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NNadir

(33,512 posts)
6. This is a good place to practice communication.
Thu Jul 23, 2020, 01:48 PM
Jul 2020

Frankly I'm not great at science communication because I'm an old curmudgeon with a mean streak...

I have some advice for you though if you're not doing this already. You need to set a little bit of time each week to read through the advice in the Science and Nature Career sections. They're totally open sourced, no subscription or library access required.

Many of the struggles scientists go through are addressed in these little articles which are a quick read which can take your mind off things and make you recognize you're not alone.

I'm definitely too old to change my approach to my career, but I send links to notes in these career sections to my son all the time because, as an old man, I wish I had read them when I was younger. (Whether he actually reads them or not, I can't say, but he's always getting tiresome advice from his old man anyway. When I'm dead he may appreciate it.)

When you do science, you can feel very small, because the key to being a good scientist is knowing what you don't know and, frankly, being a little intimidated by what you don't know. When I was very young, the son of two parents who never finished high school and one who never started high school, I always thought everyone I met was smarter than I am. I wasted a lot of time worrying about that. Everyone struggles.

When my son was in elementary school, they had a little poster in the music department that referred to a quote from Albert Einstein which read, "If you think you have trouble with mathematics, I assure you mine are much worse." (He needed help from his friend Marcel Grossmann to get help around tensor algebra.)

I recently looked into the life of Donald Cram, who won the Nobel for Host/Guest chemistry, a key concept to this day. He said that his greatest satisfaction was recognizing at the end of a particular project how he should have started it, although invariably he didn't start it that way.

Life is like that, I think, which is why we old people say all the time, "I wish I knew what I know now when I was younger..." ...or, the other more bitter comment, "...youth is wasted on the young..."

I am vicariously young through my sons.

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