The Worst Advice I Ever Received from a Professor
In which I think Dr. Shih was wrong.
June 10, 2019
Damn right I'm implying that the endless stairs from Super Mario 64 are in fact a secret metaphor for the constant pressure to ascend within the American workforce. Prove me wrong.
This past summer, Dr. Tom Shih, the head of Purdue University’s School of Aeronautics and Astronautics (you know, my school) stepped down. This makes me feel especially mean for writing a blog post about how I think he gave terrible advice, but I’ve been planning to write this for a while now and damn it, I’m going to do it.
Let me make one thing clear before I start: I love Dr. Shih. He is incredibly accomplished and hard-working and yet he never lets it stop him from being kind. He is constantly smiling and every time I’ve seen him he’s stopped to ask how I’m doing even though he perpetually has about five different meetings to get to. I am truly honored that I got to study in Purdue AAE while he was head.
However (after a paragraph like that, there has to be a however), a few months ago, I attended an event called “Talk AAE with Dr. Shih.” It’s a semi-regular event hosted by the AAE Student Advisory Council at Purdue in which students can sit down with Dr. Shih to ask him questions and discuss their concerns about the state of the department. The fact that Dr. Shih even takes the time to come to such events speaks to his virtues as a department head. But it was during this meeting, after a student had asked him if he had any general wisdom to share, that he issued what is, to me, one of the worst pieces of advice I have ever heard.
I don’t have the direct quote memorized, but it was something like this: “Never let yourself be satisfied. Because once you are satisfied – once you are comfortable where you are – that’s when you stop improving. You stop climbing, you stop reaching higher. So never be satisfied.”
It’s one of those things that, when you first hear it, sounds very insightful. After all, the basic idea behind it is pretty sound: if you are satisfied with where you are, you will stop trying to get somewhere better. It’s a principal that applies to pretty much anything, from revising a paper to finding a romantic partner to playing a video game. But in this context – an undergraduate engineering student asking an engineering professor for advice – it seemed that what was really being discussed was work. It seemed that what Dr. Shih was really saying in that moment was, “Once you are satisfied with your career, you stop trying to ascend within your industry.”
And, I mean, he was right. If you stroll into an entry-level job and decide that’s good enough for you, you probably aren’t going to put in the extra work to earn yourself a promotion. You won’t become a project manager or section manager or any of those things that look good on a business card. On that point, I completely agree with Dr. Shih, and I’m willing to bet most people do.
What I take issue with is what he said next. “Once you are satisfied, you will stop climbing…so don’t be satisfied.” If you ask me, that’s just plain awful advice. Never be satisfied? Never get comfortable? Never stop chasing promotions and accolades and pay raises? What a miserable way to live.
I’m not writing this to just rip apart Tom Shih and his literal decades of experience. My goal is not to sit here as a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate and pretend that I’m wiser than the head of one of the best Aerospace Engineering departments in the world. On this point, I feel that Dr. Shih is wrong, but he is far from the only person saying things like this.
There is a very prevalent idea in the culture of engineering, and I gather the American work world at large, that you should never be satisfied with your career. You should never stop climbing into better jobs and positions. I’m no visionary for pointing this out, because I’d bet pretty much anyone who’s grown up in the United States is aware of it. It's an idea that is very good for the economy. Once you make money, the best thing you can do from a capitalist standpoint is start looking for ways to use that money to make more money. Similarly, once you have a good job, capitalism urges you to immediately start looking for ways to be more productive in order to get an even better job. This incentivizes everyone to be as productive as they can, which in turn spurs innovation and grows the economy. Woohoo.
The thing is, while this might be great for GDP, I think it can be pretty harmful to the mental health of individual people. Again, I'm no visionary here. There are countless movies about an American protagonist (usually a white parent in an urban setting) working too hard to earn promotions and destroying their life. These movies typically end with the protagonist learning to be happy with where they are, appreciate their friends and family, and stop trying so damn hard.
But despite how visible this problem is – and despite how much pop culture pretends to show us that it is, indeed, a problem – it is, in my experience, still very much there. I feel like half the advice I’ve received throughout college, from both professors and just more experienced students, is about how, if I take a certain path, I’ll never “go anywhere”. I won’t get to be in charge of things and I won’t get to make the big decisions. It’s the reason I should go to grad school, build out my network, put in extra hours, and so on.
For some time, I really believed it. I was going to get a Master’s degree, maybe even a PhD. I was going to attend every networking event I could find. I was going to keep climbing and climbing, earning promotion after promotion, and never be satisfied. And this isn’t to say that everyone who wants those things is stupid. Some people genuinely want to make their whole life about continuously improving their career, and good for them. But I worry that there are a lot of people, including my younger self, that hear these sorts of messages and think that they should feel guilty for just being happy with what they have. There’s this really toxic notion that it’s a sin to stop climbing, and if you do, you’re a failure.
Today, I hate that. I hate everything about that. Because the truth is, when I stop focusing on what I’m “supposed to” be doing and start thinking about what I actually want, I don’t want to go to grad school. I think networking events are overrated. I never want to have a job where I’m expected to regularly work more than forty hours a week. My only career goal is to be a really good engineer. I don’t want to be any sort of project manager or, god forbid, something with even more prestige. I just want to come in, do my job well for eight hours a day, five days a week, and then go home.
Maybe some people see that as lazy. Maybe, to some people, a life like that would be pathetic and worthless. But I don’t think most people actually believe that. It might be naïve, but I’d be willing to bet that there are a lot of people out there who, deep down, just want to do a job and them come home and live their life. And if we could just stop listening so much to Adam Smith's ghost — if we could learn to ignore all these voices telling us that we’re failures because we’re not “going anywhere,” whatever the hell that means — maybe that could be enough. Maybe we could be satisfied.