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I think it would benefit people to look a few layers above themselves, and to see the big picture of the system, who the different actors are, what their goals are, how they are pursuing them etc. Like the "follow the money" game where juniors in corporations are told to try to understand the flow of money and business value and revenue as soon as possible, in order to know how to advance their corporate careers. In academia the equivalent is prestige. Who gets it and how? Who are the players? There are college students, PhD students, professors, administrators, grant committees, corporation-university industrial collaborations and consortiums, individual managers at corporations and their shareholders, university boards, funding agency managers, politicians allocating taxpayer money to research funding, journal editors, reviewers, tenure committees, pop science magazine editors, pop science magazine readers, general public taxpayers. You should be able to put yourself in the shoes of each of these and have a rough idea of how they can obtain prestige as input from some other actor and how they can pass on prestige to yet another actor. You must understand the flow of prestige, and then it will be much less mysterious. (Of course understanding the flow of money also helps, but people tend to overlook prestige because one of the least prestigious things is to overtly care about prestige, it's supposed to seem effortless and unacknowledged) |