One semester of graduate school is over. I am I suppose about 10% an engineer. A lower-case “p” of the Ph.D., perhaps.

The theme that has tied this first semester together, its golden thread, is experience hurts.

Not the gaining of experience—that is in fact the fun, the deepest pleasure to be gained from an education re-begun. But rather: having experience outside the track expected by one’s instructors is worse than having no experience at all.

The young green student is not expected to ask but why would anybody think to do it that way at all? for she has learned the tacit assumptions of her field in her undergraduate classes [of which I have none]. The real innocent does not rail at the systematic concealment of modern techniques for the sake of tried-and-true primitive ones, or the intentional masking of difficult problems and crucially precarious assumptions [noise? randomness? uncertainty? forget them now; they will only confuse the issue]. Nor at the paucity of crucial (even helpful) insights from other disciplines, from other silos, from far-off weirdos working in other buildings [We do not learn from data. We do not know here the revolution that has come upon statistics in the last 20 years.]. “You will all remember from your 373 classes that…” or “Create an AMPL model (you all know how to run AMPL, right?) that…” are statements of presumptive tracking [Such a shock to an instructor, to know the culture is so very local].

This is the way we do it here cannot be met successfully with This is the way we did it elsewhere. There is no facility for such a thing in higher education.

And: that is a good thing. For what better role is there for a graduate degree, than to make you want to push the System’s buttons right back? How else can it grow, than by instilling rage rather than complacency in its own constituents? Who will come to its aid, if not those who are made most intimately aware of its self-destructive shortcomings?

A professor whose class I did not take said to me the other day, “There are only two ways to learn a subject well: Take a good class in it, or teach a good class in it.”

There are at least two others he missed. One is: build a machine that does it. But that is beyond most of my peers, still, though I think I will be changing that quickly enough.

The other one he missed, well… it’s better demonstrated, I think.