A confused and in-progress collection of thoughts.

It must be the summer of 2011 or so. I am in front of high-school commission, and I have just taken my oral exam. Before letting me go, they ask the ritual question: “What will you do next?”. I remember that was a huge question for my entire last year.

I had been terrified by the end of the high-school, as a place where I had maximum freedom, and also enstablished good relations (some of them are still quite alive right now). For some time I thought that the life was almost over: what would come next, would be a life of burden, work, and in completly new environments maybe far from home. The major of that school was Economy, and I did that because I expected to interrupt my studies after it. But during the last year I started to get more information, and to understand that many things were still possible.

Well, to come back to the question from the committee, I had a quite precise answer: “For the 60% I will enroll for Computer Science Bachelor. 30% I would go with psicology. The last 10% is to take one year in the army, because I would work in the online fraud squad of the Police”. The whole the committee invited me to take the Computer Science path, and I also think was the most sensible choice.

After more than ten years, now I am a Researcher in Computer Science, but the interest around psicology remained. And honestly, it wasn’t that difficult since for the whole time I’ve encountered any sort of psicological distress. From the personal sphere to the professional one – in myself and in people around me.

A list of references, and keep an on going thinking around this topic:

[1]: At a given point the stress might become unsustainable.

[2]: Being a postdoc is not simpler, and I actually think is a critical passage in which many good reasercher may follow different paths

[3]: And in fact, looking for postdocs is a real challenge

[1]: Postdocs under pressure: ‘Can I even do this any more?’, Nature 2020

[2]: Falling behind: postdocs in their thirties tire of putting life on hold, Nature 2023

[3]: Lab leaders wrestle with paucity of postdocs, Nature 2022