drossbucket

There was one more thing I meant to port over from the old tumblr and forgot: a list of what I loved about my old research group. It was never under the ‘mathbucket’ tag, but goes a long way to explaining what I care about in maths and physics, what I missed horribly when I left and what I’m working towards finding again.

• Everyone is interested in a wide variety of things – other areas of maths and physics, other academic subjects, various sports and arts and hobbies. Nobody expects you to just be narrowly focussed on learning about your specialism.

• Getting better at these things is valued. A little bit of bragging is alright as long as you don’t get too obnoxious about it.

• Helping other people get better at these things is valued. Being able to explain your work in plain language is valued. Writing a clear paper, giving an entertaining talk or writing for a nonspecialist audience are all considered worthwhile, as well as technical competence in your own research area.

• (This one’s important) An almost total absence of that competitive one-upping thing where everyone spends their time proving how much smarter they are than everyone else, or looking down on other subdisciplines as less important/fundamental/difficult/rigorous than their own. This is all over the place in physics, I hate it, and I was very very lucky to avoid most of it.

• Playfulness, silliness, gurning, stupid repetitive injokes, awful songs played over and over again, pointless fun distracting projects with absolutely no relevance to anyone’s research.

• A kind of glorying in being stubbornly independent-minded and prepared to defend your own stupid opinion. ‘That is bollocks and I will tell you why.’ But always grinning as you say it, and sometimes you discover that it isn’t bollocks and admit you’ve changed your mind.

(Disclaimer I added a bit later: I’m not saying it was a perfect fit for me. It was more undisciplined and structureless and anarchic than I really knew how to deal with, and I was very lazy and unfocussed a lot of the time. This stored up problems for me in the long run, and finishing on time was a miserable ordeal. But there was a lot of good there.)