A change would do me good

Over the past few weeks I've had a hard time explaining to people why I need a change of career, and it's hard to find the right words. Today I had a very long phone call with my mother, and we talked about all sorts of things (mostly her cats and my marble run). One of the things we talked about was my attitude towards finding a new career, and this was great, because I know that my mother is one of the few people who understands what I mean. She said to me (as has been saying for years) that "You've done that now, you can do something else" and this is pretty much what I'm thinking about the whole process. Apart from a one year sabbatical, I've been a physicist in some form or another for thirteen years, and a particle physicist for ten years. That's a long time to be doing anything, and it's time for a change. I'm very glad that I had the opportunity to study physics and take part in world class research and do not regret that choice for a second. It's given me so many new experiences, new friends, new chances to explore the world and all kinds of freedom I never had before. And that's precisely why I need to move on with my life and try something else. I need to find new opportunities and experiences that a life in particle physics can't offer. An opportunity to create a new company, or to create my own software, or develop a more creative skill set, or make enough money to retire early, or... the list goes on. In my later years, when I tire of software, I'd quite like to stand as an MP.

When I look for a new job I don't want to find something safe and comfortable and boring. Instead I ask myself how the job is going to challenge me, make me a better person, and help me to develop new skills or find new skills (or limitations) that I didn't know I had. If I get to my early 30s and people are already suggesting that I should start looking for a permanent position then I've clearly done something wrong. I would hate to look back ten years from now and think that I'd reached my peak at 33. As far as I'm concerned the physics research was not a means to an end, it was the end, it was the only reason I continue to perform physics analysis today. In all the jobs I've had I haven't been investing in my career, I've been investing in myself and my abilities. To some people this seems confusing and paradoxical, and I'm sure to some people it even seems disappointing. I don't understand this view at all. To have a full career plan carved out at any age seems like a deeply sad prospect to me, and the younger it happens, the sadder it is. Anyone who claims that someone should know what they want to do by the age of 16 must think very little of the capacity of other people and suffer from both a lack of imagination and a lack of realism. That's no surprise to anyone, and nearly everyone acknowledges this problem with encouraging young people to have career plans. All I ask is that we bump the age up to 30, 40, 50, any age we like. If someone thinks they know what they want to do with the rest of their life at the age of 50 then they're lacking imagination, ambition, curiosity, and/or confidence.

There are, of course, many other factors to consider, and so far I've only addressed desires, not realistic plans. When someone has a family to support, or other responsibilities that tie them down, or don't have the qualifications (academic or otherwise) they need to move onto something else, they may find themselves stuck and unable to change career. In those circumstances I imagine a comfortable and reliable job is very attractive, and I wouldn't want to show any disrespect for anyone who makes that choice. However it should be understood that this is not the positon I find myself in. In fact my problem is the exact opposite, I spent so much time and effort on my job to the exclusion of nearly everything else that I find diminishing returns in terms of my work life and plenty of room for growth in my personal life. What I want to do is find a job that gives me more freedom to pursue growth in both these areas. Something I can get my teeth into, while giving me more opportunities to get closer to my family and friends in the UK. My family is getting older and so am I, and I don't want to be so far away from anymore. So I'm well aware of my privilege and don't want to come across as insulting those who make other choices, or come across as someone who thinks less of them.

With that hand-wringing out of the way let's get back to the main point. The end of my career in physics is the end of a chapter in my life and the start of a new one. It's time to look at another empty apartment and to fill the shelves with new souvenirs and the picture frames with new memories, alongside the old and cherished ones. When I was younger I would often be sad when one of my favourite TV shows would end, or a band would break up, thinking what a loss it was to the world. However when I realised the artists who made these works wanted to move on to different things and find something new to create, I found a new respect for them and a new source of hope. There are plenty of examples of people who have moved on from their "greatest hits" to something less glamorous but more rewarding. I recently saw a TED tak where Bill Gates, who once resided over the most powerful software company in the world, had decided to use his vast fortune to help fix some of the biggest problems in the world. There's a man and an attitude I can respect. Not content with developing Microsoft, he decided to take his life in a completely different direction, create something new, give something back and not be afraid to fail every now and then. Right now I'm listening to IAMX, one of my favourite bands. Chris Corner made his name with the Sneaker Pimps in the late 90s, then the group broke up and he pursued a single career with IAMX. The music he's made has been more intense and been much less prominent in the media, but I get the impression his experience is all the better because of it. Again, I have a great deal of respect for someone who decided to pack up everything and move from Yorkshire to Berlin to do what he really wanted at the time, and I would love to see what he does next with his life.

