The 1 needs to be a capital letter ‘i’ I believe

Palantir do those

granted as obvious. Often I was struck that the value seemed most meaningful and accessible to students who were precluded from following their interest due to 'defined-by-the-hierachy' 'relevance' making those choices for them.

'lethality' or similar. Being continually challenged on that point does have considerable benefit in that it requires you to constantly test, sharpen or re-define ways of articulating why thinking has value in ways that doesn't come naturally/frequently in some HE contexts where it is taken for

Circumstances categorically shape all our research. Who feels confident stridently attempting something long-term and challenging? Perhaps some do, but I would offer that the scarring effects upon how a significant cohort of academics relate to their work & field will be quite pronounced

One person from my cohort other than me has one I believe. I guess my own version of believing there was a better time is a dim sense talking to people that the ‘bounce’ you mention occurred in 2010-12

Yeah I was guilty of just that. I remember the PhD coordinator saying ‘many of you won’t work in academia’ and thinking ‘oh wow all those poor people that won’t make it. Won’t be me!’ Immense naivety/hubris of course

Really makes one wonder about some of the discourses around merit and agency that are propagated around funded PhDs, postdocs etc

Which is not really the case for a great many immensely talented people. I applied for over 100 jobs to produce 2 interviews and 1 fixed term offer in 2013 and that was possible due to a capacity to live with parents for a year whilst holding a part time museum role that didn’t pay enough to live

In certain respects the myth that it was ‘kinda OK’ in the last little while is even more pernicious as it holds the tantalizing prospect that one might get through OK with some endeavor and luck

I don’t dispute that things were *somewhat* less severe in 2013-14. Talking to ECRs it is interesting though that there does appear to be some folk wisdom that me as a person who has existed within the academy since that time experienced a time when getting. PhD = getting a job