Anindya Chatterjee
Mechanical Engineering, IIT Kanpur
Why I like my job
Perhaps
you are a prospective student, wondering whether higher studies are worth it.
Here is my opinion.
It
is about time we thought about time. We each have 24 hours in the day. No
matter how rich you are, you cannot make your day 25 hours long.
I
suspect you know some successful people (call them type
1) who sleep 6 hours a day, commute 3 hours a day, and work 10 hours a
day doing things they may not enjoy, reporting to bosses they may not like. 19
hours gone from 24, and they have not even gone to the bathroom or drunk coffee
or anything. They compensate by living in large, beautiful homes, and taking
expensive vacations in amazingly photogenic locations for about 15 days in the
year.
There
are even more successful people (call them type 2)
who just exist in a state of great happiness and beauty and wealth, and who do
not have to suffer the strife I describe in the previous paragraph. If you are a type 2, congratulations. I am not. In this
life, the best I could have hoped to be was a type 1. I declined.
Here
is why.
Each day, when these successful (type 1) people get into their big beautiful cars, this is what they do not think: Wow, how much better my car is than the one my college professor drives!
Instead,
I believe they think about meetings, office politics, personal
matters. They probably do not think about their car at all, most days. They
have no time.
Meanwhile,
our academic campuses are green, quiet, unpolluted, safe.
No commutes, no bosses. Research is an activity of freedom. And the salary is
sufficient in the sense that I seem to have the things I need. When I am
working happily on something (like a new research idea), I watch no clock. But
when I am tired and do not have an immediate class to teach, I have no need to
watch the time.
So
if my job is so good, how come our doors are not being beaten down by eager
hordes of people who want to take it away from me? I think there are three
reasons:
1.
Postponement of pain
2.
Middle class insecurity
3.
Entry barriers
A.
Preparing for an academic job starts with getting a good PhD
from a good place. That requires effort. At some level, people think effort equals
pain (though it need not: think of physical games, in which effort equals joy).
People avoid this anticipated effort in the short term, and in the process
accept a lifetime of what I consider more difficult work.
B.
More is supposed to be better, and our inherited financial
insecurity tells us this is particularly true of money. But it seems to me
that, for people who have enough to eat and so on, our sense of wealth depends
not on our own salaries but on the salaries of our friends. Our notion of wealth
is relative. Time is the absolute resource. But we have been taught to think
that money is everything and time is nothing.
C.
Once somebody accepts (1) and (2), takes a job with a big
salary, gets used to spending it, loses academic energy, feels (perhaps falsely)
that it is too late to start on a PhD, they run into the entry barrier that
protects my job from casual competition. It is not easy, at age 45, to quit
industry and become a professor.
When
I was in Bangalore, some telemarketers sometimes used to call me up and invite
me to become members of some country clubs and offer low rates of life
membership. I remember thinking that I lived in a country club already, where
the entry barrier was high in a way that worked to my advantage.
As a separate matter, I like teaching. I like attempting research problems I am not sure in advance that I can solve. I like being surrounded by young people, with their energy and optimism and faith in themselves that, over the years, tend to diminish.
As yet another separate matter, many academics are motivated by the possibility of maybe, just maybe, being able to do something really worthwhile that goes into textbooks. The chances are not too high, of course. But for every thousand that aim so high, perhaps one or two might achieve something worthwhile? Count me in that thousand, and wish me luck. In this particular goal, however, the fun is in the journey, because most of us aspirants may never get there!