[From Hope's diary]
One of the worst ailment in this world compared to Cocoon is related to job competition. The level of development across this New World, unlike Cocoon, is not evenly distributed. This is because Cocoon is relatively small place compared to this new world with six continents. Advanced countries, such as France, have more educated workforce, and their public facilities are more sophisticated and well-maintained. They also have more access to stable and high paying jobs whereas less developed countries, majority of available works are micro-business, mostly in agricultural sector and mom-and-pop stores in cities. In such condition, job security is constant anxiety.
As the result, higher education institutes in advanced countries are highly competitive in New World, because it is tied to people's livelihood. They ranked themselves in various ways to assess the quality of institution, such as the number of international students, number of publications, reputation from employers and so on. On the another hand, higher education is more like personal interest in Cocoon because virtually all basic necessities of people were given freely by Fal'Cie
When I looked for good universities in France, I applied postgrads program for three of them that people here consider to be the best one: Ecole, Sorbonne and Grenoble. To my surprise, somehow they accepted me without any entrance exam! They said that my grade during bachelor degree automatically qualified me for the PhD. Although I definitely did not attend any school in this New World! But they checked my online database, and they said that I got GPA of 5.0 from my bachelor degree in computer science from German university called Technische Universitat Munchen (TUM). I later found out that that university is highly similar to my own university in my hometown of Palumpolum. Somehow, it seems that we are still assigned very similar life with what we have in Cocoon.
Definitely, when come to information technology, Cocoon is far more superior than this New World. However, the underlying mathematical concept, data structure and algorithm are highly similar. When I attended the typical seminary postgrad courses, it is frankly very easy to follow. However, the difficult part is to work with the computational tasks that you think can be done 10 times or 20 times faster with Cocoon's computer. I need to somehow adjust my working pace to available machines in this world. And to explain something to our professor that frankly only understand around one-fifth of scientific concept in previous world is really challenging. They will not understand and think either I am stupid or too smart and very difficult to work with.
And different from Cocoon, I would say the research done on this world is very superficial. They are mostly redefinition of old terminologies, and minor tweak of existing algorithm to new domain is enough to publish paper in good conference. In Academy, only intern work with such method. When I was in charge as professor in Academy, I do not have any expectation to any of my student to be able to publish. Because in order to publish one paper in Academy, it will take as long as 10 years, if the student lucky. As long as they can demonstrate to me they have solid understanding of what they are doing and what are the purpose of they performed the experiment, I will count that as good scientific contribution.
So actually the challenging part of my postgrad program is to learn how people in this New World talk, what jargons they perceive positively and vice versa. It is a bit of dumb but that is how it is done here. Research here is more like fashion rather than genuine discovery. In fact, during my second semester I need to switch my advisor because of disagreement of research direction for my thesis. I told him repeatedly that neither the concept nor application he suggested were novel, and I need to quote him the paper from 10 to 15 years ago to persuade him. But so what? He said, virtually everyone on his circle think this is the next big thing.
So throughout my doctorate study, eventually I have three papers in good conference, related to application to artificial intelligence in cybersecurity and healthcare domain. Those papers are enough to land me a job as research fellow, and finally I am able to support Valerie and Conroy. I also have one workshop paper related to artificial intelligence ethics, something that people in this world seems less interested about, but definitely not for me. I experienced how AI Fal'cie that I created in Augusta Tower literally tried to destroy humanity
Light was convinced it will be just the matter of time if I got enough experience, I can influence scientific community in this world to steer the direction of ethics in artificial intelligence. Because nobody here want to entertain fresh PhD perspective about things without any publication or grant proposal. This is also sad part of our New World.