Cognitive style and employment: What is for me (trades??)?

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Are there any aspies that have experience in the trades? If so, please discuss your experience of the trades as someone with Asperger's. You don't even need to read the self-indulgent post below. I try to shed some insight on my own cognitive style towards the end in an effort to understand the sort of employment I'd be suited towards. I think this section might be the only interesting part of this post. If you have any similar experiences, please share them!!

This employment area of my life is proving to be a very difficult thing to fill in.

Background:

I graduated cum laude from a well known public university during the fall of 2009 with an honors degree in cognitive science. I throughly enjoyed my classes and the independent research I did in psycholinguistics. There isn't a day that goes by where I don't spend at least a moment thinking about the various paradoxes of cognitive science (especially with regards to sentence processing).

I haven't always been into academia, though. I was an awful student in high school and placed into entirely remedial courses. However, at the same time, I had always had intellectual interests such as computer programming, web design, linux, photography, and guitar that entirely occupied the time I should've used for studying. My first year out of high school, my parents forced me to take a community college class in philosophy. More or less, the class blew my mind and I began to take serious interest in scholarship. A couple semesters later, I read a few books on linguistics and fell in love with the field of cognitive science. Once I transfered to my now Alma Mater, I made the Dean's list 4/5 of the semesters I spent there. I couldn't stop obsessively thinking about sentence processing problems (representation, negation/multiple center embedded sentence processing mechanisms, perception's involvement in sentence representation, statistical learning theory, etc).

Then, it came time to take the GRE's, and knowing how poorly I had done on standardized tests in the past, this was not a test I was particularly excited to take. The first time I took the GRE's, I received a V330/Q330. This was an awful score. Upon retaking the test a year later, I received a V550/Q510 after studying for a few weeks. I figured that perhaps my well-written senior thesis, independent research, glowing recommendation letters from a few famous professors, and alignment of research interests with my professors of interest would compensate for this score in my graduate school applications. Unfortunately, I have been rejected by 2/3 schools. One of them was put off by my low GRE score. The Florida State POI really liked my application and thought it was a shame he couldn't admit me because he had just inherited two extra students from a professor that unexpectedly left the university, which left him with no available seats for a student and with one extra student than usual. At this late in the game, I don't think the third school is going to accept me. They haven't talked to me once since I applied. While I would absolutely love to study cognitive science at the PhD level (truly, if I cast my morality aside, I could not see myself in a happier place), I don't think it's going to happen. I also have some other objections to this work that I'll run through later.

Outside of a semester break of taking Speech-Language pathology courses last fall (turns out I hate that field, so that's why I applied to cognitive science grad programs this January), I have been hopelessly looking around for some kind of employment in the white collar world. After sending off almost 70 applications over the course of 8-12 mos, I've yielded several entry level interviews that have turned into nothing, offered sales positions in obvious employment scams (I've recently turned down selling home remodeling equipment), and taken a job at Fed Ex unloading boxes from trucks. There is a certain kind of satisfaction derived from actually getting real, physical work done.

I think part of the reason I've been rejected after getting interviewed for white collar work is that I have a personality type that is going to create problems for the social order in a workplace. I really care about abstract, philosophical issues. I come off as being far more into depth of thought rather than into performing routine spread sheet work over and over. However, this is in my opinion an erroneous assumption; I'll do whatever it takes to make some money and move out of my parent's house, haha. I mean, I'm moving boxes 6 hours a day now for christ's sake. Do you really think being introspective and being into philosophically oriented thought is hurting me at this job? No, I'm working as efficiently as possible in order to maintain my quota. I'm sure not doing any corporate internships while in undergrad hurts me quite a bit for these jobs, too. I don't have connections at any of the businesses I'm applying to work at as I usually apply via an online application. This probably hurts me, too.

Maybe hiring managers can form an intuitive blueprint of a person's intelligence very rapidly? Admittedly, I am not what I would classify as an intelligent person by any means and numerous psychological test batteries have confirmed this. I have horrible ADD, a nonverbal learning disability, and a very slow visuospatial processing speed. While I do have a non-verbal learning disability, it luckily has not affected my social skills, so I can't be diagnosed with asperger's. I still feel like I share a lot in common with those of you with an ASD, though.

