What are your true, academic, pleasures?
Sean is disgusted at the lameness of academic guilty pleasures
Chad gets in on the action also...
I'm not into guilt, and there are real academic pleasures; emotional states that come with the job.
We should revel in them.
- The rarest and greatest pleasure: the rush of comprehending in an instant, finally, a very very hard previously unsolved problem.
Realising later that there are some technical details to work out, does not detract from that momentary pleasure. Sometimes the details can become a life's work. - Observing something new, interesting and important that no one else has ever observed.
- The phase transition in neuron potentials and neurochemistry when your brain finally integrates a concept or technique so that it is now, and forever at your command.
- Seeing the expression on a student's face when they "get it".
- Your first all positive referee's report.
- Handing in the completed thesis and knowing that it is done.
Forever. - Digging out a really evil subtle bug.
Almost as good, looking at code a student has been beating their brains out over for weeks and seeing immediately the subtle bug they missed, and then seeing their reaction to your finding it so fast.
Experience, baby. - Having an intellectual conversation, preferably in two or more languages, and knowing that everyone at the table is with you as the talk flows across topics.
- Aspen Center for Physics, winter conferences.
- Comparing the selection in Trinity's cellar with the best King's has to offer.
- Ditch Day.
Even just as a grad turkey flunky unofficial assistant. - Cool toys. Like "lasers"... and, er, stuff.
Ok, so Mac Book Pros aren't special to academia, but I could get cool lab thingy stuff if I wanted to... Chad has "lasers", or so I am told. - Administrative jiu-jitsu.
The art of using administrative energy to defeat itself.
I earned a black belt in that.
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* Related to the thesis being finished (and boy, was that a rush!): Your paper is - after sending it in, getting reviews, rewrites, endless discussions with coauthors, fixing the last spelling mistake, paperwork, collecting everyones "short bio" for the end blurb, fixing the last spelling mistake, checking the formatting, getting editor feedback to fix the last spelling mistake - done. Sent in. Out of your hands. Good or bad, it's out there and nothing more you can do about it. A mental anchor; one that's gotten heavier and heavier over the last year or so; is finally let go and you're soaring.
Well, until you remember the next paper already in the pipeline; that and the third one you should have started on already but haven't.
* Fun conferences. That's a different concept from useful conferences; or serious, career-enhancing conferences, though they can at times coincide. The fun conference is where people keep presenting work that is not necessarily the weightiest, most prestigious stuff, but things that makes you think, that makes you almost dizzy with new ideas and insights on your own work. This is a conference where you spend half your break time discussing new ideas with people, and the other half writing preliminary code or text on your laptop to try it out. The unexpected, unplanneable confluence of projects, ideas and people that reminds you that we all started doing this for the sheer unadultered enjoyment of it.
How about LaTeXing really long equations?
"Digging out a really evil subtle bug."
This one made me smile. Anyone that has worked with multithreading before will know this feeling very, very well. :)
TeXing a really long equation, and having it compile and WYSIWYG first time, that is a pleasure, a minor pleasure, but a real pleasure.
Up there with the "sitting up in a seminar and going, 'hey, that's really neat'", or reading a paper in your field and sighing and thinking "damn, I wish I had written that".
I'm counting "Aspen" as my entry in the generic "really fun conferences"