Early-Career Travails

As an early-career academic, I have started finding it difficult to have political discussions with people who hold strong opinions. Last weekend, I was getting a lift back to Bristol from a fellow Meet-up member who was very excited when he discovered that I was a heterodox economics PhD student. We had a conversation in which he grew more excited by the moment and me increasingly uncomfortable. It's not that he knew nothing about economics, but he definitely didn't know enough to justify the strength of his convictions. This may sound pompous but I feel many if not most social science researchers don't hold strong opinions because when you engage with a topic very closely the gray areas are far larger than the black and white ones. Or maybe it is more typical of young academics like me, who are still awestruck by the breadth and complexities of their topics. Maybe more seasoned academics have stronger opinions, although if you are wedded to your opinions you tend not to be open to others, which doesn't  make you a great supervisor, for instance. If you know all the answers, or even all the ways to get there, what's the point in supervising someone who is trying to find answers. Supervision becomes a vanity project.

Maybe impatience is also typical of young academics. I attended a research seminar today which made me feel like pulling out my hair. The presentation,which was made by an associate professor, was of the standard of a mediocre high school essay. It didn't engage with the academic literature at all, suggested a simplistic and vague solution  to a complex problem without any justification and was made with the supreme confidence that only extreme ignorance brings. But my senior colleagues were engaging with the presenter and trying to give her useful feedback. They didn't seem as perturbed as me at all. Maybe that's just the arrogance of a young academic. To assume that someone who doesn't have an academic style has nothing important to say and should be ignored. 

The presenter was also from a poor country like me and I was wondering whether this was the standard I would be judged by too. And whether I should be disappointed or relieved that so little was expected of me. That my identity would entitle me to patronizing kid-glove treatment.