University has let me down, again

Since April 2024, the perspective on my career has changed a lot: university has let me down, again. "Again" because I've never been fond of it in the first place, really... I almost never liked taking classes and, in general, lessons always felt improvised from the moment they started. On top of that, many professors lacked "theoretical backgrounds" (I studied computer engineering lol): I distinctly remember the time I asked for more formal documentation about Hamming's Parity Check. The answer to my question was: "formal proofs don't buy Porsches".

After these five years of dread, I really don't know why I expected that joining the university as a researcher would suit me. What I realized, though, was that I wanted to be a professor, because I thought that I could change how university was being perceived by students.

Being a researcher at Unimore is generally seen as something you wouldn't wish on your worst enemies: if you work with groups that juggle with AI you actually have the chance to publish something, but then you'd have to fight with questionable work ethic and practices, without mentioning that you'd probably end up working for some sort of military industrial complex-related project.
You like network security? Kernel development? Cloud native technologies? Distributed systems? Anything, really, that is not automotive-related stuff or AI? Well, you're in for a ride: prepare to do everything on your own, because nobody (or very few) actually cares! What you can expect from your research career is, instead, to work on "research projects" (in 99% of the cases there is no research involved) that companies subcontract to Unimore in the hope to extract some profit by leveraging cheap labour.

The academic career should also come with another warning: you'll be working in a highly for-profit, homophobic, racist, bigoted and sexist environment, which is not much of a deal for the average Italian student (because nobody that studies engineering really cares about these things, at least in Italy). The problem is that I care a lot about these things and I felt that working there was erasing my identity. Yes! Because even if I deeply care, I was too embarassed to admit that I "adhere to a certain lifestyle" (I'm queer), because I was being "jokingly" (as they labelled it) called "a faggot" by my coworkers when I said something about how jealous I was about an actress' looks (my BELOVED ANYA TAYLOR-JOY). I felt complicit with what they were saying, because I didn't have the nerve to step up. Hell, I also thanked the people that said such things in my thesis (I wrote it there), I praised the environment, because I felt that saying otherwise would have brought up "too much noise".

I really am tired of saying that I left the academic career because "I found out that the time commitment was too much for what I wanted to do in life". I quit because I was tired of pretending.
I was tired of being called a "faggot" (and of not having the audacity to say "YES LOVE!!!!"), I was tired of my coworkers calling women "irresponsible" when they talked about abortion, I was tired of them catcalling foreign female students, I was tired of hearing professors laughing when they saw women scoring low in exams (while actively partaking in "women in stem"-related projects). I was also tired of the laughing when talking about Israel bombing Gaza, maybe because someone was saying some sort of joke about it. I am tired of university being financed by Leonardo S.p.A and I am ashamed for the many links connecting the place where I studied with Israel, supporting their actions and actively partaking in a genocide.
I am tired of being told that "I cannot talk politics on the workplace", I am tired of seeing two PhD students being harshly criticized (and personally attacked) when refusing to partake in a project that had ties with the military industrial complex.

I'm grateful, though, for three people I met there (you know who you are), that have similar struggles, that never judged me and that know the "full story" (the one I'm writing about here). The only three people in that environment that know that I'm not heterosexual, that always heard me when I was telling something and that stood up for me. Yes, they stood up for me when I didn't, many times, so many I started standing up for myself (and themselves) when they weren't there.
Those three people are the same that told me that I made the right choice by abandoning the academic career, because I told them that I felt useless and not represented by the environment I wanted so bad to be a part of.
In the end, I found out that it wasn't the academic career that didn't fit me, it was the other way around. Somebody says that I should've been more "forgiving" and that "I should have waited more time, because I still had to 'acclimate' to the environment" (I was there for a year, because I also wrote my thesis there). I think that it's not normal for a person to undergo something like this, just to pursue the career they have chosen. One thing I know is that I acted too impulsively when deciding for my future: I jumped on the first ship available (the research fellowship) without asking around.

There are some good news, though: I'm starting a new job as a Senior DevOps engineer (in Modena!) on April 1st and I can't wait to see what the future has in store for me.

That's all for today,
until the next post!