I think this is going to be a fairly varied collection of posts on stuff to do with art, science, culture, geekery and science communication. But we'll see, eh? And, just to be clear, what I type here is my own opinion, not my employers'.
Oh, it’s that time of the year again. Performance management review time and the dreaded question:
Your aspirations
Please give a brief statement of your career aspirations.
I’ve never known what I want to be when I grow up. And even now (all 194cm and 32 years of me) I still haven’t, not really.
At least it feels that way. I remember a schoolfriend leaving school at 17 (she’d got all her highers) as she knew she wanted to be a pharmacologist. Without a shadow of a doubt. Knew.
And since then, I’ve seen many mentions of eminent and not so eminent whoevers talking about their own childhood certainties.
I envy such belief.
My thoughts on what I wanted to be were always much vaguer. I wanted to improve the world, just a little bit. I saw things wrong, and wanted to fix them – as a teen, I seemed drawn to the back page of New Computer Express with its tales of computing woes, and settled on that. And at university, I graduated toward the courses on testing, verification and usability, I read (and posted to) comp.risks and started to think I would be helping to stop Ariane rockets from blowing up, or stopping other minor inconveniences.
But as I blogged before, I got caught (and embraced) the science communication bug, and have left my university world behind, with serendipity lending me a guiding hand by suggesting a couple of great job opportunities at just the right time.
And now?
Last year, to answer that aspirations question, I wrote a whole page analysing my past experiences, skills, thoughts and interests – highlighting my interest in cross-disciplinary interactions between arts and sciences. Talking of how I wanted to stay in science communication, but was unsure how to take advantage of my new, and unplanned interest in innovation and R&D through my work with the R&D Society.
This year… Goodbye the discursive essay, hello short sentence:
I want to be a cultural leader in science communication, and/or innovation, or broader culture.
I think that is true. I know that it is vague. I’m still leaving my options as I hope that somehow I can work out a way to fuse my potentially disparate interests together. And in some ways, it’s just a return to my early “wanting to make the world a bit better” feeling. But it feels like progress, a forward view. And it definitely excludes, say, returning to science. I just need to work out roughly what that means in practical job turns.
I think what stymies me most, is not that I fear making the wrong turn going forward, but more the fear of looking back…
~Source ~
What do you want to be when you grow up?
Last updated: Tuesday, 05 Aug 2008 - 23:35 UTC
© 2009 Nature Publishing Group
I don’t ever want to grow up.
I do wonder how Captain Fitzroy navigated the globe and how I managed to conceive of and write The origin of Species without the active assistance of a Human Resources department asking such pertinent questions. Just think how our toils would have been alleviated.
Dr Darwin
if you are at the London Blogging Conference on 30th August, for that comment alone I will buy you a pint of whatever ale takes your fancy.
I remain, etc.
Ah but Dr Darwin, did you always know that you wanted to explore the nature of… nature? When you were six, were you that sort of child that just knew what he wanted to do?
Or was it all some blind accident? Whoops, a tortoise!
I have left instructions for Mrs Gee that if the time comes when I have grown up, she should have me thrown off Cromer Pier.
In the words of a song by Michelle Shocked, “When I grow up I want to be an old woman” – the bits in between childhood and old age haven’t lived up to expectation so far. Where’s my jet pack, free energy and massive amount of leisure time? The white heat of technology has fizzled out and retirement seems more and more attractive.
BTW Happy Birthday, Scott!
I’d still quite like to be an astronaut.
hey, that’s my line!
Scott, in reference to your cm (returning to your post), were you the tallest person at SciBlog? I think you are taller than Graham Steel but I did not see you and Alf Eaton standing next to each other…