Another small dip

While sorting through some papers the other day, I stumbled across an advert that I'd clipped from a newspaper a few years ago for a "Lecturer in Philosophy" at the LSE. Paid about £40k, and you had to have a Phd (of course) and a collection of published work (of course). Much has been written over the past few years about the high pressure that now applies to an academic career but it has always been there, in the back of my mind, as something that I wish I had pursued. If my MSc goes ok, I might carry on and do a Phd, but I suspect that it would be wholly unrealistic to think that this might not be as far as I could go. And yet, people like Nassim Taleb have managed to link themselves to academic institutions "later in life"

So anyway, one of the things I did today was work my way through the LSE philosophy department website to have a look at the detail about each member of the department. This reveals that there is a good chance that I will be older than most of the staff when I am there! It is going to be very curious attending seminars, etc, where the person taking the seminar is younger than me!

And a brief visit this afternoon from Virginia - the daughter of our neighbours. She has just finished a Phd at Oxford and is now looking for a job. Not sure if this will be academic or not. She says that the MSc will really speed by. That is perhaps not what I wanted to hear as I hope to savour it slowly.

So overall, the effects of these has been to leave me feeling a bit down. I need to think of my MSc as being just for me and having not additional motivations. And stop thinking that there is any chance that one day, I might be employed as an academic. I am 20 years off the pace for this to have been a possibility!