Hey Veeky Forums, you probably don't remember me...

Hey Veeky Forums, you probably don't remember me, but five years ago I made a post here about how you guys changed my life.

I went to college for a pretty run-of-the-mill liberal arts program, and (unsurprisingly) I was living paycheck to paycheck after I graduated. I worked two jobs to make ends meet, including a graveyard shift at a gas station for over a year. I was poor, I was exhausted, I was depressed, and I had nothing to look forward to.

... then, in January of 2010, Veeky Forums added a new board called Veeky Forums.

When Veeky Forums was first created it was an amazing place. Every day there were dozens of new and interesting discussions - physics students arguing over the finer points of relativity, engineers brainstorming new projects, researchers collaborating on ideas for papers, undergrads asking for advice and grad students sharing their knowledge and experience. Spending time on this board rekindled an interest in science I'd almost forgotten I'd ever had... and so, a few months later I took the biggest, craziest risk of my life and went back to school to study physics. I want to stress that I'm not one of those guys who 'wanted to be a scientists ever since I was three and a half years old' - I was terrible at science in high school, I'm still terrified of math, and if it hadn't turned out that I was actually pretty decent at doing physics I'd probably be back at the gas station working overnights.


An hour ago, I got a call from the chair of my department congratulating me on passing the Doctoral Exam and being admitted into the PhD program. They want to meet with me next week to go over the project I'm pitching for my dissertation, and at this point I'm basically one class away from being ABD. I don't know if anyone from the early days is still a regular here, but if you guys are out there, I just wanted to say thank you - you guys inspired me to take a huge risk and it changed my life.


Stay gold, Veeky Forums.

sweet blog post can you tell it again

Care to share more information?

Congrats. It's a shame Veeky Forums sucks now

Good job user! Go make your mark.

What did you study?

Good job user. Now spread your wings and fly, and let this forsaken place die to the stampeding hordes of millenials.

How did you fund it? Asking your parents?

Physics. I'm working in laboratory plasmas for my PhD work.

Loans, a few small grants I applied for over the years, and work - I kept working nearly full-time while I was an undergrad.

Your thoughts on quantum mechanics ?

It's horrible.

Neat. I was here atleast five years ago when Veeky Forums was much cooler and didn't have science denying conservative retards constantly making troll threads.

That is really inspirational. Thanks for sharing m8.

theres a difference between science and "climate science"

Good job user, now this place is cancer.

Veeky Forums has always had troll threads. The difference was Veeky Forumsentists used to have a lot more patience and would frequently turn troll threads into education or awesome threads.

Veeky Forums once turned a troll thread about whether you could cook a steak by dropping it from orbit into an intense, 300+ post discussion about the idea. There were anons doing calculations for optimal reentry trajectories, anons figuring out how to minimize ablation of the outer layers, there were even people taking drag and second order effects into account to figure out if a steak would rotate as it fell through the upper atmosphere so it could cook evenly. That's fucking awesome!

Veeky Forums needs to be less bitchy and more awesome. Stop whining and complaining all the time. If there's too many shit threads, make more non-shit threads or come up with ways to make the shit threads less shit.

And those types of troll threads would be fun.

But instead we have political bullshit troll threads that just parrot Trump's minions' ignorance and stupidity.

I get enough of that irl.

Reach out to them. Trump supporters aren't unreasonable people. Christ, I've got a whole condensed matter group at my department full of them.

Most of them are decent folks and they're usually more than willing to hear people out on matters of science and technology. Sure, they're stubborn as mules when it comes to shit like climate change. But tell a /pol/ster you think "carbon credits" are a shit idea and that we should invest more in nuclear power and alternative energies and they'll be all ears. Start a discussion on space exploration and they'll hang on your every word

To all those "it used to be better" posters:

Just three more years 'till the current user base graduates.

Congrats user!

Nice, user. I'm kind of in a similar situation. How old were you when you started physics?

Congrats!
I've been coming here on and off over the last year, and as a newfag I'm always inspired by this place. I never finished linear algebra or thermo because I dropped out of school, but every time I come here I feel like I'm inching closer to picking math and science back up. I say that as someone who has made plenty of money but feels like he's squandered his intellect on prosaic things. It makes me genuinely happy to know that there are people out there who really needed this place and found success from it.
Good on you, Veeky Forumsguy.

subscribed

nah jk, congratulations lad

I do agree with one thing tho
>When Veeky Forums was first created it was an amazing place.

It truly was an amazing place, it was basically scientific old/b/. It had enough post volume to sustain itself and its memes were actually quite funny, also housed a lot of autism like the underwater minecraft spergelord server, the schizo EK, etc. And when you got bored of all that bullshit, you could actually have constructive discussions at the same time.

And then came the mod faggot who ran this place into the ground with his KC-tier no fun allowed policy. The "inane trolling garbage" faggot. There was a picture showing a drastic drop in post activity during 2012 because of him, which is continuing up to today even if the site is actually growing. That taught me how important it is to keep moderation on a forum to a minimum, because those people have no idea what they're doing. Imagine what Veeky Forums would've been if it wasn't for him and actually grew like other boards did.

>the schizo EK

Whoah, I forgot about EK. I remember most people hated her. I vaguely remember thinking that she wasn't that bad, and people were just being assholes to her since she was a namefag.

I forgot about being banned too. I think I got banned a couple times. I just used Tor because I thought the moderator was a prick.

Then I decided I should be studying for exams anyway and being banned was probably a good thing. That's the last time I came back until fairly recently.

you're not an oldfag unless you remember when the board used to be called:
Veeky Forums - Religion & Homework

I do remember that. But that wasn't really a long time ago. Not for me anyway.

Congrats, now you get to realize how shitty the job market for your PhD is.

good job user :)

You don't even know his specialization.

Just an undergrad spouting something he read on the Internet, nothing to see here

>I'm kind of in a similar situation. How old were you when you started physics?
22. I'll turn 30 later this year. My (optimistic) goal is to work myself to death and try to finish my dissertation by next Summer. I've already been doing a lot of theoretical and computational work on a project, and the plan now is to figure out which of the effects I've been looking at could I realistically build an experiment to measure.

One surprising thing is how many non-trad students I've run into between undergrad and grad school. People my age, people older, people from liberal arts backgrounds, people from engineering backgrounds, people from military backgrounds, etc etc. If you're thinking of trying something like I did, I wish you the best of luck, but be prepared for a lot of hard work.


I've already got plans for a job lined up. There are a couple of small colleges up around where I grew up - all small, teaching schools in rural towns. They're decent schools and respected in the state, but because of their size, location, and limited research funding they've struggled to attract PhD's in the past, but they're exactly the kind of place I'm looking for. I've got enough connections to know at least two of the schools are planning to post job openings for qualified physics instructors in the next year or two, and those same connections should be able to help a little with securing a position.


Laboratory plasmas and plasma diagnostics.

I'm legit happy to see an user on the path to making it. Living the physics dream. Makes me wish I had gotten an education earlier