[erikpukinskis]

> Graduate school is a great place for "people testing the fringes."

Testing, yes, but not exploring. Grad school gives you one experiment and then you have to start publishing. So if you have something you want to try out, with a direct implementation strategy and a clear set of possible outcomes, then you can do that at grad school.

If you want to try many things and iterate, grad school will not work well. You will be expected to publish digestible “learnings”, and so you will end up skewing your work towards ideas that are likely to produce compelling presentations.

There’s no good place to experiment, in either the corporate or academic world. Your best bet is to move between many domains, trying small ideas in context while also delivering value, and only ever doing your real Hail Mary experiments at home on your own dime.

[lazyasciiart]

Isn't the freedom from short term value basically the concept behind tenure?

[erikpukinskis]

If you don’t care if you have anyone in your lab, and you don’t have any expenses, you’re pretty free as a tenured faculty.

But if you want students, you need to find grants for them. And if you need materials/travel/services/etc for your research that’ll require grants too.