What does your gut tell you?

Lately, I’ve been encountering a problem when I mentor others.  During mentoring, I try to follow a very Rogerian approach, choosing to let others talk through the problems they are facing, as opposed to providing direct advice.  Like the fallen Jedi Kreia, I feel that sometimes you may inadvertently rob someone of a growing experience if you provide too much help, and so sometimes, you need to let others trip, fall, and get back up.

The problem I have found, however, is that fear of the unknown may stunt others from even thinking about the consequences of their actions.  And so, when I ask people: “What do you think you should do?,” I’m often met with a blank stare, often times succeeded by the phrase: “I don’t know.”

What I’ve resorted to asking (with odd success) is: “What does your gut tell you?” On countless occasions, this has helped my mentees at least utter what they’re thinking of doing.  It’s almost as if relinquishing agency to an external entity (even if it’s a conscious-less object) makes the process of detaching and objectively evaluating yourself even easier.  Admittedly, relinquishing agency could be thought of as what people are doing when they solicit advice on what to do next, but what’s interesting is that in this case it’s completely imagined; maybe people think that their gut is actually telling them something?  Maybe it is easy to abdicate the choice point, so as to not take direct responsibility for the consequence of the decision.

What does your gut tell *you*?

Reply: “The Ph.D. problem: are we giving out too many degrees?” by Kate Shaw, ArsTechnica

Before I start, my bias is that I’m a Ph.D. student, so take what I say from that perspective. A colleague of mine recently brought to my attention the article of the above name.

The article can be found here.

The world’s most interesting man thinks you should get a Ph.D.

My opinion is echoed in the article; too often are Ph.D. students divorced from real world applications. The dream of “tenure” is slowly fading away because there is a finite number of tenured (professor) positions, and those are mostly already taken by professors with established research tracks. Ph.D. students should have training in real-world applications, so that they can pursue jobs/work outside of traditional academia.

However, as we go into the future, I think we need more Ph.D.’s, not less. Humanity faces (on a daily basis) increasingly complex problems. The true value of a Ph.D. (as opposed to standard undergraduate education) is the ability to do research on topics that are ill-defined/possibly non-existent and produce scientific work of value. If more people are capable of coming up solutions to problems we’ve never faced before, I’d say humanity stands a chance to face issues such as global warming, finite energy resources, overpopulation, and space exploration. I’m not saying that undergraduates out of top-tier institutions aren’t capable of doing that once they’re out the door…but on average, I’d be willing to take a chance in saying that they need a little more education/scientific training (which could go a long way).

There is a long-standing fallacy of innovation (often applied as a “social concern”) which sounds like: “if we create this new technology, we’ll put people who do this work manually out of business”. Like all fallacies, this is just not true; it assumes a finite amount of work in the world. I think something similar applies for Ph.D.’s: while there is a finite amount of Ph.D. tenured positions, there is not a finite amount of Ph.D. level work in the world.

Re-interpreting the most interesting man in the world:
“Stay thirsty (for knowledge) my friends.”