Viva Academia!
Since I was young, I've loved to take things apart and learn how they work. From this early time, I knew I wanted to take after my dad and be an engineer. Now that I'm wallowing in knowledge at Ohio University, I am finding a new passion, teaching. I love to tell people things, almost as much as I like to be the center of attention. It's so rewarding to teach people things they don't know. I want everyone to know what I know just as much as I want to know everything they know. The spread of ideas is orgasmic to me.
In light of this new-found desire, I find I would be doing myself a disservice by leaving higher education after a brief 4 years. I am already certain that moving on to the corporate engineering world would very much disagree with me. The last thing I want to do is become a faceless number working for some massive engineering conglomeration like GE or Lockheed Martin. I still want to invent things, but working for companies like these, I would be forced to sign Intellectual Property Agreements. These contracts would basically forfeit all my ideas to the company, so they would have any and all rights to said intellectual property. Therefore, if I were to single-handedly invent the next pacemaker or something, the company would reap all the benefits of my hard work, and perhaps give me a modest bonus (if I'm lucky).
So I come to what I do want to do: Teach. I'm not talking elementary education, but teaching at a higher level. I will not graduate with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and call it quits, but I will move all the way to the top: PhD! I, of course, haven't figured the details of this out, but I finally know what I want to do, and things are seeming much less stressful as a result. I am going to be an electrical engineering professor! The thought of it excites me greatly. Not only will I have the pleasure of teaching people my age all about status registers, Fourier analysis, and Dirac delta response; I will also have the freedom and resources to experiment and discover in an intellectually free environment. In a University, anything I create will be my own, and I will reap the benefits of patenting my own inventions. I am truly excited about this, and it makes more sense the more I think about it. If you want to be intellectually free, don't enter the corporate world, get into academia!
In light of this new-found desire, I find I would be doing myself a disservice by leaving higher education after a brief 4 years. I am already certain that moving on to the corporate engineering world would very much disagree with me. The last thing I want to do is become a faceless number working for some massive engineering conglomeration like GE or Lockheed Martin. I still want to invent things, but working for companies like these, I would be forced to sign Intellectual Property Agreements. These contracts would basically forfeit all my ideas to the company, so they would have any and all rights to said intellectual property. Therefore, if I were to single-handedly invent the next pacemaker or something, the company would reap all the benefits of my hard work, and perhaps give me a modest bonus (if I'm lucky).
So I come to what I do want to do: Teach. I'm not talking elementary education, but teaching at a higher level. I will not graduate with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and call it quits, but I will move all the way to the top: PhD! I, of course, haven't figured the details of this out, but I finally know what I want to do, and things are seeming much less stressful as a result. I am going to be an electrical engineering professor! The thought of it excites me greatly. Not only will I have the pleasure of teaching people my age all about status registers, Fourier analysis, and Dirac delta response; I will also have the freedom and resources to experiment and discover in an intellectually free environment. In a University, anything I create will be my own, and I will reap the benefits of patenting my own inventions. I am truly excited about this, and it makes more sense the more I think about it. If you want to be intellectually free, don't enter the corporate world, get into academia!
2 Comments:
UPDATE DAMN YOU
It's Alyssa...
I had the same thought on teaching higher education--and I'll be damned if I didn't go for it, too. Good choice, man--It's a long road, but there needs to be more taking it!
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