Osheroff on Studying at Caltech and elsewhere

Not_quite_old
Wed, 13 Sep 2006 11:17:17 +0000

I don’t think this has been posted elsewhere, but Nobel laureate Osheroff’s 1997 address has a lot to say about the Caltech experience, about feeling burnout, about carefully choosing your area of work/study, about matching your ambitions to your life’s work.

http://www.usc.edu/CSSF/History/1997/Keynote.html

Two quotes to entice you to read the entire thing:

“I only applied to Stanford and Caltech. Stanford because it seemed like a good school and because I had an older brother there. I applied to Caltech only because I had heard it was the hardest place in the country to be admitted, and wanted to see if I could get in.”

“By my junior year at Caltech I saw physics as nothing but endless problem sets, and began to suffer from the burnout which comes when you cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel, and even suspect that there is no end.”

In tandem with Ben’s advice posts, this should be of real interest to Techers and to those interested in academic careers.

I especially like it because I believe that the real value of Caltech was that it gave me insight into who I was, what I wanted to be, and how those goals matched up to the research world as it really is, and not how we tend to see it from a high school/outsider perspective. By getting a close look at the intense life of the mind at the very top it forces you to ask what you’re willing to sacrifice to work in the areas that interest you and whether that interest is enough to sustain you.

Many ambitious students at some of the best places never get a chance to see that world and therefore don’t have a fair idea of what a research career entails when applying to grad school.