Note: to be expanded

2024-2025 was supposed to be the final year of my Master’s degree studies. Some part of me still thinks if it wasn’t just better to have started a PhD straight away, as our Bacherlor’s degrees in Brazil last 5 years, we do research during the degrees, etc etc. In any case, over the past year I have been deliberating and oscillating a lot, considering the options I have before me after my master’s degree finishes.

I don’t know if that is some generational phenomenon that many people born around the turn of the millenium want to be their own bosses and super successful, but I particularly have some aspirations:

• To have my own deep-tech startup a.k.a. develop something insane with high disruptive potential, not your usual fullstack-chatbot shit;
• Do some truly cool project that is the intersection of biotechnology, electronics, computer science and manufacturing, some crazy futuristic thing;
• At the same time I want to have a life beyond work.

Fears

To some extent, there is a popular belief that “a PhD is the hardest path to unemployment”. I have heard this and similar from many people, mentioning being overqualified for some industry jobs, either because they can find someone cheaper to do the job, or because some managers/bosses are not confortable when overseeing people with more qualification than themselves. The other problem are all the traumatic stories about how having a shitty PI will essentially destroy your mental health and will change your brain forever. I think I do not want to follow the academic career beacuse there is either too much bureaucracy: from empirical observations, group leaders spend most of the time writing grants, managing people, reviewing publications and giving talks and attracting funding, which makes them have no time for the actual research. I am not sure if I want to become this type of manager. Not that I am not sure. I don’t want to become this type of manager.

The myth of freedom in academia

It is true that in academia you have the freedom to think and to develop “lo que te dé la gana”, as long as you’re either a tenured professor or a PhD funded by the university itself, and not by another project, which represents I guess the staggering majority of people.

Hopes

I was extremely lucky to have a mentor during this past semester, and we had many meetings to talk about my life plans. I hate to make bullet points when the conversation was actually something far more fluid, but it will make those ideas easier to explain:

• It won’t get easier than this. It will probably get harder
• You have to get used to multitasking, and you natually develop this ability of dealing with many projects and people in a short amound of time
• PhD will open doors, not close doors
• You don’t have the job you want? Be your own boss. Create this job. (especially in terms of research)

Final

Once my mentor was in a sailing trip, on one of the islands of the Finnish archipelago, and he talked for hours with one old man he found. This old man was actually a retired professor from the university. One of the things he said was something in the lines of: “after all the years, nobody ever called me to say thank you for the extra effort I put”. This makes me think that we should above all respect balance, and compensate short term and long term rewards. Life is not infinite (as of 2025).