I know :( the issue is I’m in ME and school is fucking expensive. Oh and I am working in a research lab getting paid for my work, not much though.

I would love nothing more than to stay in school and get like 82 different degrees in various topics. I would love to do a PhD in math, and one in physics, and one in cs, and linguistics, and psychology…

But the world forces me to specialize if I want to have enough money to live well. I chose ME because I knew it had a lot of overlap with a bunch of different fields. And yeah I’m taking grad level math and cs courses, but like you said, lots of the stuff I’m interested in is PhD level stuff.

Also Idk if you’re in America, but the money for research here is getting scarcer every day. It could likely be more effective for me to sell my soul to a defense company and then build my own personal lab with that blood money to do research I want to do than it would be to get a PhD and be a professor and simply hope the projects I want to work on will get funding.

Of course that’s assuming the country doesn’t fully collapse (or kill me) before I enter the job force. And assuming I could work for a defense company without deciding to kill myself out of guilt of building civilian killing murder machines.

Anyway, point is that you are right but I lack the financial security to justify trying to get a PhD in math right now.