Last week and this week, I attend conferences about International Finance here in Cambridge. This has led me to think a lot about whether a career in Academia is really what I want. Certainly, as a Phd-Student life is very nice, you get to travel, meet interesting people, attend conferences, get invited to nice dinners like last night.

On the other hand, most of your work has only relevance within a small community of people. There is no immediate feedback and you evolve only slowly. For instance, at these conferences, even if somebody talks utter nonsense, people are very nice about and say “That was a very interesting contribution”. I am fed up with that, I want people to argue and discuss, and say “That was rubbish because… ”

The same with academic papers: the first skill of publishing papers is finding a professor who wants to publish an article under his name with you, because big names will get you into big journals.

The second skill of publishing is making reference to the big kids in the playground, those authors which drive a certain paradigm in science, in the hope that you get noticed by them and cited in one of their articles. It is almost like blogging if you are out for a high pagerank, you link alpha-bloggers to catch their attention and get a backlink from them.

The third thing everybody seems to think in academia is that articles contribute to the evolution in science because they pick up where other people stopped their argumentation. I am not sure if that is the case, often they simply reaffirm a certain paradigm and very few scholars manage to link different schools of thoughts.

The final thing in academia is the obedience to hierarchy, but that is probably a human phenomenon. If a professor says rubbish or clouds his arguments in a certain lingo, then everybody say “Nice thought!”. If an undergraduate student says the same thing people will think he is an arrogant tit.