative prospects been so good for a young person with quantitative or technical abilities. [sent-25, score-0.078]
17 In my generation we had fewer options: defense, academia or big stodgy corporations. [sent-26, score-0.463]
18 Or, to put it slightly differently, I think I’d get sucked into the goal of proving myself by becoming a billionaire. [sent-32, score-0.245]
19 One advantage of the old system “defense, academia, or big stodgy corporations,” is that the sky isn’t the limit: you can make a reasonable living and do good work without feeling a pressure to be a business superstar. [sent-34, score-0.601]
20 But at a personal level I’m glad to have bypassed it, and I think there’s value in protected spaces where non-business-savvy researchers can do their work and contribute to a larger goal. [sent-36, score-0.218]
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