Today I went to what I thought would be a professional development seminar but it ... wasn't. It was a presentation utterly irrelevant for me and I don't mean it in the I'm-too-cool-for-this-seminar-because-it's-not-quite-in-my-subfield sense. This presentation just had nothing to offer for me. I guess I did learn that there is a group that sometimes engages in professional development activities. Also, I got free pizza.
Aside from the pizza, I got a reminder that my research is cool and important. Lately, I've been feeling like my work can't possibly solve the problems it's funded to solve and it's all a farce. Sure, the research we do to address programmatic goals generates new and vital information. But in some ways, the programmatic goals are a little stupid. Anyway, I was sitting next to this guy who wanted to chat so he asked what I do. He was enthralled as I explained my research. He had heard a little about the topic in the media and was interested to meet someone actually working on it. He asked all these great questions and appeared to be genuinely intrigued. His research, theoretical physics, was so far from my expertise that I could barely ask any questions at all but he didn't seem to mind. He told me how cool it is that my research has real world applications that are meaningful to society since his apparently doesn't.
What a wake up call. I was just last week feeling like I want to branch out so that my work has more applications that are meaningful to society.
It's all relative.
3 comments:
That's great! It must be refreshing to get an outsider's view of your research. One of the bad things about working on a medical campus is that everyone works in "biomedical science" and there's no opportunity for mingling with people from other fields.
Omg. Anytime I tell people what I do they think it's super romantic. And I'm always a little stunned and yeah, I mean ... it's a job.
But it's true. Outsiders always think your job is more awesome than you think it is.(Unless you are a garbage collector.)
I guess the grass is always greener.
But it's good to have the perspective.
Great! I often feel that my research is quite far from any applicability, even though it is biomedical (which I guess sounds useful). Then again, given what I remember from theoretical computer science, that's another dimension in distance from application.
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