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11/18/2005: "goals?"
i asked people in my program what their goals were.
here follow 3 examples of things i don't think are goals:
1) the only two women at the table told me their goals were to "pass prelims and then have a baby". i told them that having a baby isn't a goal, i think my reason for thinking it's not a goal is that it's normal enough (most people who make it to the relevant age end up reproducing).
2) however, someone else told me that they wanted to "live a good life". this seemed a non-goal as well, because it's not clearly defined, includes no plan of action, and it's not obvious that it's been met (and how does one measure living a good life over an extended period of time? economists and health economists might have some vulgar measures, but those remain crude, and what i need here is refinement, not an arbitraty reduction of complexity imposed so we can make the problem more tractable).
3) yet another person (actually, one of the future moms from above, but i don't want to rag on her) told me that her goal was to "do research". that doesn't seem like a goal for reasons similar to the "living a good life" "goal". like "living a good life", it's something over a period of time, so it's hard to measure success. second, and this seems more interesting, one presumably would want to do research because one cared about something else. maybe there are only two categories: to advance some field of knowledge itself (oncology and clown-tipping are two fields that immediately come to mind) out of a love of the field and the myriad problems is poses or to gain some sort of acknowledgment by a community that one cares about that one is indeed a smart/useful/whatever person. those don't seem mutually exclusive at all. so "doing research" doesn't seem a goal as much as a symptom of a larger, underlying goal that would be of more interest.