That makes sense. I like your approach of self-diagnosing what sort of resources you lack, then tailoring your PhD to optimize for them.
One challenge with the “work backwards” approach is that it takes quite a bit of time to figure out what problems to solve and how to solve them. As I attempted this planning my own immanent journey into grad school, my views gained a lot of sophistication, and I expect they’ll continue to shift as I learn more. So I view grad school partly as a way to pursue the ideas I think are important/good fits, but also as a way to refine those ideas and gain the experience/network/credentials to stay in the game.
The “work backwards” approach is equally applicable to resource-gathering as finding concrete solutions to specific world problems.
I think it’s important for career builders to develop gears-level models of how a PhD or tenured academic career gives them resources + freedom to work on the world problems they care about; and also how it compares to other options.
Often, people really don’t seem to do that. They go by association: scientists solve important problems, and most of them seem to have PhDs and academic careers, so I guess I should do that too.
But it may be very difficult to put the resources you get from these positions to use in order to solve important problems, without a gears-level model of how those scientists use those resources to do so.
“Working backwards” type thinking is indeed a skill! I find it plausible a PhD is a good place to do this. I also think there might be other good ways to practice it, like for example seeking out the people who seem to be best at this and trying to work with them.
+1 on this same type of thinking being applicable to gathering resources. I don’t see any structural differences between these domains.
That makes sense. I like your approach of self-diagnosing what sort of resources you lack, then tailoring your PhD to optimize for them.
One challenge with the “work backwards” approach is that it takes quite a bit of time to figure out what problems to solve and how to solve them. As I attempted this planning my own immanent journey into grad school, my views gained a lot of sophistication, and I expect they’ll continue to shift as I learn more. So I view grad school partly as a way to pursue the ideas I think are important/good fits, but also as a way to refine those ideas and gain the experience/network/credentials to stay in the game.
The “work backwards” approach is equally applicable to resource-gathering as finding concrete solutions to specific world problems.
I think it’s important for career builders to develop gears-level models of how a PhD or tenured academic career gives them resources + freedom to work on the world problems they care about; and also how it compares to other options.
Often, people really don’t seem to do that. They go by association: scientists solve important problems, and most of them seem to have PhDs and academic careers, so I guess I should do that too.
But it may be very difficult to put the resources you get from these positions to use in order to solve important problems, without a gears-level model of how those scientists use those resources to do so.
“Working backwards” type thinking is indeed a skill! I find it plausible a PhD is a good place to do this. I also think there might be other good ways to practice it, like for example seeking out the people who seem to be best at this and trying to work with them.
+1 on this same type of thinking being applicable to gathering resources. I don’t see any structural differences between these domains.