So, this is interesting. For the first time in roughly four years, I am no longer directly engaged in the enterprise of scientific research. There are two things that immediately spring to mind:
1. It’s quite the shock to leave an activity that you were doing on a daily basis for four years and then abruptly stare never doing it again right in the face.
2. On the other hand, it’s also shocking how quickly you adjust. The laboratory already seems pretty distant, and I’ve only been gone a week. It’s like those people who leave/graduate and get a job outside of a research lab who say they’ll “always be available to run experiments if you need help, because they’ll really miss research.” Two weeks later, if you remind them that they worked in a laboratory they’ll give you a blank look and you can actually see them trying to recall when that happened.
The biggest immediate change in my relation to science is, ironically, having a lot more time to carefully review those aspects of it that I find interesting. I mean, I’m still working on finishing up my thesis, it’s not like that process ever ends on time, but not being in the laboratory running experiments, keeping up with research question-specific technical information, classes related to one’s degree, etc. frees up an incredible amount of time to engage with science in a different way.
For example, I’m really looking forward to reading some reports that the AAAS Science and Human Rights Coalition sent along in their latest newletter. These reports, Climate Change and Human Rights: A Rough Guide (International Council on Human Rights) and Claiming the Millennium Development Goals: A Human Rights Approach (Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights) are of great personal interest, but I’d have never even dreamed of having time to read these with care and critical attention while in the midst of my graduate research. That in of itself points out one of my worries regarding the scientific community, but that’s a topic for another day.
Last updated:
Monday, 07 Jul
2008 - 05:29 UTC
Your descriptions are remarkably on point, Samuel. I had a moment of panic when leaving the lab when I realized that I would likely never be in another lab as long as I lived. It was scary! It’s all I have ever known. Scary and good mixed together, actually. While I still recall (with painful clarity) what it’s like to be in the lab, I can say with some certainty that I would struggle with doing something even as basic as a DNA miniprep. All that programming evaporated in a matter of days!
Best of luck finishing up your dissertation! As you recently found out, there is life on the other side. Sometimes, it makes science fun again.
And same here. I think I finished my last experiment last week, but I still have some unanalyzed data and don’t know if I need to go back in and analyze that at some point.
I have no clue at all what I’ll be doing when my thesis is finished in a few months, but people keep asking me about it and that’s the most annoying thing. Whenever I picture myself in the future, I’m always either giving a lecture or writing or reading about science. It’s always been like that – I never pictured myself doing research, so I know I shouldn’t, but I don’t really know how to get to the point where I want to be.
I also worry about people in science not having time to really think about it. If every department just hires someone to do their meta-research thinking and reading for them, I’d gladly take one of those jobs.
Oh, that must be a strange feeling. I’m looking forward to reading how it goes. That scariness is often what has stopped me form jumping off into the wild yonder…that and the lack of another job :)
Good luck.
… but that’s a topic for another day.
An interesting one, I think – at least for one who got so cheesed off with being a busy lab rat that he took a year out, partly to free up some quality reading time, during which I didn’t miss lab work one iota… but then came back to it! (For a number of reasons.)
Good luck with whatever.
It’s kind of surprising how many of “us” (ex-lab rats) there are out there, but it probably shouldn’t be. I had a mini-epiphany one day last year when reading a post by Chris Mooney in The Intersection blog that basically laid out the demographics: there are this many graduate students + there are this many “traditional” research jobs = some of us are going to be trying new things. It was very liberating. And Anna is spot on, science is getting to be FUN again! That might be a good argument for Lee’s strategy of taking some time away, in retrospect I probably should have done that between the Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. Thanks again to y’all for reading and commenting, by the way.