I'm on the Fast Track

To Glory? Hell? Riches? Fame? Mediocrity?

I don't know which one. Any, or all.

This comes up because I am a couple of years short of my thirtieth birthday and have already been a post-doc for close to a year and a half. I'm yooooouuunng! by the standards of this industry. To many people that is something to be envied: I have an edge in the job search. Even if my first two years of post-doctoral work don't lead to great success, I can spend more time on it, or even go to another lab for another post-doc. I have time you see. I can zip through a few more years of this and even be the right age to have children after it all!

Time is precious, even more so when you find yourself in frustrating situations with no perceptible way out barring extraordinary success, in other words a post-doc in a foreign country. It is of great value and I do value it. There is a cloud of implied purpose and ability that follows a post-doc who is younger than grad students :). She must have ability, you say, look at how fast she's reached where she's reached. Maybe so.

Or maybe, by a lucky chance of birth-date and state education systems she ended up the youngest extreme of the age range in her class long before it was a question of work or ability. Maybe growing up in a competitive education system meant that she didn't take gap years. Maybe putting her head down and thoughtlessly ploughing through the rows of academia meant that suddenly, one day, she was twenty-five and planning a dissertation.

What I'm building up to I suppose is whether youth really is an advantage. What do you think? Sure, one still has freshness and energy to bring to grad school and post-doc-hood, but doesn't that mean that the crushing disappointments of that life come to one sooner? Age gives one the skills necessary to navigate the perilous waters of academic personalities, but does youth supply the absence of cynicism that disarms? More time give ones more leeway with one's career decisions, but the assumption of more time leads to sloppier decisions and extended procrastination.

This isn't something that has bothered me much personally, but the age reaction is such a strong component of how people react to me, especially in the academic world. Stronger, even, than the woman component. I have had to think of it as a result, and I still can't decide whether its to the good or not. Let's see:

I'm safely short of thirty and I have had a repetitive stress injury that put my right hand out of commission. Twice. As a result my left isn't in good shape, from overcompensation, and my wrist seizes up when I type too fast. I'm nowhere near thirty and I have to think, plan, act and raise funds for myself. I am almost thirty and have but the veriest pitiful beginnings of retirement money. I will be thirty soon and I may have to throw away ten years of hard work and switch careers. Thirty looms and I have no secure career prospects. No house. No IRA.

I was recently past twenty-five when I got a Ph.D. I am, on average, four years younger than my peers in equivalent positions. I will likely never lose a position because I am older than the maximum allowed age to apply, as has happened to friends. I really can switch gears, I can even go back to school and get another degree (hah!) and enter the job race nearly at par. I can take a year off, go travel and still come back with time to spare. I don't need a house, I have time to get an IRA.

Half-full, half-empty, take your pick. It's all in the viewing.

scientiae-carnival