Yesterday morning I was up early and trying to do some sort of work, but I just kept thinking about various people - sometimes I like to just sit and do that, think about people who I know, especially people who I haven't seen in a while. What are they doing? What are their lives like now? Are they happy, wherever they are? I guess in particular, I think most about the people who just graduated last year or two years ago, and it occurs to me how much I truly miss them. So I tried searching for various peoples' blogs, because I'm really bad at checking blogs and always forget the URL. Luckily, Nicola had an easy website to remember, but I didn't realize it was actually her blog until yesterday, haha. Reading her blog really made me think - I actually had some of the same thoughts myself about life after graduation. After we're done with MIT, what next? I had always thought it would be awfully noble to be a biology professor and spend the rest of my life with a huge lab and papers to read and grants to write, and I thought I actually would be happy. In fact, I still think that I would be really happy that way, but the problem is that I don't love one particular subject in particular. If I was truly into my work and really wanted to just keep on learning just for learning's sake - I think that would be awesome. But (for me at least) there's really no point of doing that and going through grad school if it's a subject that I'm just lukewarm about. I often feel like professors are one of the few types of people who truly enjoy their work - or maybe that's just here at MIT, but whatever it is, it's amazing. Either that, or grad students who actually really like their work and want to go and become professors afterwards. It seems to me that most grad students I talk to are just like "Yea, I'm just going to go straight to industry afterwards," and actually, that's perfectly fine - I'm going into industry anyways. But to actually know that you want to be a professor and that you want to do academia the rest of your life - I really think that's something special.