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May. 14th, 2010 07:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tylik1) What do you see yourself doing professionally doing in 5-10 years
This really isn't how I tend to structure my life. At any given time I'm actively working with the possibilities - working on the doctorate now has a reasonable likelihood of having some effect on what I'm doing in five to ten years, after all - but trying to project some version of myself into the future? I guess it just seems kind of silly. I won't be me then, the world will be something else. I choose things now based on what I want to do now, and to some extent what might open the most interesting possibilities for me in the future, but I haven't noticed that my plans tend to survive meeting reality intact. (I had planned to go back to school in genetics. Then I met Valerie, and ended up working in computational biochemistry. And now I'm in neurobio! And I had opportunities to stick to my plans, as it were, but I'm pretty happy that I didn't.)
Some things that have caught my interest, though -
I've been thinking that I might want to spend some time in China. As it happens, there's a lot of money going into research there right now, and there are at least two institutes for neurobiology in close proximity to the part of China I'd most like to spend time. (Do I know I could get a position? Do I know I want to live there? Do I know the opportunities to futher my martial training will in fact materialize? No. Bt it's worth looking into more.)
I've talked with my former PI about post-doc'ing in her lab. Again, I don't know if this will actually be open to me, but there are many things attractive about that situation. (There's also at least one other research situation in Seattle I've looked at pretty seriously. And probably more I would were I actually looking - it's kind of premature, really.) Though in some ways I'm hesitant to go back to Seattle just yet. Though some of the Chinese institutions are apparently doing things where you spend half of the year there and half in the west. If I can deal with China, that might have some appeal.
I've completely crushed out on a few other research opportunities recently, and have been engaging in terrible academic flirting with some of the seminar speakers.
But hey, I might end up concentrating on my martial arts. I might die. I might end up spending some time in a monastery. I might get involved with international science policy (okay, that would probably be on a longer timeline, but it could happen - and on that longer time scale, it would make a lot of sense with my background). I might go back to food writing. My body could fall apart, and leave me an invalid. *shrug* Many of these things aren't even exclusive of eachother!
2) Do you tend to design-in your relationships and social groups or pretty much play it by feel.
In a lot of ways, the answer to the second question is the same as the first. I think about what I'm doing a lot. I'm very careful with how I allocate my time. (I am deeply aware what a finite resource time is for me.) I also try to be aware of the opportunities around me, and not be so attached to one way of structuring my life that I'm unwilling to consider another. (For instance, it's pretty likely I'll be starting a beginning Chen group. Really, I'd kind of thought that I wanted to teach less, if anything, but then I met some interested people, and it sounded fun and useful.)
I'm not putting a lot of energy into social groups per se at the moment. There are a lot of people I spend time with, but the socializing tends to be secondary to some other activity (research, martial arts, staring at a wall, mostly). This isn't prescriptive, and I've met a lot of cool people, but so far when deciding how I'd rather spend my time, the purely social has mostly been losing out. For relationships in the romantic sense (which is how many people use the term)... eh, I'm even more hesitant. I think there are a lot of things about the societal models of romantic relationships that are fairly toxic to me and I want to really get my head clear about that. But even aside from that, on a purely case by case basis most people seem to want an awful lot of my time and attention, want me to be (subtly or otherwise) someone else, and don't want to actually do anything productive at all. Eh. Not a hobby for me.
This really isn't how I tend to structure my life. At any given time I'm actively working with the possibilities - working on the doctorate now has a reasonable likelihood of having some effect on what I'm doing in five to ten years, after all - but trying to project some version of myself into the future? I guess it just seems kind of silly. I won't be me then, the world will be something else. I choose things now based on what I want to do now, and to some extent what might open the most interesting possibilities for me in the future, but I haven't noticed that my plans tend to survive meeting reality intact. (I had planned to go back to school in genetics. Then I met Valerie, and ended up working in computational biochemistry. And now I'm in neurobio! And I had opportunities to stick to my plans, as it were, but I'm pretty happy that I didn't.)
Some things that have caught my interest, though -
I've been thinking that I might want to spend some time in China. As it happens, there's a lot of money going into research there right now, and there are at least two institutes for neurobiology in close proximity to the part of China I'd most like to spend time. (Do I know I could get a position? Do I know I want to live there? Do I know the opportunities to futher my martial training will in fact materialize? No. Bt it's worth looking into more.)
I've talked with my former PI about post-doc'ing in her lab. Again, I don't know if this will actually be open to me, but there are many things attractive about that situation. (There's also at least one other research situation in Seattle I've looked at pretty seriously. And probably more I would were I actually looking - it's kind of premature, really.) Though in some ways I'm hesitant to go back to Seattle just yet. Though some of the Chinese institutions are apparently doing things where you spend half of the year there and half in the west. If I can deal with China, that might have some appeal.
I've completely crushed out on a few other research opportunities recently, and have been engaging in terrible academic flirting with some of the seminar speakers.
But hey, I might end up concentrating on my martial arts. I might die. I might end up spending some time in a monastery. I might get involved with international science policy (okay, that would probably be on a longer timeline, but it could happen - and on that longer time scale, it would make a lot of sense with my background). I might go back to food writing. My body could fall apart, and leave me an invalid. *shrug* Many of these things aren't even exclusive of eachother!
2) Do you tend to design-in your relationships and social groups or pretty much play it by feel.
In a lot of ways, the answer to the second question is the same as the first. I think about what I'm doing a lot. I'm very careful with how I allocate my time. (I am deeply aware what a finite resource time is for me.) I also try to be aware of the opportunities around me, and not be so attached to one way of structuring my life that I'm unwilling to consider another. (For instance, it's pretty likely I'll be starting a beginning Chen group. Really, I'd kind of thought that I wanted to teach less, if anything, but then I met some interested people, and it sounded fun and useful.)
I'm not putting a lot of energy into social groups per se at the moment. There are a lot of people I spend time with, but the socializing tends to be secondary to some other activity (research, martial arts, staring at a wall, mostly). This isn't prescriptive, and I've met a lot of cool people, but so far when deciding how I'd rather spend my time, the purely social has mostly been losing out. For relationships in the romantic sense (which is how many people use the term)... eh, I'm even more hesitant. I think there are a lot of things about the societal models of romantic relationships that are fairly toxic to me and I want to really get my head clear about that. But even aside from that, on a purely case by case basis most people seem to want an awful lot of my time and attention, want me to be (subtly or otherwise) someone else, and don't want to actually do anything productive at all. Eh. Not a hobby for me.
