When I grow up, I want to be a doctor! Or mad scientist! Something like that.
— A young and impressionable Ahmet Akkoç
Find me on https://scholar.social/@AhmetAkkoc
What is Academia?
Academia can loosely be defined as an educational environment where you are expected to contribute to the gain of knowledge. Academia is thus contrasted from traditional schooling, where the student is expected to learn certain things rather than to discover. In most countries, academia begins with postgraduate education and it continues from there.
Most doctors or scientists identify as ‘academic’s. And growing up I wanted to be either, so you could say I wanted to become an academic. Whatever that means.
Historically, being an academic meant holding a position in a university. But nowadays with the rise of research groups in the private sector it’s not uncommon for researchers in companies such as Google or ByteDance to proclaim theirselves academics.
To learn more about Academia, I would highly recommend the Academia Stack Exchange.
Why I am disillusioned with Academia
The ideal of having knowledge gained through shared contribution is a great ideal. Even just “pay to learn” sounds like heaven. But in practice, Academia is littered with Red Tape, Gatekeeping and inexplicable Elitism. In spite of this, there is in Academia a certain pride that this order is necessary to maintain scientific integrity. Yet today Academia is an engine without wheels. It has long ceased to be the disseminator of its own knowledge.
All the while, the role of scientists and science communicators has been largely taken over by podcasters and influencers. Names like Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate have defined this generation’s understanding of the world through their (very often mistaken) interpretation of facts. Yes and those are all men, because casual sexism is apparently in, now.
After failures in getting my own research published academically, either due to stringent submission/acceptance criteria or mismatch in values, I decided to quit my studies after graduating from my Master’s in Data Science. I went full-time in my part-time job and I am now a part of research and open-source software outside of Academia.
For anything outside of my job, I have cast away prestige and now pursue student journals and blogs for publishing my research work. In fact you can find an assortment of my research work on my Notion page. I am also trying to expand to Social Media, since that seems to be the big battleground nowadays. But of course video editing takes a lot of time, so I continue to mostly write.