Diary - the blues and a memorandum

seeing what I spent my life aspiring to and my dreams before me ...
it's what I want, but done in a way I don't think is right
and in a way inaccessible to me.

So what if I don't become an actual scientist?
I'll make discoveries and expand my understanding of things my own way.
I don't need a billion dollar lab to do research. All I need is my brain.

I spent the day with a group of students touring a science lab. It was great, but at the same time it was awful.

It went as well as it could have, and that's why I feel depressed. As well as it went, it still felt wrong.

I don't know... seeing what I spent my life aspiring to and my dreams before me ... it's what I want, but done in a way I don't think is right and in a way inaccessible to me.

"Not like this... not like this". lol.

There are requirements I can't meet anymore to apply to certain programs. The competition makes it unlikely to get in, and there are too many rules and restrictions on how one must proceed to land a position.

There's a feeling of disconnect between what I want to do and what the system is set up to permit me to do. 

It's not even like someone takes your dream and smashes it to pieces. It's like they molest that dream into something I can't stand to be around, and makes me detest my own dream.

It's confusing and demoralizing, but it's not a new struggle for me. This trip just brought back a lot of old, unresolved sentiments that I worked to step away from.

I'm compelled to pursue the process to get into a research position with the lab, because the work they do is my dream. But the way the work is done, what the kind of life that path is like, it's painfully depressing to me. 

That has been my conflict. I've tried to seek ways to do the science work without trapping myself into that academia life, but when I find a lead it ends up back into the pockets of the drudgery I'm trying to escape.

I'll feel better tomorrow when I get back on the road, put work into my own projects that I can control.

So what if I don't become an actual scientist? I'll make discoveries and expand my understanding of things my own way. I don't need a billion dollar lab to do research. All I need is my brain.

An idea came to me on the tour, that a lot of the data is made open to the public, so I can analyze that data with my own computer. I might be able to work on my own research project, using the data some poor bloke spent his life going through a PhD, writing proposals, and maneuvering his career to get into the right position in order to generate that data.

Ha ha, I skip all that, cut out the academia middleman, and just take their data :)

"If universities really cared about educating the public, there would be more open access to information."

Bah, I could go on a long rant about universities as a selection ground to serve government agencies and powerful organizations rather than an institute for intellectual growth and education.

That was part of the wrong feeling that tainted my day.