A strange career, so far

Near the end of my first year of grad school, a grad student that used the same lab facility asked me if I had changed since starting grad school. Still being very new, I didn't see any real difference. He said that he had became much more introverted as a result of spending so much time working alone. The lab that we used was a series of MRI machines, and users reserved a block of time to do their experiments. Since only one of the machines was used, the building was generally empty except for the current user. (As an aside, the professor in charge of the lab was fired a couple years later. Another year or so after that, he won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for being the first person to put the "I" in MRI back in the 1970s).

I'm currently 8 months into my second post-doc. The first lasted 2 years at Los Alamos Bomb factory. Grad school lasted about 5 years. Here's the inspiration for this post: I estimate that during the last 5 years, I've spent 1 hour per week talking to another employee about my work. I'm not a really hard worker, so assume that only 39 or so other hours were spent at work in a week. I have my own office here, had my own office in Los Alamos, and shared an office with 3 experimentalists that were rarely in the office during grad school.

How does this happen? In grad school, I worked on my own project with no one else. In LA, our project had 2 other post-docs and several staffers, but it was broken amongst a couple of labs and there wasn't much overlap. My supervisor handed my off to the project leader, but he was really busy. Here, it's just me and my supervisor. If he doesn't talk to me, no talk.

Late last summer, I decided that this was enough for me and planned to join my dad's hvac controls company after my contract was up. Didn't work out.

My current job is responsible for raising my average interpersonal interaction rate. There've been several days this summer where my boss and I worked on a code together for a few hours a day. Those were the days! I have hopes that this trend will continue, but there are still many days that involve no work interaction.

Mercifully, I don't feel that I've become much more introverted like the fellow-lab-user-at-different-times-person did. For one, I got married after my 2nd year of grad school. Coming home to the owner of the Baby Blue Bicycle is indeed a blessing. Nearly all of my time away from work is spent with her. The second factor is that in LA and here, I ride with a group of fellow cyclists during lunch a few days per week. Though the conversations aren't always inspiring, just being able to talk to other people helps.

There will be a change soon though. I should have my current job through next October. But that's where the buck stops. I WILL get a job that requires some measure of teamwork. You might say you're boss and coworkers drive you crazy and make you work too hard. You might say that I'll be wishing for my current situation after one week in a different job. You might be right.