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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   32828 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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Where doing physics research requires being hired by one of a handful of institutions in the world, and if you don't meet their criteria or get unlucky early in your career, tant pis.

And your timing has to be close to perfect.

I was a young shithead in undergrad but, at the time, thought I was just going to go into the corporate world so my GPA didn't really matter. That .... turned out to be exactly true, but is beside the point! I've always wanted to go back and get a masters in something like computational linguistics, but I'd have to self-fund some sort of post-bac in math or other pseudo-re-bachelor-degree in order to be competitive for any non fly-by-night degree mill.

Academia, despite it's self-inflated perception as the "palace of ideas" is actually one of the most rigid "FOLLOW THE TRACK" career paths out there. The Marine Corps has far more flexibility in terms of self-determination.

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