Withdrawing from MIT
Retroactively posted January 28, 2005
After too many years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pursuing a Ph.D in astrophysics, I finally gave up on my thesis and left school as of today.
I still love the Institute as a whole: it's a wonderful community of really smart and interesting people. And I learned a lot, needless to say. But my research was going nowhere, and the whole situation was becoming unhealthy for me, so I had to cut my losses.
My graduate student status is still pending for up to five years, so there is a chance that I can find some other research group and start over again on another project, but in the mean time I'm planning to be unemployed for a while, hang around campus and sit in on some classes that look interesting (Shhh! Don't tell anyone!), and take care of some personal projects that have piled up over the years waiting for a rainy weekend or two.