The analogy seems to be like learning classical music (like piano or violin) after as an adult.
You learn the basics like scales and chords to build and build to modern jazz.
But if you’re an adult, life is too short, just go straight to a few pieces you like. Get a simplified version and learn the bits you need from there from a teacher.
These stories are common in math, e.g. these recently happened to me, a lowly mathematician:
1) Two and a half years with no reply from a journal (not even to emails I sent that I'd like to retract the paper so I could send it somewhere else). Then suddenly they tell me the paper is accepted.
2) One year with no reply. Then, my "anxious" collaborator sends them countless emails and gets redirected from person to person and finally an editor tells us that they decided almost immediately to reject our paper but they didn't tell us because "they hate giving bad news".
These were not top journals like Annals, but decent, prestigious ones, from whom you'd expect some professionalism.
Indeed, same reason I don't usually go to Indian restaurants, I can just make the same thing at home with much fewer costs. The only ones I'd go to are specialized or well known ones, such as some South Indian places I've been to recently.
What's even more interesting is no one actually makes butter or tikka chicken at home, or has a tandoor to do so, but Indians also don't eat it outside generally, instead it's mainly foreigners who like those dishes.
I feel like similar to the chinese, indian home cooking and indian restaurant cooking are very different; I can try my hand at a lot of restaurant style recipes at home but it's not what I usually cook or what I grew up eating at home.
I'm assuming by tikka chicken you mean "chicken tikka masala"? Because chicken tikka is something my family made all the time growing up. I still make it at home often. That's mostly been with a charcoal grill and not a traditional tandoor, but like you said, most people don't have tandoors at home. That's restaurant food.
I don't know how relevant it is, but my wife and I like to eat out at places where the dish/cuisine is something that we simply cannot make at home. If it is too similar, my wife will sigh "we could have just made this at home".
Look, I'm not from the US, I'm guessing maybe the pay for tradesmen isn't as high as in Australia. But what you're suggesting as a comparison involves a pretty high degree of variance and odds are stacked against you. You need to get into a good PhD program, get funding, compete against everyone else doing those things and so on.
The path I outlined in my OP is a _very_ common path that people take in Australia and not at all unrealistic. The barrier to entry is drastically lower, and the access to funding/capital is far easier.
Reminds me of an old 1990s/2000s post from News of the Weird [0] about endowed chairs with funny names, such as an XYZ Corn Chair at some midwestern US university, or an NEC/ Nippon Electric Chair at some Japanese university.
[0]: www.uexpress.com/oddities/news-of-the-weird/archives , can't find the exact citation.
You learn the basics like scales and chords to build and build to modern jazz.
But if you’re an adult, life is too short, just go straight to a few pieces you like. Get a simplified version and learn the bits you need from there from a teacher.
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