For those playing along at home, I’m back from my sojourn Down South.
It was a bit of an odd trip. I left graduate school fairly early — three years between my Bachelor’s and Ph.D, which is really rather short — at least in part because I could; I’d gotten an early start on a research project, and then more or less let momentum carry me through. I’d occasionally regretted finishing so fast, since by the time I left I’d actually settled in fairly well.
The regrets were only occasional because, well, it’s graduate school, and thus ephemeral by nature. (Well, if you’re doing it right. There were a couple of tenured
grad students around my old department, and I suspect you can find the same in almost any school, but that’s not what I’m talking about.) I could have stuck around for another year or even two, but it probably wouldn’t have accomplished what I’d have wanted to accomplish; that is, I’d become comfortable in my milieu, but the milieu itself wasn’t a fixed sort of thing.
It’s this latter insight that was really driven home during my trip down this past weekend. The small, coherent community that I’d been a part of doesn’t really exist any more, or at least it doesn’t exist there anymore. And, being that we’re academics, we’re all pretty scattered around these days; it’s not nearly the same as my (several) undergraduate socail circles, which for the most part still exist in some form or another in whichever city that particular collection stayed in or migrated to.