Would You Like Some Cheese With That W(h)ine?

It’s September 2007.

I began graduate school in 2002.

That’s five years of my life. Five years of my life working my ass off for bupkiss and feeling like a failure 9 out of 10 days.

And when I look back over my life it’s also the point at which I begin to feel the “seven year itch”. It doesn’t seem to matter what I’m doing, who I’m with, or where I live. Five years is my max in any same surrounding. And while I have no desire to switch careers, as I truly love being a biologist, I feel it is time to switch institutions…cities…states. But I’m trapped both by obligation to and love for my research.

I wonder if this is how the married with children feel when the magic is gone. You don’t want to stay…but you can't/don’t really want to leave either.

My boss wants me to take a tenure track faculty position, after another 2-4 years of working my ass off for bupkiss and feeling like a failure 9 out of 10 days. And I dont even have my PhD yet!

From Dictionary.com: Tenure- status granted to an employee, usually after a probationary period, indicating that the position or employment is permanent.

PERMANENT?!?!?! Thanks, but I don’t do permanent. And, quite frankly, I don’t understand people that do. How do people look out over the landscape of their future comfortable in the knowledge that little will change so long as they have anything to say on the matter?

What have I gotten myself into?

Someone once said to me that “there would be a lot less suicide in the world if people just realized that everything is temporary”. And I believe that. Because, what is really permanent? What is really constant? And should we trust anything that is?

Nothing is permanent and everything is temporary.

So, I spoke to my boss about being a science editor for a someplace like Science magazine or a newspaper. Maybe even Scientific American. Not a bad rag if you ask me. And we both know that literature reviews and writing papers are my strong suits.

But don’t underestimate your talents as an experimentalist he says.

And I don’t. I know I have good hands and if it can be done I can figure out how to do it. Hell…I work less than most an accomplish more. My skills or lack thereof aren’t what’s in question. What is in question is what I actually want to do.

But it’s so hard to get back into “hard-core” science once you leave, he says. And he’s right. Despite Brian May’s recent ascension to the ranks of PhD after 36 years playing guitar for Queen it’s not the same for us biomed geeks. Things move faster in the world of biomedical research than they do in Zodiacal Dust Clouds.

But is that a reason to chain oneself to being one thing? Would I really be making a point of no return decision should I decide to “leave the bench”?

I used to be an accountant…and I got to tell you…as dull as it was…sometimes I miss it. I actually miss the dull. Which means at some point I’ll probably miss the daily knots in my belly over that which I cannot control or that which I do not understand.

And on that note…I’m going to go start in on the w(h)ine…