In case you can’t tell from my previous posts, I’ve been in a slightly bad mood this past week. It’s not really my fault, I think I just stumbled upon some financial information regarding architecture school that has sort of made me once again potentially pivot my plans. The postdoc is supposed to be a time to explore. We are granted freedom to dictate the direction of our research and, in my experience, I’ve had very little guidance in terms of the direction with which to take my projects, for better or for worse. It is a completely different training environment that I find myself in at the moment. That has effectively engendered a sort of creative reaction that I’m not really used to.
I think overall, I’m also just experiencing a bit of a slow phase in my research and I always feel a bit of guilty when this happens. Academia–or at least the training portion of it–is a hard life, as I’ve come to learn. You are quite literally competing with the top students in your field or school and it becomes this sort of pressure cooker situation. My instinct at the moment seems to be to get out because I haven’t been good enough to publish in reputable journals. I think part of that is my fault but another part of that is that I didn’t feel like my graduate school program necessarily trained me that well in the fundamentals of the field. It’s probably a mixture of both, I don’t know.
It’s been a challenging career trajectory for me thus far and I don’t think I’ve settled on anything yet really. A lot of things are still really uncertain for me and it’s not because I’m not smart enough or hard working enough or any of that, which can cause much frustration. I’ve just had not experienced the good enough fortune of making it into a profession that I can see myself being in long-term. Yet, they say that a little challenge is not a bad thing in one’s youth. I’m still confident I will rise above it all.
The Ivory Tower 
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