Quitting astronomy

There's a recent article I read about quitting. It's an interesting topic, especially given the taboo associated with it in our high-achieving, success-driven school. There's a certain line  - it's a podcast - that really, really stood out to me. Steven D. Levitt is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago (woah) and Stephan J. Dubner is a journalist writer for the NYTimes, Time, The New Yorker, and elsewhere.

LEVITT: I try to talk my grad students into quitting all the time.
DUBNER: Quitting grad school?
LEVITT: Quitting grad school, yeah. A lot of people — you make choices without a lot of information and then you get new information. And quitting is often the right thing to do. I try to talk my kids into quitting soccer, baseball if they’re not good at it. I mean, I’ve never had any shame in quitting. I’ve quit economic theory, I quit macroeconomics. I’ve pretty much quit everything that I’m bad at.

Per this.

I guess I'm evaluating this in terms of myself - knowing that there are a lot of people who are better at this, at astronomy and physics and that I'm bad at this. Not terribly bad, just not sparkling good.

This is quite relevent to our discussion, I guess, about our future careers in astronomy. These guys, who, in my mind and from what I know of their work in Freakonomics, seem quite well informed from an economic standpoint in decision making and the validity of choices. 

It’s something that Stella Adler, the great acting coach, used to say: Your choice is your talent. So choosing the right path, the right project, the right job or passion or religion — that’s where the treasure lies; that’s where the value lies. So if you realize that you’ve made a wrong choice — even if already you’ve sunk way too much cost into it — well, I’ve got one word to say to you, my friend. Quit.

Same source.

So. To quit or not to quit? That seems to be the question.

Melodie's friend from college quit physics. And she does seem very happy.

Ah. A question with an answer only quitters know. I wouldn't know if it was the right decision until far into the future, and even then I'd not be sure.

For now, I am perfectly content with staying with something I know I am bad at, just because it's too early to tell if I'll get better at it. Chances are that your talent may be hidden in the beginning.

P.S. This is kinda number 3 part 1 for our project, which I did with Nathan and Daniel and Eric.