I suspect that academia would be less like this if there weren’t an oversupply of labor in academia. Like, there’s this crazy situation where there are way more people who want to be professors than there are jobs for professors. So a bunch get filtered out in grad school, and a bunch more get filtered out in early stages of professorhood. So professors can’t relax and research what they are actually curious about until fairly late in the game (e.g. tenure) because they are under so much competition to impress everyone around them with publications and whatnot.
Also, the person who’s willing to mud-wrestle for twenty years to get a solid position so they can turn around and do real research is just much much rarer than the person who enjoys getting dirty.
I suspect that academia would be less like this if there weren’t an oversupply of labor in academia. Like, there’s this crazy situation where there are way more people who want to be professors than there are jobs for professors. So a bunch get filtered out in grad school, and a bunch more get filtered out in early stages of professorhood. So professors can’t relax and research what they are actually curious about until fairly late in the game (e.g. tenure) because they are under so much competition to impress everyone around them with publications and whatnot.
Also, the person who’s willing to mud-wrestle for twenty years to get a solid position so they can turn around and do real research is just much much rarer than the person who enjoys getting dirty.
Yeah, a big part of my strategy is to ignore this effect and accept potentially being filtered out as a grad student.