One of the questions I get asked is "If you think physics and academia are so bad, what makes you think anything else will be any different?" First of all I obviously don't think physics and academia are bad, otherwise I would have left long ago. Secondly, "different" is exactly what I'm looking for. Different advantages, different problems, different frustrations, different pleasures. Different is good. Even if I'm no more or less happy in a new job at least it will be different enough to keep me interested in it. I'd rather be content and learning something new than content and bored. I hope this post answers some questions some people have been asking me. I don't see myself as Aidan the physicist, I see myself as Aidan the person, who can be more than just a physicist, and anyone who thinks differently thinks less of me for it.

It starts with a late night at the office...

This week has been a rather strange week. Right now I am sitting on the Eurostar, bound for London, and this visit to the UK was arranged in January when I felt it would be important to get away from the lab for a while and clear my head. With that in mind the purpose of this visit is to take some time to really ask myself what I want from a change in career.

There are certainly social aspects to the choice, because it's hard work having to make a new set of friends with every new job, and it gets increasingly difficult to make new friends as well as keep up with the old ones. It'll help to get some perspective, and I can do this by spending time with people outside the field, enjoying socialising with them and focusing on the things we enjoy that aren't physics. One of the biggest fears about changing career is that I will no longer be surrounded by people who enjoy solving problems and finding questions for the joy of it, because that is one of the most rewarding aspects of the job. If, after 10 days in the UK, I find myself climbing the walls looking for new problems to solve then this will be a hard process than I thought. If, on the other hand, I have a great time seeing family and friends and manage to get the balance right then this will give me many more options for a different job, and I would be content with a job I can leave at the office. That would be ideal because one of the biggest sacrifices I've had to make to follow my physics career has been having a difficult social life. There have been times when I've been very lonely, or frustrated at how little time I spend back in the UK seeing friends, and after a few years it no longer seems like a sacrifice worth making. As rewarding as the work is, it can't stay novel and exciting long enough to make it worthwhile, and in the meantime my social needs have changed.

This weekend I found myself falling into a couple of traps that I would fall into when at CERN. We had a Chinese student visiting for a few weeks and one of the things I wanted to do was to make sure he felt welcome at the lab and eager to come back, and to tell his fellow students to come to Belgium. Having been a student in a foreign country, spending a few weeks or days in one place, I know how isolating it can be. If you end up in a one room apartment with nothing to do except work and nobody to talk to, you soon feel the need to escape and never return. This is why I've spent so much time trying to make it easier for physicists to socialise and find common interests outside the field, and I'm glad to say it's worked to a large extent. However it's frustrating how little other people seem to care about it. Instead of showing this student around Belgium and sharing some of the history and food and culture with hin it should have been someone else's responsibility, but she didn't seem to show any interest. As a result I end up giving up some of my free time to help out a foreign student. I don't mind this, and I had a lot of fun, but this is an easy trap to fall into, the idea that it's acceptable for me to choose to give up my free time so easily. Clearly my priorities are starting to slip a little, and my social life is leaning on the lab more than it did a few weeks ago.

The other trap, which is more lethal, is the notion that work must be done at the expense of everything else. I had promised to give an update on Monday afternoon, and between a few bugs in the code, looking after the student, and having my phone stolen, I found myself falling behind. I had no choice but to do some work in the weekend to meet the deadline, and this was the first time I'd broken my resolution of not working outside the office and not working at weekends. Physics analysis is addictive, because each answer piques the curiosity, so you find yourself thinking "Just one more compilation, just one more selection." After starting work at 8pm on Sunday evening, I found myself collapsing into bed, jobs running, at 7am. I got a few hours sleep, wrote the talk and presented it from my kitchen (with apparently very good audio quality.) Since then I've been intrigued by the study. It's nice to see it all come together and tempting to just trim a bit here and there. In fact I ran a job while on the train just to see if I could improve things a little further. The problem is that this is what leads to obsessive behaviour, and that if I do this now, people will expect of me in the future (including myself.) I got lucky this time, because the results were what we expected and probably the final time I will have present them as they are. There have been many times in the past where I haven't been lucky and had to repeat the late nights many times, and that leads to very rapid deterioration of morale and quality of work. As a result I've decided that this week I will not work on any physics unless it's an emergency. We'll see how long that lasts. Physics is addictive, so I should find some other problem to work on to keep me busy.

