When I started graduate school (for math), I was very interested in big ideas. I had had a couple experiences of having general research intuitions pan out really well and felt like the core of good research is having a brave idea, a gestalt. I went into grad school looking for the “gestalt people”. The people whose math had that mysterious, cutting edge flavor but was not too pop (at the time the sexiest thing around was higher category theory and I was drawn to it and tried to learn it, but I didn’t want to do the “common” thing of working in that field). I ended up choosing an advisor, and skipped over any computational or “applications-driven” (insofar as doing calculations in Galois theory or string theory counts as applications) stuff that he recommended working on. It really wasn’t my thing: you had to read long technical papers [...]

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