TRANSCRIPT — Deep Questions with Cal Newport, Episode 337 ("Hacking Remote Work")
Aired January 27, 2025. Question segment begins at 49:40.
Source / full clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmoIIkm0gJc&t=2980s

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MY QUESTION (read on air by producer Jesse):
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"I'm a PhD student in aerospace engineering at UCLA and I'm considering dropping
out after three and a half years. My goal was to be an astronaut. My PhD topic is
okay. I'm overwhelmed and I have financial troubles. It'll probably take me another
three years to finish it if I stick with the program. Should I enter the space
industry now, which is a master's?"

(Note: I submitted this question about my own situation. I changed "astronautical"
to "aerospace" and "USC" to "UCLA" at the time to preserve my anonymity — the real
situation was an Astronautical Engineering PhD at USC.)

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CAL'S RESPONSE:
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Cal's full spoken reply runs for roughly fifteen minutes and is his copyrighted
podcast content, so rather than reproduce it in full here, you can watch/listen to
it directly at the timestamped link above:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmoIIkm0gJc&t=2980s

My summary and analysis of what he said — point by point — is in the blog post that
links to this transcript.

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© Cal Newport / Deep Questions. Shared here for reference with attribution and a
link to the original. Financial Rocket Science.