The pursuit of career

Hmm, I’ll write a blog to warm up for my essay.

So, life is interesting and complicated. One of the things people sometimes do in life is enter careers that involve doing jobs. A question arises: What kind of career would I like to do?

I like science a lot. I think that, at a philosophical level, improving the level of mankind’s understanding of the natural world in which we all find ourselves is one of the greatest pursuits there is — here we are, some mammals sitting around wearing clothes sometimes, and we spend years figuring out what the heck everything is and how it got there. Almost as amazing as the fact that anything got there in the first place. (I think Stephen Hawking is a well-known proponent of essentially this idea.) And my favorite branch of the sciences is the science that deals with most of the universe: physics (and astronomy). Understanding the whole universe seems like an extremely ambitious goal, but people have made such big achievements already in figuring out what exactly is out there, beyond the Earth. Space is cool! And the mathematical relations (i.e. laws of physics) that most “stuff” on and near Earth follows seem to hold true throughout the visible universe, as far as we can tell. For me, the idea of being a part of this process of figuring out how the universe works is both extremely appealing and intellectually engaging. This is why I’d like to be a scientist.

Learning how to understand the awesome stuff that we see in the universe is really satisfying

But, hmm, sometimes becoming a scientist is hard, and maybe in real life it’s not as cool or satisfying as it’s cracked up to be. When I come to it, maybe the actual experience of being a scientist is tedious, unrewarding, and takes too much grant-applying & dealing with bureaucracy, and not enough exploring & appreciating the wonders of the universe. If I were to choose a career that I enjoyed, even if it didn’t have the philosophical benefits of being a ‘man of science’, what would I do with my life? (more…)