[robotresearcher]

Are you also disillusioned with professional sports, music, acting, and art? Most people who study and aspire in these fields don't make a sustainable living in it either. It's a tough competition. There's work and luck involved, as well as talent.

I think most grad students understand this, and it sounds like it was communicated clearly to you in a timely way.

[SkyBelow]

>Are you also disillusioned with professional sports, music, acting, and art?

Not the person you were asking, but I think we need to double down on disillusionment in these. I've spoken to too many kids who dreamed of careers in this well into high school, often at cost to other academic paths, when their performance already clearly showed they weren't going this route. Sadly, it is hard to be strong about correcting kids because it is seen as not believing in them and not encouraging them.

As disillusioned as one might become in academia, the path one is on to get there tends to better align with setting students up for a successful career outside of it compared to the ones you listed.

[JuniperMesos]

The Teacher's Argument, Fame, 1980: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OVfOJ4Oi0c

Some kids who try to compete in a winner-take-most market, whether that's being a famous artist, performer, or academic, will succeed; most won't. No one who doesn't try will succeed. Someone is going to succeed. (Who wrote The Teacher's Argument? People who by definition made a famous musical, that's who.)

[CamperBob2]

The thing is, the cost of discouraging the wrong kid -- the one who ends up curing cancer or otherwise innovating in an extremely useful area -- is unbounded.

The cost of encouraging the ones who fail can be heavy, but at least it's finite.

And it's not always obvious if "their performance already clearly shows they aren't going this route." The Nobel archives are full of acceptance speeches that describe how the recipient got off to a slow or unpromising start.

[djoldman]

> The thing is, the cost of discouraging the wrong kid -- the one who ends up curing cancer or otherwise innovating in an extremely useful area -- is unbounded.

> The cost of encouraging the ones who fail can be heavy, but at least it's finite.

Assuming that every kid has a non-zero chance of being the "right kid," then discouraging only one child results in infinite cost and so every child should be encouraged to try to cure cancer...

[CamperBob2]

True if resources are infinite, but they aren't.

[59percentmore]

Those other fields are ones in which there is a lot of readily-available support to pursue them as hobbies, without going broke or being put on a three-letter-agency list somewhere.