Career Crossroads

The wife and I were discussing the future today. Having a child makes me want to plan out a little further ahead than the next ten days or even the next ten months. We've talked, and we're thinking we want to be in one place from K-12 (and then for the love of monkeys, we're moving somewhere).

Where I'm at now doesn't have long-term security. I can probably maintain my position here for as long as I can write myself grants to pay my salary. That might be a long time, that might be just the length of the original appointment.

(random note here...I love the the "Wise LeBron" commercials)

So clearly I need to be investigating longer lasting positions. Everyone is always at a potential crossroads. You can always decide to quit and do something new. Or you can always decide to move. There are always options.

Having said that, the combination of Alton's birth and being sick of working with a jerk is really forcing my hand.

I figure there are 3 options available to me, and the possibility of a fourth.

Option 1: The Research Track.
Right now I'm sorta on this path. I have a dozen publications. I have about 4 more on the way in the near future, and I have a half dozen more with various collaborators. The idea here is to try hard to make some of these publications really good ones, to finish this NSF grant and get it submitted, and to crank out another 5-6 papers this year (possible).
In a perfect world, the NSF grant would be successful, I'd be very competitive for a top tier research position (probably at an academic institution, but who the hell knows). This would result in my working my tail off for years in order to build the kind of CV that my advisers would be thrilled to see representing their labs.
More likely, I'd continue to be haunted by mixed success. Several papers, but none of them really that good, and I'd do some kind of middle-of-the-road job that is good but not great.
On the downside, I might totally run out of ideas, suffer a mental break, etc. That's entirely possible.

(another random note: I LOVE the spell checker in Firefox)


Option 2: Education/Outreach
While a slightly less popular option around the research community, this is still pretty respectable. Looking hard for a job at a primarily teaching institute (liberal arts college?), doing a little research on the side, mostly just teaching a handful of classes each year and taking the summers relatively easy (just doing research then).
This has all sorts of possibilities, depending on the institution and the situation. I'm not sure what the best case scenario is here, but it is probably teaching 1-2 classes a semester, and doing collaborative research with friends at bigger institutions in the summer. That actually sounds pretty good.
The down end of this is probably getting into a situation where I teach 3 classes a semester and never have any time to think about research in an institution that doesn't have it.

(Another Random Note: The 4th quarter of this Nets-Cavs game has seven minutes remaining and neither team has made a field goal. As Dick Stockton just said: That's amazing.)

Option 3: "Practical" Ecology
Maybe this should be called "out of academia". This is the option where I go for a government job or a job with someone like the Nature Conservancy. The idea here is that those kinds of organizations should have good scientists involved. Environmental policy, advocacy, etc. I don't really know where this goes, or where it leads. The pay seems good though, and it doesn't seem to require nearly the time commitment that the academic track options have, so maybe I could actually start learning things that don't relate to science (hablas espanol?).

These are the options I'm really considering. I guess there are lots of other options too (go to law school, Barnes and Noble, restaurant). I'm not necessarily ruling those things out, I just think right now Options 1-3 are more plausible (and require no loss of 'pride').

(another random note: The NBA suspended 2 Suns players. This is the worst possible decisions the NBA could have made. To be clear, the NBA is now enforcing the rules inconsistently, because Bruce Bowen, Baron Davis, and Jason Richardson have all hit people, sometimes in the groin, in these playoffs. None have those players were suspended. Boris Diaw and Amare Stoudamire got up off the bench when the most important player on their team was hip-checked into a table, never got close to the players on the court, and were suspended for a critical game 5 in the playoffs. Great. The NBA sucks.)

So I'm not sure which way I'm going to end up going here.

Tonight I went fishing.

8 fish in half an hour. Only 1 that was bigger than a foot in length though.

The Crux of my Desire

Ever since I left Winfield I've had kind of a hard time being happy. What follows is basically me thinking aloud.

crux (krks, krks)

n. pl. crux·es or cru·ces (krsz)

1. The basic, central, or critical point or feature: the crux of the matter; the crux of an argument.

2. A puzzling or apparently insoluble problem.

In this case, the crux of my desire is merely finding that which I desire.

What do I desire?

I was once, even as recently as 6 months ago, driven entirely by the twin desires of being happy on a personal level and doing useful science.

Have fun, think hard, solve interesting problems.

Right now, I'm not so sure. These days, I'm not sure what is driving me, but having a child is throwing this whole thing out of wack. I've got new desires. Little Alton is going to need things. Not the same way I need a beer after a long day, but real, genuine need.

And between my wife and I, we've got to figure out a way to give it to him.

