It could be worse. It IS worse.
I have a doctorate in experimental nuclear physics. Can't do that without knowing your way around tools and wires. But I ran away to join the museum and became a curator.
The museum director often condescended to me because I knew how to use my hands.
Imagine the wasted human and societal cost of educating a doctor of nuclear physics only to have them run away and join the museum.
So you can use a hand tool, hoorah. Pity about that brain.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Perhaps, dear heart, you are unaware of what a curator does? The job combines aspects of scholar, teacher, librarian, repairman, and warehouse worker. It's definitely not a brain-free zone. Witness an article I did for a symposium:
http://washuu.net/Med-Lec/Return.htm
My main problem with nuclear physics was that I was basically an experimentalist - and the schools demanded theoretical analysis. At that point, I had to swim in the frigid seas of tensor calculus. I barely avoided drowning.
As a secondary problem, I'd graduated at a time when nobody was hiring. The field was shrinking in constant dollars, and everybody was holding on to their tenure with grim determination.
So I ended up in the museum world as a kind of public-access Doctor Science. It turned out to be a good fit. Later I moved to a smaller museum, which was an even better fit; I was a generalist, able to do a bit of everything. And since the museum dealt in the history of science, very little of my education was wasted.
Making the leap from brain-free to doctorate in physics is like trying to leap the Grand Canyon in two steps. It won't fly.
What a waste of education.
Post a Comment