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27 May 2004
It's amazing the difference a new job makes. For the past few months—when I had no immediate prospect of a job, and it looked like I might have to leave academia—I was completely unenthusiastic about work, and I found it really hard to motivate myself. Now that I know I have a permanent job and I'm starting a new project, I'm fizzing with ideas and enthusiasm. Lately I've been waking up early—not with the feeling of dread and worry that I experienced before, but bubbling over with ideas for experiments1, which forces me to get up and write them down.
It has made me realise what destructive things short-term contracts are (in any field, but particularly in academia). Projects require quite a lot of personal investment in terms of passion, motivation and drive, and often only really pay off in the longer term. If you know that you will probably be out of a job in two to three years, it's really difficult to have the same level of commitment to a project. Let's face it—no-one is in academia for the money (if you are, someone has seriously mislead you), so it's vital to be excited about what you're doing. Instead of worrying about what you can possibly get done in two years, you can think about the questions that you are burning to answer. You still have to have things that will produce results in two to three years to get grants to fund the research, but you can at least have a bigger, longer-term strategy running through the shorter projects. I'm really looking forward to it.
1 For example, this morning I woke up wondering whether it would be possible to build my smaller bits of experimental apparatus out of Lego™.
2
Funny; all my friends treat academia as something one dreams of leaving. 
This instant preview stuff is creeping me out. Although not necessarily in a bad way!
by Aaron @ 28/05/2004 3:06 am • Permalink •
3
Glad that everything is beginning to look up for you again, Bsag - it's obviously been a while since it happened!
I'll echo the thoughts of others, it'd be interesting to know what sort of thing you're actually working in/with, assuming that you're not the only person in your field looking at that subject, and thus suddenly becoming uniquely identifiable.
Anyway - good luck for the future, and with the new project(s).
4
I am not a scientist of any sort so if you told us, I would be none the wiser! It is great to hear you fizzing with enthusiasm, joie de vivre and all that positive sunny weather stuff. Good luck!
by ThoughtBadger @ 28/05/2004 11:05 am • Permalink •
5
Oh yes and any job where you get to play with Lego sounds pretty good!
by ThoughtBadger @ 28/05/2004 11:06 am • Permalink •
6
1
Do you think it would be possible in one of your future posts for you to say a bit about your research, and what your new project involves? i don't want you to expose yor secret identity
, but I am curious as to what you are doing. From some of your previous posts I think that I can deduce the general area of your research but not specifics.
By the way you can do amazing things with Lego, I seem to recall reading somewhere (the Guardian I think) that someone had built a machine in Lego to solve a Rubik's cube. I assume that there was a programmed chip involved somewhere, as to build logic circuits with Lego really would be amazing.----- I agree with Keith. Possibly you've posted in an older post, but I often find myself wondering "what does she do?" Well besides the learning Perl and PHP stuff.
by allgood2 @ 27/05/2004 8:05 pm • Permalink •