Feeling the Burn...

This was a pretty rough summer for me on many fronts: some personal, some professional. The latter had a lot to do with my effort to juggle a fairly time-consuming research project, while trying to manage an ever-shifting 'side-project' that lacked a clear objective and continued to metamorphose as the weeks went by. Sadly, I ended up writing 25 pages of a manuscript that will not see the light of publication in its current form¹.

I worked really hard on that side-project, so much so that I essentially abandoned my 'main' research for ~2 months. That's really not a lot of wasted time in the grand scheme of things. I suppose I've wasted more time in the past, but that was 4 years ago now and I've become quite used to being extremely organized about effort.

This brings us to the title of my post - I feel like I experienced a minor burn-out. I can tell that my general love of science, which is to say the amount of time I spend actively immersing myself in scientific culture outside of the work I'm required to do, dropped a bit during this season. I stopped reading science books, stopped following science blogs, stopped talking about science outside the lab, etc. As I'm sure I've said many times on the blog, this isn't very conducive to being in the sciences: research is a difficult job to pursue if you're not regularly thinking about possible ways to expand your work. It's also a heck of a lot of work to not enjoy, if you catch my drift.

I can feel some of my enthusiasm returning though. This is partially seasonal: Autumn is by far my favorite time of the year, and I'm looking forward to such niceties as colorful leaves, pumpkin pies, and not sweating to death every single day (the ice-water that flows through my Canadian veins isn't built for the heat here). However, the major part of my changing attitude is probably getting back to my main project. This is what I came here to do, and what I what I wrote-up for my funding proposal: It's what I actually wanted to work on. Oh, it's also helping that I'm reading science books again - Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions will be a book club post soon!

Hopefully I'll come around soon. Hey, if everything becomes rosy again and I get a few hours of free time, maybe I'll continue blogging about that crazy alien book again. Who knows?


¹All is not lost, however, as I learned a lot of useful information/techniques in preparing said manuscript, and large sections of it will be cannibalized for a forthcoming study.