= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
paper-machine comments on Open thread, Jan. 12 - Jan. 18, 2015 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (155)
In the vein of asking personal questions of Less Wrong, I need career advice. Or advice on finding useful career advice.
I'm an undergraduate student, my course is "Mathematics & Theoretical Physics", BSc, but I'm already convinced I don't want to try to be a career scientist. Long-term, my career goals are to retire early (I've felt comfortable enough on what I live on as a student that the MrMoneyMustache approach seems eminently doable), with the actual terminal values involved being enjoyment and lack of stress, so becoming a quant also seems like a bad choice what with having to get a PhD first. Teaching just sounds horrible to me.
What this leaves me with is the much broader range of careers that are either mathematical or sciencey enough that I could use the degree for them, or the jobs and graduate programs that just ask for a degree and don't care what kind. I have too many choices, every particular one I look at seems okay but not great, I have no idea how to even begin narrowing them down or ordering them.
Hey, Math PhD candidate here (graduating this May).
These are my goals, as well.
It is pretty horrible. My university has a relatively teaching-heavy TA assignment, and it was kind of soul-crushing.
Graduate school could serve the role of a holding pattern for you to figure out what it is you actually want to do. I think it's possible to become a quant or an actuary with a MSF or other master's degree. However, I don't recommend going into debt for graduate school, and as far as I know most graduate schools don't fund master's students.
There's a somewhat sneaky trick: One can apply for a PhD program, obtain a TA or RA, and then after the requirements of the Master's program you actually want are done, transfer to the Master's program and graduate out.
Of course that all requires some degree of teaching, probably, and afterwards you need to find a job making enough to balance out the cost of making a TA's salary for ~2 years.
The people I know who retired or are scheduled to retire the quickest do white-collar jobs in manufacturing or energy at very large corporations.
The people I know who do the least stressful jobs work either part-time in retail or have tenure of one kind or another. One is an epic-level computer programmer who gets so many job offers that he's able to choose the least restrictive.
Me, personally? After I defend I'm going to work for a small research lab.
Cops.
So, this looks to be a common aspiration, but it strikes me as woefully underspecified :-) A lot of retired people spend their day extending minor tasks to take a lot of time and spend the rest of it staring into the idiot box.
Are all y'all quite sure you have enough internal motivation to do interesting, challenging things without any external stimuli? What will prevent you from vegging out and being utterly bored for the rest of your life?
Oh, and a practical question (for the US people) -- once you retire at, say, 40, what are you going to use for health insurance and does your retirement planning cover the medical costs?
Also military. Defined pension benefits and health care (such as it is) for the rest of your life. Of course, you must be in the military for 20+ years, which I'm guessing is not what the OP is looking for based on his/her other comments. :-)
I experienced this to some extent (a long story I won't go into here). For a while, we paid for a high-deductible plan on the state exchange since we were both relatively healthy and mainly looking to not be bankrupted should we experience a medical emergency or suddenly fall ill. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), our other income was just high enough that we didn't qualify for federal subsidies so we were paying over $400 per month for a bare-bones plan for my husband and me. Doable, but not ideal....definitely something people need to plan and budget for when considering early retirement.
A life of just everyday minor tasks plus internet/videogames seems perfectly adequate and I don't understand why the emotional response would be "boredom" rather than "content", except for the fact that television is vastly inferior to an internet-connected gaming PC.
I'd probably prefer to do "interesting, challenging things" than just veg out the time (which surely should be enough motivation in itself, unless you're specifically talking about work-like projects and assuming those are necessary to happiness), but if I have a motivation failure and spend all my time doing inconsequential things at home, that's hardly going to be such a bad outcome that it would be preferable to have to go to work.
Ah. OK, then.
Will they for a Masters in mathematics? Nearly everyone knows that a Masters in math means "I quit or failed out of my PhD program". This generally doesn't reflect well on you.