C. Thi Nguyen

Some of the stories are like, some food is delicious and makes me feel good and other food is low in calories.

And it's really easy to grab onto that, right?

To that number.

It's really easy to track the success of losing weight, which is how like I made myself miserable for a period of my life.

It's really, I just went through this thing.

I mean, I...

There are moments where like, you know, for an academic like me, like you get a job offer and the job offers from a place that has a higher status ranking on this list of like what the status is of universities.

And you know, I knew that I would be less happy at this other place.

I knew that the place that I am at, which is lower ranked on this official external ranking, right?

I knew I was happier there.

I knew I loved my colleagues there more.

I knew I fit in better.

And it was still incredibly hard to hang on to that super quiet sense of like, I mean, it's not that subtle.

Like, I'm happier.

I love these people.

These are like, we work well together.

It's all.

And then the other side is something like, but that place is higher ranked.

And it's really funny because it's a little quick vision because no one, if you are an academic like me,

It's funny because academics like to pretend that they don't care about this kind of thing because they don't care less about money, but every academic knows the relative status of their various departments and publications, right?