I can't do anything very well if I don't get obsessed with it. The only thing that has ever come intuitively to me without becoming obsessed is writing and computers. Everything else I've had to become totally engrossed by. It's not that I don't enjoy becoming totally engrossed by something at all; I welcome it. Still, this obsessive process leads to a very bizarre cognitive style within any field. Since I generally cannot intuitively learn things through the non-verbal dynamic pattern detection ability most people use, I consciously use verbally based deductive/inductive processes to learn things.

I learned the limits of this cognitive style very quickly in my teenage years through playing guitar for 5 years and my semester of music school at Berklee. While my ears are totally awful, I learned enough music theory to use "painting by numbers" to write music and improvise. My technique on guitar was also really good. So long as I knew the chord progression, I could 'calculate' the kinds of arpeggios and scales I could use to run through the chords. I also have a huge trick bag of 'licks' (learned musical phrases all improvisers fall back on constantly within solos). Similarly, for writing songs, I could start with a vamp (simple 2-3 chord progression), cliche chord progression, and then build it up from there. I got sufficiently good enough at this painting by numbers game with music that I got admitted into Berklee College of Music to study jazz guitar. This is where I quickly noticed that the way I was writing songs and improvising was totally unlike most of the good musicians there. I did it in this entirely mechanical, uninspired way (not "feeling" the music, this is hard to explain to non-musicians). Everything I did when improvising was either connected to almost organized chaos (this is when it sounded genuine and I was actually feeling the music, imo), muscle memory, and theoretical knowledge of the songs' chord structure. I remember taking ear training classes and being embarrassed that I couldn't really get myself beyond Ear Training 1, regardless of how hard I worked. While I'm not tone deaf, I couldn't hear the aural patterns that you can't explain via a kind of propositional logic. How your brain feels something cannot be put into a propositional logic that musicians can readily understand. If you can't learn to categorize certain chord progressions or intervals very reliably given some guidance and a lot of first person interaction with these chord progressions/intervals/rhythms/whatever, then you probably just do not have the right equipment to do it to begin with. So, one day, I remember hearing my ear training teacher say "music is a hearing art: theory is only mental masturbation." In agreement with him, it was at that point that I mentally threw my hands up in the air and thought to myself "what the hell am I doing here?"

So, then I came back to community college frustrated that music didn't workout and ear training didn't miraculously fix my ears with hard work. I initially delved into psychology to discover why I couldn't be a good jazz musician and maybe figure out some way to overcome my ear training issues. Luckily, this didn't last too long as it would've been a very depressing route of inquiry. I eventually discovered the fields of linguistics and cognitive science and became totally obsessed with them. Since my mother was a psychologist by profession, I had volumes of neuroscience, psychology, and most importantly, linguistics books in my house. Over the duration of a summer, I read several books by Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker (two linguists I came to entirely disagree with over The entire point of academia all of the sudden became clear for me. As far as I could see it as a total novice and idiot at the time, academia existed to discover laws of cognition and eventually build devices that could replicate cognitive phenomenon. (Later on down the road, this focus became more centered around creating more humble things like very simple sentence processing mechanisms.)

As a result, I applied myself extremely hard in every class I took from biology to linguistics to anatomy & physiology to psychology to the three semesters of computer science courses I had to take. Interestingly, it was in these CS courses where I felt most at home with my cognitive style. In order to program a computer, you must think in what is basically propositional logic. I felt intuitive for the first time in my life and was frequently helping out actual computer science majors with their programming homework. Since my program did not require that I take more than three computer science courses, I didn't go beyond Data Structures because I feared that Discrete Systems would have far too much math for me to handle (ironically, I am tragically awful at math and cannot handle far beyond algebra). I think this might've been a huge mistake.

Outside of neurobiology, after finishing off that sequence of CS courses, my courses started becoming a lot more abstract and not practically useful. I missed that component of the CS work greatly. However, the classes were still completely fascinating. I did start to notice, though, that things started to become arguments about metaphysical constructs (working memory, parsers, mental representation, executive function, attention, etc).

