Yes, there are a lot of constraints. They aren’t all hard constraints, but that’s life. I’m not going to put all my eggs into one basket, but I think I would be about as significantly unhappy if I can’t resolve career issues as if I can’t live within a 4-hour plane ride radius from my family.
Regarding the part-time job thing: it would be pretty hard to sustain myself financially that way. Like I said, I have additional goals like saving money for retirement/home ownership. I don’t see this as being orthogonal to doing a career I derive personal meaning from at all: being able to do this is a standard byproduct from most careers at the earnings levels that my master’s degree would provide. How do I pinpoint the subset of those careers that also satisfy the constraint that they pay me money to do mathematical research?
Yes, there are a lot of constraints. They aren’t all hard constraints, but that’s life. I’m not going to put all my eggs into one basket, but I think I would be about as significantly unhappy if I can’t resolve career issues as if I can’t live within a 4-hour plane ride radius from my family.
Regarding the part-time job thing: it would be pretty hard to sustain myself financially that way. Like I said, I have additional goals like saving money for retirement/home ownership. I don’t see this as being orthogonal to doing a career I derive personal meaning from at all: being able to do this is a standard byproduct from most careers at the earnings levels that my master’s degree would provide. How do I pinpoint the subset of those careers that also satisfy the constraint that they pay me money to do mathematical research?