As I huddle down in the only room in the apartment that has doors and a working heater, and review what I’ve compiled for my job application package, I once again tackle the difficult question of “what the hell do I want?”
The possible future paths my life can take overwhelm me. I like to have a clear vision, and I’m simply unable to generate one now. I can isolate a few aspects of life that I want, but placing them into a specific context, I draw a big question mark. Further thinking about how to balance professional with personal life goals makes the future a limitless, unsolvable equation.
One issue I have is the degree to which my two professional choices are mutually exclusive; qualitatively I can do everything I professionally want in either, but quantitatively there are big differences. In one career I could work on the thing that I am most passionate about, and find deeply, truly fulfilling and pleasurable. This is the aspect of my research that people most associate me with, the stuff that comes easily and naturally, and in many ways, my so-called calling in life. Yet this is the area of my research that I refer to as my ‘secondary specialisation’. I want to be the world’s leading expert in this area and, already in the top ten and still under 40, I have the potential to be just that. But the actual job for doing exclusively this doesn’t exist yet, and maybe never will. Furthermore, if it did, I would be giving up most of my primary research, and all the hard work I’ve done to establish myself even a little bit in my field; thus I consider my passion to be a secondary specialisation.
The other career path, I continue my primary research, ask the scientific questions I want to ask, find out the answers to questions that often keep me up at night trying to solve, and overall get to contribute more broadly to a challenging field. I still get to work on my passion, but it really would become a secondary specialisation, as administration, grad students, lectures and pressures to publish in high-end journals etc. would consume most of my research time and energies.
When I was finishing my PhD, I gave a seminar to the department. I had one slide introducing my ‘secondary specialisation’ and the rest focussed on my scientific questions. Afterwards people who were not familiar with my research came up to me and told me how passionate I was about this ‘secondary specialisation’. I asked how they could tell with such limited discussion of it, and they said “your eyes lit up when you talked about it’. Okay, so why am I fighting it? Why not work the rest of my life on my passion? Why sacrifice the ability to work the rest of my life on my passion? Well, I have ego. I spent many years in a degrading job, being treated as worthless and having people expect very little of me. I still feel I need to prove to myself I'm not a loser. Career path two is more prestigious. Career path two is more likely to bring me geographically closer to family and friends (though still unlikely). And what’s more, career path two is the harder path. If I opt out of career path two will I always wonder whether I was good enough?
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