“How do you eat an elephant ? One bit at a time”. I only first heard this well-known motivational joke in an upright bass master class ten years ago, and was surprised back then to have never been exposed to it before in my professional life, as a student and young researcher. Although possibly a bit cliché, it has since served me well to learn an instrument from scratch, to structure my musical practice but also to digest my regular frustrations and lack of progress. I still have a surprisingly hard time applying this principle to my day job though, and would probably be wise to apply it better in the context of this research career transition, as I’ve been struggling a bit recently after spreading myself too thin.
One of the challenges of my current situation, and of this transition, is that I essentially have to do more than two jobs at once. On the one hand, I’m still fairly active on the astrophysics front, supervising students, finishing a few projects, getting involved into scientific meetings, and doing a bit of cool theory with a newly hired colleague on a project I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. On the other hand, I’m also still deputizing for, and administrating a large research group in Toulouse, and the job comes with quite a few internal meetings, menial organizational work, email, and stress…and all of this is eroding my concentration, thoughts continuity and willpower on a daily basis. And, in the middle of all that, I’m trying to build a bridge to ecology research and to have a family life.
The truth is, winter so far has been quite draining and frustrating for my transition plans. In the last month in particular, I have been swamped by group admin, submission of funding proposals and internal CNRS career applications again. Looking back, it has now been a year since I first contacted people in Moulis and, except for some good hands-on progress last autumn, I increasingly feel an unreasonable amount of my time so far is being spent working on proposals at the expense of doing actual research. Part of this has been very useful of course, as a good deal of this time has been spent reading, learning ecology and structuring my own thoughts for the future. In other words, planting seeds. While working on a tight schedule and deadlines, all the proposals I have written in this context so far have also been well-thought and polished, and directly aim at kickstarting truly interdisciplinary work I really believe in. Co-supervision of PhD students, for instance, has always been a good way to get hands-on research started for me, but requires PhD funding. Finally, my impression is that project-oriented research is also more how things work in ecology, more so than in theoretical astrophysics at least, so I have accepted to make an effort and bite the bullet to adapt to this field. Still, I can’t help but think I have been spending too much time on the writing side during this first year.
The irony, is last year, at the same period, I wasn’t feeling in a rush at all to play this kind of games. In fact, one of the very reasons I initiated the move to Moulis was to get some breathing space and to recenter on the core of my research job at a slow pace. Now I feel things are getting a bit upside down… maybe this blog entry is a good way to keep myself accountable to my original motivations. I’m approaching the end of this winter marathon though, and hopefully should have more time to actually do stuff in the next months (yes we always say this kind of things in academia, often not to avail in the end). While overworked, I still managed to put a full day aside in Moulis recently to discuss hands-on research projects with two colleagues there, which should start in March. With spring coming, things are also going to get a bit quieter on the astro management side, as the winter schedule in the French research system is always busy.
Anyways, recovering my spirits after a short holiday in the mountains, it is probably a good time to remember that a research career is a long, winding way, that the pressure we put on ourselves to eat big elephants all at once is quite silly and self-inflicted, and that it is also necessary to appreciate all the little steps taken along the way. For instance, I have been reading a few hundred pages of textbook evolutionary theory, population genetics etc. over the last two months, which, while not a big feat, is not nothing either. The numerical developments I’ve been working on in autumn are also now soon going to be put to good use, so it is hopefully a matter of patience and perseverance before the initial risk, and the significant extra work load I have put on my shoulders over the last year starts to bear fruit.
As for the diverse proposals we put in…it’s not just God that plays dice, the whole academic system does it all the time…Although the absurdity of it all still has me fuming on a regular basis, I have no other option but to accept it, and we’ll see how thing play out. This adventure, at least, is going to be a good crash test to see if “supporting interdisciplinarity” is more than a buzzword in the current system. Whatever the results, I would probably be well advised in the next months to keep the research passion, and the drive to make a small difference to the real world at the forefront of my own focus, and to step off the perpetual academic hamster wheel for a while. To more research action, and fewer applications.
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