This section of my life will probably remain incomplete for a good while longer. For whatever reason I don’t feel the desire to write this section.

It spans a large section of my life, five years so far. Naturally, that will cover many ups and downs and changes in personal ideas and philosophy. So it will take time to unpack. I can say overall that it was a positive experience. To put that in context however, in 2019 I badly broke my ankle, which required surgery and 9 months of recovery. I consider that experience one of the best in my life. So I’m prone to see silver linings everywhere and grow from experiences that knock me down. For many PhDs I’m sure that analogy will ring true.

Although I am grateful for the experience, I am leaving with a critical and borderline cynical view of academia. Cynicism is often used to describe unhappy graduate students in an effort to discount their stories, which to be fair can sometimes be ramblings of unprocessed emotions. But I am happy. I want to use my experience to get curious about the assumed value of doctoral work and modern research institutions.

If my time at MIT trained me for anything (directly or indirectly) is to get curious about assumptions and to question them. Somewhere along the line, I got more interested in these questions than perhaps my own research questions.

So eventually I will get to all of that. But not now.