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What Comes Next
Aug. 12th, 2010 10:47 pmBecause of the stage I'm reaching in my academic progress, this has been a slightly different conference for me than previously. It's time to look around and think about postdocs. Although it wasn't as prepared as I wanted it to be, I still had a preliminary list of people to talk to about potential projects, and by now, I've actually managed to track down and talk to all of the people on the list. Step one, complete. The easy step. Grant-writing will be more challenging.
That's not really what this post is about, though. It's mostly about one of the great losses associated with the academic lifestyle (and many other lifestyles as well), the loss of community. Postdoctoral positions are, by nature, ephemeral, a few years in a different place where one hopes to gain new experience that will aid in the eventual search for a faculty position (assuming that there are actually faculty positions available sometime in the future). I'm partly thinking of it like an extended study-abroad program. The challenge with this, much like the challenge with moving to a new country for another line of work, is that the main group of people I will interact with at first will be academic colleagues. Although these colleagues maintain a global network, such as the network of people who show up to these international meetings every four years, there's a part of me that strongly resists defining myself by any single facet of my life, such as my academic studies. From what I understand, Europeans generally don't talk about their personal lives nearly as much as Americans do, and so I'm left wondering if I can handle that kind of separation of my work from my interests and activities.
There are a lot of reasons that someone like me would love to live in Copenhagen, or many of the other places where I could go: great opportunities for bicycling (and a city where it's convenient to live without a car), a vibrant ceramics culture, I'm guessing I'd be able to row as well, and this climate is definitely suitable for growing berries. But I'd be tremendously far away from my family, making trips back to the Pacific Northwest difficult and even more infrequent than they are now. I hate airplanes with enough passion to ensure that much. On top of that, there's asking someone else (S) if they'd be willing to uproot, too.
That's not really what this post is about, though. It's mostly about one of the great losses associated with the academic lifestyle (and many other lifestyles as well), the loss of community. Postdoctoral positions are, by nature, ephemeral, a few years in a different place where one hopes to gain new experience that will aid in the eventual search for a faculty position (assuming that there are actually faculty positions available sometime in the future). I'm partly thinking of it like an extended study-abroad program. The challenge with this, much like the challenge with moving to a new country for another line of work, is that the main group of people I will interact with at first will be academic colleagues. Although these colleagues maintain a global network, such as the network of people who show up to these international meetings every four years, there's a part of me that strongly resists defining myself by any single facet of my life, such as my academic studies. From what I understand, Europeans generally don't talk about their personal lives nearly as much as Americans do, and so I'm left wondering if I can handle that kind of separation of my work from my interests and activities.
There are a lot of reasons that someone like me would love to live in Copenhagen, or many of the other places where I could go: great opportunities for bicycling (and a city where it's convenient to live without a car), a vibrant ceramics culture, I'm guessing I'd be able to row as well, and this climate is definitely suitable for growing berries. But I'd be tremendously far away from my family, making trips back to the Pacific Northwest difficult and even more infrequent than they are now. I hate airplanes with enough passion to ensure that much. On top of that, there's asking someone else (S) if they'd be willing to uproot, too.
