I often think about what life would have been like had I stayed in industry as a working professional rather than come back to grad school. As an engineering student, I’ve more recently begun to process these thoughts transactionally. For example, in addition to the cost of a graduate degree, what other opportunity costs am I shelling out by coming back to school?
Hindsight is often said to be 20/20 but I’m not sure that really applies in this case. I’m often unsatisfied with the status quo so I’m apt to romanticize the past and future elements of my life while grumbling about the present. In other words, I’ve found that I never find satisfaction being in here and now and tend to either think about how great things used to be, or long for what’s to come.
To clarify my remark about clouded hindsight, I think about the times when I was working, feeling unsatisfied, and romanticizing about the new opportunities grad school could create for me. Certainly I had some expectation of rigor, work, and the finitude of time, but I was always willing to submit those practical trade-offs for the glory of it being “worth it.”
It’s very easy to reverse that in my present situation – i.e., wish I were back in the working world – or just shift the time frame forward – i.e., think about how awesome life will be after I graduate. The fact of the matter is, it will always be easy to gripe about the current situation and try to pursue something that’s bigger and better. It’s no wonder why so many young professionals switch jobs at the rate that they do.
I’ve come to realize that this all culminates in an endless ladder, where one climbs and climbs without ever reaching a defined goal, since the goalposts (or in this case, the top rung) keep getting shifted every so often. For me, having a worldview grounded in the Bible has helped, but it’s still admittedly difficult to deal with the practical realities of the daily grind.
Ultimately, I’m beginning to move away from the notion where my objective is to reach some goal X, with the mentality that all my hard work now will pay off. Because pretty soon after that, the rewards will start to taste quite stale. Instead, I’m sensing that I have to adopt some measure of appreciation in everything I do and better understand its effect and purpose.
For the sake of moving out of generalities, let’s say I’m working on a research project that involves programmatically implementing an algorithm. The main idea seems simple but the more involved I am, the more cumbersome things get. Pretty soon, I’m trapped in an extensive time sink of compiling, debugging, testing, and banging my head on the keyboard on repeat.
Whereas I might have been motivated by the carrot, i.e. – the good grade, the commendation from a professor, etc. – before, now I would have to think about what I’m learning from this apparent time sink. I begin to understand that the effect of this exercise is to better teach me computational logic or more deeply understand the programming process, and that the purpose is appreciate the nuances in putting big ideas (the high-level I/O algorithm) into action (the grunt work).
I think this mentality ultimately results in two things: 1) not getting caught up in (unmet) expectations, especially if I don’t get the good grade, commendation, etc., and 2) not conflating my eternal purpose of glorifying God with ancillary objectives that are secondary, tertiary, etc., as godly as they may be.
At the end of the day, all this requires discipline that I admit is often lacking in my life. But without it, I risk being caught in the cycle of work-reward until I die.
Sherwin Lee 