An entire subfield within cognitive science was basically created through George Lakoff et al. 's disagreement with classical cognitive scientists (Noam Chomsky, etc) over mental representation. Basically, Chomsky thinks that the mind represents the world using language like symbols that are not grounded in perceptual experience. Thus, the fundamental unit the mind performs computations on is this abstract symbol. (One doesn't even need to know what computation actually is as a cognitive psychologist, all you need to know is that it's abstract symbol manipulation; ask a cognitive psychology professor to mathematically define the computational processes the mind is performing upon these symbols and he probably won't be able to tell you. In fact, outside of a small but growing amount of cognitive psychologists with mathematics and comp sci backgrounds, this definition is unimportant. In cognitive psychology, this computation is merely a squishy, philosophical concept.) This means the mind is very much like a modern day digital computer and lots of analogies can be made between mental processes and computers. Embodied cognitive scientists (Lakoff et al) beg to differ. They offer the common sense alternative that the mind is fundamentally embodied and instead manipulates perceptual representations that are grounded in first person subjective experience rather ungrounded symbolic language-like representations.

It is in my opinion that this entire argument over mental representation is BS. I never expressed this opinion to anybody except a couple ecological psychologists that would agree with me; if I do any graduate work ever, I intend to do research in embodied cognition (which requires representation). The mere necessity of mental representation as a construct seems to stem from arguments made from introspection. We have these subjective, fuzzy mental objects in our imaginations, therefore they should be at the forefront of our explanatory efforts regarding cognition. What if these fuzzy mental objects are simply products of underlying processes that are not representational in anyway whatsoever? Do we even need to invoke the mind as a construct altogether when we already have the brain/body and the physical environment the animal is situated in? I don't think so. I think all these constructs that come with the construct of the mind simply superimpose this metaphysical order on a physical animal-environment system that already has it's own order. There is some interesting research coming out of dynamical systems psychology that is doing just this and treating the study of psychology as an entirely physical science. Unfortunately, I do not have the physics/mathematics background to do such work.

I could probably keep going in psychology and apply to 10 schools next year. I'd probably get into one after playing the numbers that hard. I think the fields of psychology that I'm actually capable of doing work in are entirely nonsense argumentation about metaphysical concepts. I'd also get paid very little if I ever found an academic appointment within the field after getting a PhD. However, this area does fit into my cognitive style very nicely, and even though I realize the work is meaningless, I would find it throughly enjoyable.

So, if you've gotten this far, I think you know what kind of person I am. Would I be at all suitable for work in the trades? After reading
Shop Class As Soulcraft, I feel like the trades might be for me. Office work looks completely pointless and unsustainable. A PhD looks like a gamble if I even can get admitted into a program.

sorry i couldn't read all of it but basically: if you are interested so much in that field, you need to apply to many more schools (not less than 10). there is a good match out there just you need to find it.
my friend graduated in cognitive science and comp sci and works for the web search engine companies. generally if you find that interesting, it can be valuable.
good luck.

hi roadGames

Hmm. I have recently changed course in life and begun a mechanical engineering apprenticeship. This definitely counts as trades!

I find that I think very deeply about all aspects of the mechanical processes. For example, when welding I am aware of the properties of the metals, gases, heat, electricity, movement, crystallisation, and so on. I maintain an immense store of data in my mind and body, regarding these things. To me, the practical activity and the intellectual understanding become a seamless experience which is very satisfying.

My current work experience is at a CNC milling operation. This is specialised and uses code to programme the mill machines. I find that I can understand the code quickly and store the meaning of it in my head. You may find that this sort of trade suits your cognitive style. The process itself is pre-ordained, meaning that rapid processing and sudden-changing-of-plan is not essential. Preparation and careful planning is required.

good luck

Homeland security.

Completely serious. They're hiring linguists from time to time.

A few years ago I interviewed for a job at a place in salt lake city where they produce software that builds database query strings to search multi-terabyte databases of text. They told me that they have one customer who they hinted is a front for a security agency, and noted that their primary investor is the federal government.

So, unless you have a problem with working for the man, I'd say maybe if you need a job you should start sniffing around federal security agencies and spook-related corporations.

(It also turns out that the army hires anthropologists if they have studied game theory. No kidding.)