And The Bell Tolls

Yes it does. It tolls for my former life as a scientist. Gone. All gone 🙁

Really, I wasn’t a scientist in the true sense of the word. In this country anyway. In this country, to call yourself a scientist you need a PhD, and usually som time under the PostDoc umbrella. My actual title for five years was Research Assistant – aka “one who does all the work but gets none of the credit” 😆 Actually, in terms of giving credit, my boss was quite reasonable. He gave his RAs responsibility for their own projects, and I even have authorship (not primary, alas) on a few papers. So with those, and a published Abstract and conference poster from my year-long Honours project, I felt like I could call myself a scientist… at least to those who wouldn’t know any better!

I left it behind, though, for something which gives me a lot more potential to enjoy myself. I had no intention of ever doing a PhD, and without that, there’s nowhere much else to go – sideways, from academia into industry, would’ve been the most attractive option. My little sister took that option. I completely backtracked and started studying again, in a whole different area. As difficult as it has been, studying while raising a baby, I really am loving web programming. Perhaps one day I might actually feel like working for a living again!

But back to that bell tolling. For a long, looong time, all of my lecture notes and other stuff from uni (the first degree) has been in storage. Probably 5 or 6 years. I’ve obviously never had a need to refer to it, but something kept me from throwing it out. Tonight was the night though. Not enough storage space at our new place, so there are now two boxes worth of papers waiting out front to be picked up by the recycling truck 🙁 I had to let OtherHalf throw most of it in the bin while I turned away. I know it’s sheer craziness, but it feels like a whole lot of my previous life just got erased.

Oh well… moving right along…

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