Another day at the Meating
Aug. 23rd, 2012 09:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rebeccmeisterIt has been good to get to know my insect nutrition colleagues at this meeting. The downside of things here is that whenever I wind up going out for dinner with the gang, we wind up going to a Korean restaurant where the foods are all vegetables or meat. I've enjoyed the vegetables, as I often wind up craving vegetables when traveling. But they don't contain many calories, and then I feel awkward and hungry. So I ate some fish last night - fish that would have otherwise gone to waste anyway. It tasted all right, but as I walked home I wound up feeling a bit gross. Meat-based foods just don't taste that appealing to me, and in general they never have. Bleah.
Anyway, the dinner companions were entertaining. I wound up sitting across from a postdoc from Australia (there's a huge group of people studying insect nutrition in one lab in Sydney) who studies social thrips. He said he also spent some time doing genomics work, and said that it hadn't been time or energy especially well-spent for him. Actually, that corresponds with a lot of what I noted among some of the postdocs at ASU, too. Lots of jobs get advertised for postdocs with bioinformatics skills, but then the actual work involves a lot of hair-pulling and frustration and the benefits from the work are very uncertain (my impression that this is actually similar to a lot of programming work). At some point, somehow, the conversation turned to bicycling - oh, I think that was my fault, for bringing it up by way of explaining why I'd visited France [there was a stereotypical Frenchman present as well, quite hilarious]. And it turned out that the trip postdoc is also a bicyclist, also aspiring to go through life without owning a car.
It's kind of a relief to run into kindred spirits, as they are so few and far in-between in Texas and among academics, generally. The emphasis at academic meetings tends to be quite abstract - people get caught up in explaining the cool stuff they're working on, sometimes trying to inflate their self-importance, and a human element gets lost or buried. I just can't get excited about my work in the same way all the time. It makes me crave peace and quiet and a break from the anxiety of wondering if I'm working hard enough and doing the right thing and smart enough to cut it in this field (and does working hard really translate into good science?).
Anyway, the dinner companions were entertaining. I wound up sitting across from a postdoc from Australia (there's a huge group of people studying insect nutrition in one lab in Sydney) who studies social thrips. He said he also spent some time doing genomics work, and said that it hadn't been time or energy especially well-spent for him. Actually, that corresponds with a lot of what I noted among some of the postdocs at ASU, too. Lots of jobs get advertised for postdocs with bioinformatics skills, but then the actual work involves a lot of hair-pulling and frustration and the benefits from the work are very uncertain (my impression that this is actually similar to a lot of programming work). At some point, somehow, the conversation turned to bicycling - oh, I think that was my fault, for bringing it up by way of explaining why I'd visited France [there was a stereotypical Frenchman present as well, quite hilarious]. And it turned out that the trip postdoc is also a bicyclist, also aspiring to go through life without owning a car.
It's kind of a relief to run into kindred spirits, as they are so few and far in-between in Texas and among academics, generally. The emphasis at academic meetings tends to be quite abstract - people get caught up in explaining the cool stuff they're working on, sometimes trying to inflate their self-importance, and a human element gets lost or buried. I just can't get excited about my work in the same way all the time. It makes me crave peace and quiet and a break from the anxiety of wondering if I'm working hard enough and doing the right thing and smart enough to cut it in this field (and does working hard really translate into good science?).
