« You will like any subject once you get to know enough about it. »
this is a really important observation — good attitude will do wonders to your motivation for research.
this is a really important observation — good attitude will do wonders to your motivation for research.
And unfortunately false, as I've witnessed on multiple occasions. Don't underestimate mental health problems in academia, telling people that everything will fall into place if they just keep pushing can lead to bad outcomes.
Having dropped out of my PhD due to - mostly - mental health reasons, I don't fully understand the preoccupation with the mental health situation in academia. Not that it is not bad, but is it worse than in most other occupations? Or is it just that academia is mostly populated by people of at minimum middle class upbringing who are not supposed to experience hardship of any kind?
Makes me wonder, is there a name for that sort of reasoning where one person asserts 'A is associated with B', and the response tries to turn it into an argument about !A? I guess it's not a strawman, but I'm sure the philosophers have come up with a name for it.
Academia is the worst environment I've ever worked in, worse than any industry job I've ever had whether blue collar or white collar.
There are other paths where self-discipline and self-motivation are important, like being an independent consultant, but those are generally not considered "normatively standard" paths for people to take.
(My personal experience with academia was great. I was genuinely interested in the topics, had great colleagues and a great advisor. It probably helped that it was in maths, where there is money for decent pay but no lab work with which PhD students are routinely burdened.)
Psychological (indeed, medical) criteria are not necessarily all they're cracked up to be.