Sometimes I wonder what I'd do instead of science.
What would you be doing if you weren't a scientist? That's what I asked my classmates at the end of our second year of graduate school. By then they'd begun to recognize the difficulty of a career in science. The list of dream alternatives was impressively diverse: four restaurateurs, two concert violinists, one dancer, one fashion designer and a professional roller-hockey player.
What struck me, re-reading this list recently, is how many people's idealized career alternatives were their hobbies. I guess this makes sense. Advice columns are always telling you to make your passion your career. That's what attracted most of us to science in the first place. We were the ones building batteries out of stuff we found in the garage and trying to culture microorganisms from the vegetable drawer. But that childhood passion never included writing grants, rushing to publish or scheduling your life around your experiments.
Then again, I doubt that the would-be restaurateurs were thinking about health inspections or the aspiring singers about contract negotiations. As graduate school has become progressively more stressful, I've increasingly had to remind myself of the passion that brought me here. My hobby — cheese making — helps. I'm not actually tempted to do it professionally, but watching microbes transform milk in my kitchen is still a thrilling display of science.
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Milan de Vries is a molecular-biology graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Milan de Vries
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de Vries, M. Roller hockey or science?. Nature 444, 516 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nj7118-516c
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nj7118-516c