Again, based on inspiration from Tony Judt's book Ill Fares the Land, I am prompted to explore the concept of "Academic Generalists". By "Academic Generalists", I mean people who care to get invested in various academic fields and investigate the similarities and differences of the seemingly disparate subjects. My impression from my own limited graduate school experience is that structured academia values people who have an incredibly deep understanding of a small part of a field of study. This way of doing things was not and is not appealing to my academic persona. The more interesting parts of my graduate experience happened at my apartment where I was the only person studying chemistry among roommates who had studied economics and public policy.
A related area of investigation for me is the idea of institutions of higher learning as microcosms of the real world, with all the benefits and limitations of working closely with other humans. I personally found graduate school to be limiting of free thought and was deeply disappointed at how important the human aspect of interactions were to success. By this, I am referring to classic "brown-nosing".
I'm sure I will be developing these ideas in future posts.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment