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by romankolpak
3026 days ago
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Replace Poland with Ukraine and you’ve described my situation as well, with uncanny precision. I’m thinking about continuing my education in US after a 6 years break from academia. I’m a bit anxious no one will want me, a 28 y/o guy with a degree from an unknown university. I also find myself leaning towards journalism and social studies, which doesn’t play nice with my CS degree. Anyway, I wish you luck in any direction you end up taking. |
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Academia is hierarchical ("feudal"), is so everywhere, and this is by design. And it works.
There are wholly different factors such as complacency of local academics in dishonest practices of some of their subset. There does exist a genius loci, the whole social, administrative contexts matter.
Also the Wallerstein centre/periphery theory applies, developing countries are at a disadvantage and that is not for the lack of smart among their people or even in the pockets of their academia (remember, Oxford also has a lot of dead wood, the difference lies they have at least 50% of it while you might approach 90%).
I would not place the selection process among those factors. It may be romantic to think the US grant system as meritocratic. However historically it was first introduced by Vannevar Bush who in the war time has lead the State's scientific efforts. He saw public subsidy as the modus operandi of a successful effort and also saw the Soviets realizing the same while the US government was barred by the Constitution from direct subsidy. So the NSF was set up not for selection, that's a byproduct, but as a workaround enabling government to pour streams of money to the usual suspects. Wallerstein's dynamics also applies to the inter-US provincial relations with the centres.
I find your fears about age premature. I know of many academics who started late or took enormous time. The whole system in Sweden is set up around taking enormous time for everything. If you are able to show good research you might have a honest chance. If all you want to show is pedigree, you set yourself up a rat race with all the Asians for example.
There are fields combining CS and media, such as for example the so-called digital storytelling lately combining grammars of graphical visualization, and probabilistic programming in spreadsheets, NLP and what not.