[SunRescue] Leasing Employees

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Thu, 29 Mar 2001, bobk wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Mar 2001, User Bobkeys BSD Bob the old greybeard BSD freak wrote:
> 
> > > A lot of the people of this list seem to be sysadmins.  Personally, my
> > > goal in life is to either be a scientist or a developer or some
> > > combination of those two and possibly other fields.
> > 
> > Being a scientist has its ups and downs, too.   Years ago, science was
> > for the sake of science.  Now is it often for the sake of chasing bucks
> > (grants, etc.), has it has become a cutthroat bottom-line business.
> 
> I see this around here, the cut-throat nature of many of the younger
> scientists/professors at Harvard/MIT/BU is unbelievable. I have no first
> hand knowledge of it, but it sounds like the tenure track around here is a
> game of 'Survivor'. Not much REAL science gets done, it's all 'political
> science'.

I've heard how cut-throat big schools can be.  As people might have
noticed from my email address, I'm at a state school.  The computer
science program here has to graduate program.  I've known one of the
professors here for the past 7 years.  He has a strong research bent to
him and has brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars of research
funding.  He is the reason I'm here instead someplace like Penn State.
Anyway, it seems to me that going to a smaller school would be a good move
if I want to be an academic.  At this point in my life though, I'd 
probably too application oriented to stay in academia.  Maybe when I'm
older I'd be interested in becoming a professor.  Lot's of people tell me
that I'd be good at it.
 
> Still, it is directed research. Lately, I have been looking to scrape up
> enough money and but a big old house / building somewhere not too scarey
> and work on the big, old, mad & bad science stuff. Since my childhood, I
> have acquired the mad scientist laugh, and crazy hair (not balding
> yet). This desire to return to my own mad lab was brought about by my
> analysis of life unhappiness....I had got off the track of what originally
> had thrilled me. Now, repeat to myself at times, to keep on target:

Yeah, I try to fund my own equipment for research.  While my friends buy
monstrous hard drives and stuff the with warez, MP3s, and movies, I have
hundreds of megs of DEM files and an trying to get the disk space together
to download the visible human data set (54 gigs of data, just a small
little download over my DSL line). 
 
--
Joshua Boyd