Juggling Communication Into My Calendar

It’s about time that I wrote my next Blog Post. As you may recall from one of my old posts on Hallows or Horcruxes, as a researcher, my daily question is whether to spend time on grants or papers. What I neglected to mention is that as a Professor, I also have a long list of other items that I must address in order to keep up my research (and teaching) enterprise moving forward. The fact that I enjoy many of these tasks doesn’t detract from the fact that they take time. Alas my blogging has suffered.

So where's the "chemistry" in the fact that I have been a slacker in not writing on my everywherechemistry blog? Sadly, it partially lies in the fact that all of my chemistry colleagues are equally overburdened. E-mail has become a daily chore with hundreds of messages that must be deleted, responded to immediately, or which require significant deliverables that require even more time. I know that this is no different than what other professionals experience. It is a sign of the times. Electronic communication has increased our ability to share our chemistry with each other, but it has also increased our volume of work. The ease in travel also tempts us to move our bodies, not just electrons, to distant places. It allows me to interact with chemists (and other scientists) directly, and mentor students whom I would not meet otherwise. That human touch provides more substance to the methods and approaches that we are developing and teaching each other.

Thus communication in all its forms is critical to learning and advancing chemistry. This is a fact that may have been lost on you as you learned how to balance chemical reactions, how to name molecules or how to calculate the wave functions associated with chemical bonds. Nevertheless, it's a critical part of doing chemistry... And I'm happy to be back on my blog! Please stay tuned.

The Academic Juggle: Hallows or Horcruxes

Every day, entering the office, I face the question of whether to write papers or grant proposals amidst the flood of other tasks. Yes, we all have to deal with managing time lines. But the question is akin to the one that Harry Potter faced when trying to decide between chasing after horcruxes or hallows. The horcruxes represent the immediate problem. The hallows offer the possibility of solving this and any other problem. In the fictional case, the hallows are also the temptation to become evil. Focusing on them would likely be done at the expense of ridding the world of the latest evil, Voldemort, and would also lead Harry to become evil. This is the Faustian bargain revisited. Like Goethe before us, let's remove the unfair rule that one isn't dammed just for playing. The question then centers on how we should balance our time on the short-term versus the long-term. That is, without papers, you won't earn the next grant, but if you never write grants, then you won't have funds to do the research that you will document in your next journal article.

Some researchers love to write articles because it is part of their process to do the research, diving deeply into the details that you have to get 100% right or else the logic of the paper falls. Some researchers love to write grants because they enjoy thinking about the possibilities that have yet to be explored without having to worry about the details that might muck it up. Still others enjoy neither because they dislike the toil of writing let alone the fact that it takes you away from actually doing the research. Or perhaps you prefer to do something else entirely, like writing blog posts? Regardless, you have to choose between hallows or horcruxes, not just the one time as Harry did, but every day.  It is the daily need to make a conscious choice over the prioritization of articles, grants, and everything else that makes being an academic researcher both challenging and exciting. We're not Harry Potter. We don't have a wand. We can't make (unexplainable) magic. We don't have the glasses. O.k., maybe we do have the glasses. But we do get to choose our own adventure as we as advance the limits of our understanding.

Little boy blue and the man on the moon...

Work-life balance. If you're thinking about it, like me, you've likely already tipped the scales. For me, the old Cats Steven song,* Cat's in the Cradle, serves as a clarion call reminding me that my actions today will be rewarded or penalized later. It's seemingly easy to ignore any one request to play with my son today. After all what could it hurt? But there's a tipping point beyond which I would essentially never play with him, never teach him anything, and thus not have him around in the long term. One could argue that science is another such a child in my life, and it too requires my attention so as to remain on the productive side of its tipping point. This is yet another nonlinear dynamics problem for which I seek a partitioning of time that gives rise to a global fixed point. The trivial solutions would result in the loss of grants or detrimental effects on my relationships. The good news is that there are existence proofs that nontrivial healthy solutions exist! (And hopefully I'm maintaining one of them.)

A similar question arises when you run a research group. Each of my students requires just the right balance of training and freedom to venture into our joint research problems. She or he has little choice—once in the group—but to trust in my approach and in our group culture. That is, unless there is a catastrophic event that results in them leaving before achieving their degree. Like the little boy in the song, though, once graduated my students have the choice to remember their experience positively or negatively. If the former, this gives rise to an alumni network of students who continue to interact with each other and me. Thus the seeds of collaboration and interaction planted during their training continues to give back substantially to the other members of my group and me. But it's my choice to make those investments, and sadly not everyone makes this choice. So one of the pieces of advice to the students at the Future Faculty Workshop was simply: invest your time in mentoring the kind of group you want now and later. The former is your choice, but you will reap the latter accordingly.

*The lyrics of Cat's in the Cradle were written by Sandy & Harry Chapin, though I have mostly heard them on the Cats Steven soundtrack.