Suddenly I desire money. Like, a lot of it, relatively speaking, or at least a constant supply of it.

Shit.

I left graduate school too early for this desire. I intentionally took a job working on stuff I'd never worked on before. That was so that I could re-invent myself into working on questions I actually found interesting. I was really, really sick of working on DOM dynamics.

That's fine, and that works out great if I can afford to slum it for a few years while figuring out and publishing a series of projects that establishes my credentials in this new area.

Unfortunately, we can't keep slumming it. Our expenses are going up, way up. Health care costs alone are going to break us if we don't get more income. I mean, we can live really cheap. We worked it out last month, and our combined rent, car (gas and insurance), student loan payments, all our utilities and all our groceries is less than 50% of my income after taxes.

Yet we still found ourselves confined to our house, eating through everything in our freezer and going without bread and milk for the last six days of the month in order to preserve our budget.
Why? Because we have to spend a ton of money on medical expenses, we eat out too much, we go places, and we just generally don't stick to a budget very well.

So here I am, looking around for another job, one that will be pretty much guaranteed for the next 4-5 years. And what am I supposed to look for? I'm already slipping out of the DOM game. I'm not yet up to speed in toxistoichiometry, and I don't know a fricking thing about fish (which seems to be the job of choice right now).

I'm looking at teaching positions, but seriously who thinks I can teach? Let's see some hands. Oh wait, I'm not seeing any hands. I mean, sure, my CV looks like I should know something about teaching, but I really don't. I'm not bad at it, but I'm not really good at it. The most I can honestly say is that I put a lot of effort into it (I can't even put into words how much work I've done on this invasion biology class). I like outreach activities, but again, the best I can say is that I put a lot of effort into it.

Apparently this is what having a kid will do to you. I have no desires anymore that do not revolve around securing a relatively stable situation for my kid. Science? Really? Science? I'm supposed to still care about frickin' science?

I'm torn apart right now. I do not know what I'm supposed to do, or how.

Some things I learned today

I spent my day instructing, teaching, entertaining, and educating (in no particular order) a bunch of 7^th and 8^th grade students. I figured, naively that this would be about like providing content for 9^th graders.

That’s just not true.
Here’s why, I think: 9^th graders are constantly exposed to people (Sophs, Juniors, and Seniors) who are more mature than they are. As a result, their behavior tends to become more mature than their physical age alone would suggest.

8^th graders, by contrast, are constantly surrounded by people (6^th and 7^th graders) who are far less mature. As a result, they act far less mature.

I’m sure it’s more complicated than that, but you get the idea.

Here are some ways that this manifests itself:

1. They never shut up.

2. They do not respect their peers...at all.

3. They don’t care.

4. Even the smart ones.

5. They never shut up.

6. They just want to get done and go ‘play.’

I find that last one to be kind of a cute concept. Does anyone really remember how to play? Jeez, I had forgotten. I can’t imagine being that carefree. There was just a constant barrage of screaming and yelling going on for hours this evening.

Here are some handy tips if you end up needing to create content for a group of middle school students:

1. However much you think you need to have ready: Double it. I figured I’d push 7-8 hours of content easy with what I had prepared, based on what had happened with a group of 9^th graders. No way, I ended up filling about 4.5 hours! Ug. I felt terrible. We ended up spending the rest of the time fossil hunting, which was fun, so I guess it worked out.

2. Remember all those points in your talk where you ask questions? Yeah, that’s not going to work. You need to ask specific people questions. I can’t tell you how many questions I asked today that were greeted by absolute silence. I should have been pointing to individuals and asking them questions.

3. Tell them to shut up. Apparently they always hear “be quiet” or “stop talking”. Telling them to shut up worked pretty well.

4. These guys have the attention span of...well, 7-8^th graders. That means any concept has to be explained in a 5-second burst. You might be able to string together several such bursts, but then again, you might not. Come to think of this, I’ve had this problem with many adults as well.

5. Try not to scream or laugh incredulously when nobody remembers what you said two seconds earlier.

6. Do you remember what you thought was cool in middle school? You do? Good. None of that will be remotely interesting to these kids. So just accept that.

7. Apparently the idea of herding cats could also be applied to middle school kids. I would have gone insane if I’d had to keep track of these guys, but the teachers here just sorta allowed the swarm to move. When I was in middle school, if you’d given us this much freedom, we’d have trashed the Dwight Eisenhower Memorial and gotten our middle school banned from ever returning. Oh wait. That’s exactly what happened. Apparently my wife’s dad (who lead this group) commands much more respect from his charges.