Professional Life Transition

I haven't posted anything for a while, and I'd like to talk about the reasons. I've been going through an interesting professional life transition right now, and as I've been working on coping and adapting, one of the things that had fallen through the cracks is my online writing. As I am starting to stabilize again, however, I'm feeling inspired to write and would like to share some of my thoughts and experiences with you, dear readers.

I find that a useful way for understanding how my professional life has recently been evolving is Latour's cycle of scientific credibility. I explored this in more detail in a prior post, but it may be simplified to relations between three primary "currencies" of credibility: data can be invested to develop publications, publications invested to develop funding, and funding invested to develop data.

A researcher always needs to be tending to all parts of the cycle at least to some degree. At different points in a project or in one's professional life in general, however, the emphasis and available resources may shift around. For the past few years, I had been very heavily invested in the data and publications portions of the cycle, getting stuff done as part of a number of delightful collaborations and as a byproduct demonstrating that the ideas and approaches I've been advocating are capable of providing some real value.

Across the course of this year, that has resulted in several really fun new projects kicking off (which I intend to share with you as I come back to writing once again), and me needing to spend more time coordinating with the folks I'm working with. So these days, in addition to my existing external collaborations, I'm working in partnership with an amazing super-experienced program manager (one of the big benefits of my niche in the scientific world), growing my group, and ramping up a number of other folks on these projects.

This is all good, but it's a significant transition, and I've needed to shift around a bunch of my personal heuristics in how I organize my work life. For example, I have to be less of a perfectionist and control freak when I need to be delegating a larger fraction of the work on a project. I have also had to accept that I can't write most proposals in LaTeX any more.

Going through a transition is always intense for me, but I feel fortunate that this is being a good and joyful one so far.