Last night I arranged dinner a local restaurant with some people from the lab. We went there, had a good chat over some beers and burgers, and for the first time since my interview I got to have a long chat with my boss about where my career is heading. She's weighed down with many responsibilities so she has precious little time to discuss these things at the moment, but it was a relief to breach the subject with her in an informal environment, and we agreed that we need to have a longer chat some time in the future. We both want to make things as easy as possible, and we both want me to get excellent physics results while I'm at the lab, so the main point of contention will be about when the best time for to leave would be. From my point of view, it would be August 2015, but this might be very inconvenient for the lab, since we will still be in the early days of LHC Run II data taking. She hinted that she wanted me to stay until 2016, and that if we don't see new physics at that point then I'd have every right to leave the field and never look back. She also said something along the lines of the reason we stay in the field is because of love of the job. Well that's certainly true, there are parts of the job I love and can't find elsewhere, but then there are other things I love that I can't find working at the lab, including a higher salary for less work, a better working environment, and the chance to settle down somewhere. And if I do that in the UK I'm much more likely to find a long term partner as well. I got a chance to ask her about er own experiences as a postdoc and it seems she didn't face the same kinds of problems that I have done (although I'm sure she had her own problems) so while she can appreciate why I might not want to stay in the field, I doubt she can fully understand it. In the same way, I can't understand why she wanted to get a permanent position. To me, getting a permanent position in my early 30s is like a form of stagnation, as if that is best I can ever achieve in my career. It would be as if I was stuck in one job, in one place for the rest of my life. I'm not ready for that yet! I need to sort out my personal life before I do that! (Well not quite, I need to find a balance between the two, and stop putting my career ahead of my social life and love life.)

So it's been a week of gentle reminders of the dangers of physics addiction, and how it can slowly take over every aspect of my life if I let it. It's also a good time for me to reflect on my future and consider my options. I'll try to consolidate some more of my online projects and detail my work experience as I travel, putting my time to its best use. I'm about halfway through updating my portfolio and once that's finished, my website won't be far behind. Then I'll need to overhaul many of my online profiles to look a little more slick, then put some effort into improving the presentation of my non-physics based skills, such as blogging, communication, and long term policy work. There's a lot of experience to tap into there, and it won't be easy to summarise. I can see myself needing another trip to the UK to polish my CV and personal statement sometime in the summer...

Mode Analytics SQL School

One of my friend sent me the following page, which is an introduction to SQL commands. I've known how to use MySQL at a basic level for about seven years, but so far none of my projects have required me to learn pivot and join commands, so I suppose it's time I added that to my portfolio of skills! Mode Analytics SQL School

It's git time

I haven't published much on this blog lately because I've been spending my time developing another blog. Over the past few years I've worked a large range of different projects, many of them on my website. This involves taking my projects one by one, adding them to a git repository, adding documentation, adding a blog entry about and then committing them to github. The immediate reason for this is that when applying for a job that involves computing it helps to have a portfolio of projects for prospective employers to browse. The less immediate reason is that it's something I've been meaning to do for years. After about seven years of continual development, at varying levels of competence, my website is a complete mess. It seriously needs to be revamped and made more versatile. It's very refreshing to finally get around to doing this and satisfying to see it come together!

The new blog summarising my projects (in progress!)

Looking back over the past seven years I've realised that every step of the way I chosen projects which would allow me to develop my skills. This had lead to some code which today makes me cringe! I need to go back and fix up or completely delete some of the projects for the sake of sanity and security. In parallel to my skills developing the technology has changed as well. Back in 2008 SVG was all the rage and with PHP I could create any SVG document I wanted. Since then the canvas has enjoyed widespread support, so now it's all about Javascript and canvas. There are quite a few projects that need to make the transition from SVG to canvas (and maybe back again, because the formats aren't equivalent.) With the canvas things suddenly become more intuitive for the user- you can create and manipulate images using the canvas! So it's no surprise that many of the things I made involve clicking a canvas and interacting with shapes.

