Happy New Year! Everyone talks though about making new years' resolutions. I don't do that anymore. January 1st is merely an arbitrary date on the calender. Every day is New Years really.
I've been meaning to write this post for a while but this is the first time I had a chance to do so. A little while ago I had lunch with my PhD advisor. It was great seeing him and catching up, but talk about a time distortion.
I was immediately brought back to Winter 2000/2001. I had just turned 28. I drove a beat-up 10-year-old Honda Civic hatchback with well over 100,000 miles that had a tear in the seats and no air-conditioning. This despite the fact that Baltimore summers are about as hot and humid as anywhere else in the country. I was working 70-hour weeks and making do on something like $1200/month. And yet, I felt like I was about to make it big.
I just felt like I was on the rise in a big way. A research project that I was working on--the final part of my thesis--was accepted to one of the most prestigious conferences in the country. I spent a couple weeks in early November 2000 in sunny Redondo Beach, CA presenting it. When I was there I got an interview with the person who headed a prestigious research group in Princeton. (He must have been impressed because I got the offer that January for my dream job.) As I walked along the Pacific Ocean just after dusk one day during that trip, I felt really good for how the past 4 years went. I felt really good about how that research project turned out, especially after all that hard work I put into it. I felt really good to be doing what I always wanted to do--making contributions to science, and that someone felt that what I was doing was that valuable that I got that all-expenses-paid trip out to SoCal when Maryland was shivering via an unusually cold fall. I guess I also felt really proud to be the first person in my family to earn an advanced degree, and to move away and make a life for himself so far away from home. I also wondered what the next 10 years would hold.
The next 10 years were actually quite a bumpy ride. I got complacent, suffered from burn-out, fell in love, screwed that up royally, got sick, and actually had to move home for a few months. I felt at this point like a huge failure. By 2007 I was out of mathematics. I did end up getting a job in software development and even though it wasn't what I wanted to be spending my life doing, I appreciated the fact that I was making a more-than-comfortable income (for the first time in my life). I was finally paying off all my student loans and establishing a financial cushion.
Then in 2007 a friend of mine invited me to where I am at now, to come down and give a talk on my research that I had done as a graduate student. The talk went really well, and I was offered a job. If I accepted, I would be back in mathematics. It wasn't a professorship as I had dreamed about back in 2000, but it was a chance to do what I had loved again and get paid. I accepted the offer. I've been here for 6 years and time has flown for me.
And yet driving home from lunch in my Jeep on I-97 South, I couldn't help but feel a bit sad. That Aerosmith song was running through my head. The 28-year-old version of me was a hard-charging young man who had all these big visions of changing the world. He could get by living on so little. He had no idea though, of how fast the time would go between 28 and 41.
The version of me now still wants to do that, but at the same time, a lot of that fire is gone. I leave work at a civilized hour (usually). I'm happy making a good living and that I've (finally) built up a cushion. I like being comfortable.
Yet I am also idealistic. I still want to climb the mountain. I'm doing soul-searching to discover what it will take for me to get the passion back, or for me to come to peace that the passion for me, is gone at least when it comes to science. and it is time to move on to finding joy in something else.
Maybe this is a part of growing up though....
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