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Jacqueline W's avatar

Note that females also go into academia because (depending on what country you are in) it can be more family friendly. Certainly I opted for PhD and ultimately academia rather than working for an Australian mining company for that reason. I'm not quite a weird nerd but closer to that than an accomplished corporate type. As you rightly point out not everyone can be brilliant or make that excellent world shaking breakthrough, but there seems to be little room for decent accomplishment and simple hard work at teaching. Everything has to have "impact", your teaching has to be using new methods or you have to be capable of theorising about it or producing a teaching portfolio and yes work in groups which doesn't suit everyone either.

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Catherine Hawkins's avatar

I thought this comment on Ruxandra's piece hit the nail on the head:

"I don't quite agree that the group pushing out the weird nerds are "Failed Corporatist" types. The shift I observe is that there are now a lot of "Successful Corporatists" who could easily have elite careers in finance or consulting, who pursue science because they prefer it.

Imagine someone who, at the end of their undergraduate degree, made a choice between an offer from McKinsey or FAANG (depending on the type of person) and an offer from a top 10 PhD program in their field. They are sociable and good at networking. They have normal, legible hobbies: perhaps moderately skilled at a musical instrument, likely athletic and pursuing an endurance sport in a serious but not competitive way. No one would say they are a genius but they have solid ideas, pursue them well, and are very competent and pleasant to work with. And they never have the "basket case" type of problems you get where the Weird Nerds just sometimes fail to do their jobs."

The purpose of most higher education now is to mold students into exactly this type of person, so it's not surprising that's who universities want to hire - after all, don't they trust their own product? I think this is incentivized by the expansion of higher ed - far more people can be molded into this type than into Weird Nerds, and there are far more jobs that need this type than need Weird Nerds.

https://open.substack.com/pub/ruxandrabio/p/the-weird-nerd-comes-with-trade-offs?utm_source=direct&r=u7d91&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=58539428

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