There are still gaps in my experience that need to be addressed. For example, I made an application that enabled users to login, but it wasn't exactly secure! In principle this is easy to do, and once I have a reason to make a project that involves logging in, I'll create one. Working on the projects blog has also helped me get to grips with Wordpress, and one of the things I want to do is write a few Wordpress themes to bring my CSS skills up to scratch. Then there's advanced API interaction. I have a handful of projects that need to interact with Twitter and have a MySQL backend, and that's not an easy task to get into! However once it's done I can use it elsewhere.

In addition to all that I've added more support for web development on my laptop. I now have a fully functioning apache server with PHP interfaced with MySQL. I finally upgraded TextWrangler to BBEdit and arranged all my projects using the dedicated BBEdit feature. Combine that with a "Labs" directory for testing out new ideas, and version control on GitHub and I've got quite an operation going on in my laptop!

Finally I gave my website a service, and as I process my projects one by one, the website too will change. The old homemade content management system has been disabled, I finally fixed the error pages to be a bit more useful, and the same setup works both locally and online (with a simple change of environment variables using .htaccess files). With that done it might also be time to give the user various CSS options to show off my l33t styling skills.

Let's also not forget the hundreds of gigabytes of photos I have stored away. I have plans for those too, eventually. If I can use them in my web design, all the better. And all this is to say nothing of my C++ and python skills. They need honing too. This year I plan to learn how to make a C++ executable from scratch, including the makefiles, the most feared and mysterious of files. It's going to be a fun year!

In case you're curious, here are the links:

• Projects blog
• GitHub

Diminishing Returns Part II

It seems that as you progress further in this field you end up spending less time actually discussing physics and more time sitting in meetings and discussing discussions.  It's becoming more and more rate to find times to actually discuss the difficulties we're facing and take part in a bit of problem solving.  After all that's what interest us as scientists, a mystery to be understood.

Recently I was appointed as a the electron contact for the CMS Exotica group.  This means that I form a point of contact between the two groups to make it easier to keep track of the latest studies and changes to analyses.  Its one of those tasks that is essential and isn't particularly difficult.  I consider it a responsibility as a postdoc to take on a role like this and I'm doing my best to make it easy and enjoyable, but at times it simply means reading several pages or papers and summarising them on another webpage.  That's one of those things that you have to be sufficiently knowledgeable to perform properly, but it is essentially just administration.  Writing about what someone else has written about an analysis is not how I want to spend the rest of my career.  It's not all bad of course, it's one of the quickest ways to learn about the electron reconstruction, which is essential to my analysis, and it gives me visibility which opens up new career options in the future.  But it is boring at times.

The situation gets more frustrating the higher you go.  I've spoken to group conveners and sub-conveners, whose roles are essentially to monitor the progress of analyses, and they have to find the compromise between meeting tight deadlines and giving the analysts the time they need to complete the studies.  When the analyst is a first year PhD student it can mean slow progress.  Having to sit back and watch someone perform a study much more slowly than you could manage can be a painful experience and teaches a great deal of patience.  Being a sub convener or convener would be the next logical step for me after working on analysis for a long time, but the idea does not appeal to me at all.

I'm naturally a problem solver and that's what I want to do for the rest of my life.  I'd rather make my own project than administer someone else's.  At the moment I can't see any future path in particle physics with lead to a situation where I'll get to spend more time problem solving.  Then again at least I'm not going to be person who makes a summary of my summary of other people's work.

How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang

This article was doing the rounds a while back: How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang

The promise of a professorship was never particularly glamorous to me, although the kinds of people who are drawn to that are the people I'm supposedly competing with every day. Im that guy who joins the gang simply for the joy of taking part in drive-by shootings and finding new ways improve the distribution of merchandise. The guy who's in the gang just to pass the time while he secretly learns how to flip burgers. That's sort of creepy. As the weeks pass by I find myself spending more and more time finding distractions. I find productive outlets for my problem solving urges, but I still can't shake the feeling that I need to be doing something else with my time.

Job market

I saw this on facebook and Buzzfeed. Notice how far away "Research scientist" is from sane working hours and respectable pay.

Creator: Kevin Tang