On the idea that you should not have done your degree if you are not willing to take just any academic job, so long as it is on the tenure track, even a great sacrificer and penitent like César Vallejo did not stay in Lima but went to Paris. This was a career move for it was not true then, nor is it now, that you can develop your poetry just anywhere.
On the idea that you should just go anywhere because “you will change more than you realize over the next ten years,” that is enough to make me say W.H. Auden is right about social science, and psychology is bunk. Tastes and interests can of course develop and change but these are not essential aspects of a personality. And the very first things I liked were not passing interests, and I knew it then.
Every time I encountered one of the main things I like I said, exactly, “This is one of the main things I like.” Before school started and in very early primary school I chose the main three things I liked then and also now, to wit: 1. words and language, comparing meaning across languages; 2. the feeling of expanding knowledge; 3. Madrid.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I had similar thoughts when I read that piece. I feel that I have been who I am from a very early age, maybe always. Obviously I have changed in externals and some emotional elements: I have not for a long time been in love with the boy I loved when I was 14! And I am calmer and less defensive than I once was. But I knew as a teenager that relationships come and go, and expected or hoped to have many lovers while I pursued a career. But who I am, well, I recognize my earlier self as me and do not laugh at her but am often impressed with her courage. Actually I would say nearly all my changing has been in “trivial” emotional details, like not worrying any longer about the thing that seemed so important at a particular age. These are not trivial in that life is much more pleasant when one is not pointlessly anxious, but they are unimportant to my sense of identity. The idea of scholarship and writing has been with me as a piece of self-definition since my age was in single digits. Also love of cats, solitude, and sunlight.
Yes — I am very flexible but then again I never do change.
(Trivial example: I am wearing a jacket I bought at the Joseph Magnin on Bancroft with my first TA check. It still fits and it is still in style and it is still in good shape, it has been with me half my life at this point!)