Fitting into a place where I’m using as much of my skill set as possible, is the goal.
This is one of the harder problems out there, in my experience. Many extremely intelligent people spin their wheels on this one for years. Some indefinitely.
Especially for a person who is talented at inferential or analytical problem-solving, looking for acceptable institutions first may be a case of putting the cart before the horse. Those places- the universities, research groups, etc.- tend to be looking for researchers that think of the institution as a tool, not as a goal. This is at least partly because it’s very hard to quantify successful research, and they’re looking for assurances that work will continue. If you value ‘being a member of the Center for Advanced Studies’, then you can succeed at that goal without actually doing any work.
Imagine a dissertation for yourself, the multi-year project that you would be working on during your time in the Platonic University where everyone is accepted and everything is perfect and you study exactly what you want to study. What is that project? What can you do, right now, to pursue that project? What factors will get in your way, and what steps do you need to take to minimize or eliminate those factors? If you can’t picture one just yet, that’s fine. Talk with your professors if you want; not about grades but about what their own research is, and why they care about it. Ask a lot of professors about that; they almost always think that their work is important, and are happy to describe it. Get a sense of the conversation as it currently exists, and then find a niche that interests you.
In other words, don’t look for a pleasant societal position as its own end- just do the thing, become more skilled in thing-doing, and grab help when you need it. The more you do the thing, the more you will quite naturally build a positive reputation among a widening network, and this will grant you access to a surprising number of institutions as you need them. But at the end of the day, it is the privilege of the researcher to encounter a reality that is not built by social consensus. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to break your back accumulating social status markers like grades and test scores just to convince somebody really respectable to tell you what questions to ask.
This is one of the harder problems out there, in my experience. Many extremely intelligent people spin their wheels on this one for years. Some indefinitely.
Especially for a person who is talented at inferential or analytical problem-solving, looking for acceptable institutions first may be a case of putting the cart before the horse. Those places- the universities, research groups, etc.- tend to be looking for researchers that think of the institution as a tool, not as a goal. This is at least partly because it’s very hard to quantify successful research, and they’re looking for assurances that work will continue. If you value ‘being a member of the Center for Advanced Studies’, then you can succeed at that goal without actually doing any work.
Imagine a dissertation for yourself, the multi-year project that you would be working on during your time in the Platonic University where everyone is accepted and everything is perfect and you study exactly what you want to study. What is that project? What can you do, right now, to pursue that project? What factors will get in your way, and what steps do you need to take to minimize or eliminate those factors? If you can’t picture one just yet, that’s fine. Talk with your professors if you want; not about grades but about what their own research is, and why they care about it. Ask a lot of professors about that; they almost always think that their work is important, and are happy to describe it. Get a sense of the conversation as it currently exists, and then find a niche that interests you.
In other words, don’t look for a pleasant societal position as its own end- just do the thing, become more skilled in thing-doing, and grab help when you need it. The more you do the thing, the more you will quite naturally build a positive reputation among a widening network, and this will grant you access to a surprising number of institutions as you need them. But at the end of the day, it is the privilege of the researcher to encounter a reality that is not built by social consensus. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to break your back accumulating social status markers like grades and test scores just to convince somebody really respectable to tell you what questions to ask.