What does a bunch of hard work, good graduate training, some letters after your name, fantastic post-doctoral training at an Ivy League Medical School and about 400,000 cups of coffee get you? Well, it gets you lost. What it does not get you is a j-o-b. In today's academic environment, jobs are tough to come by and the chances of getting grants are, well, to quote an old friend's father, "Slim and none and Slim left town". What all of that training, a decent volume of publications to go with it, and a marriage to budding pediatric surgeon does get you is a little lost and a lot of consternation.
Unfortunately, I realized about 3 years into my postdoctoral training that I, in fact, may not really want to continue my path in basic science and academics. Further, I was doing my post-graduate training in a lab that, while full of really bright people and led by the brightest person I've ever met, was focused on research that really didn't mesh with my own. It was also on the verge of being considered a "hard-core" basic science lab, which meant that everyone lives and breathes science and medicine and all would like to either continue their current existence or progress to having a tenure-track faculty position and a lab of their own. So, if I didn't really do what the others did (think of that Sesame Street game with the squares and "which of these things is doing their own thing, which of these things is not the same" playing) and really might be interested in pursuing the evil alternative career path, then what does that make me? It makes me an official black sheep. Define irony. Dr. Shepherd is actually a black sheep.
So what do I want to do and what am I going to do? Well, the fact is that I've been attracted to science and medicine for different reasons than the classical scientist. I like to know stuff. I love to know stuff. I love to know stuff so much that I am easily distracted by, and easily enthralled with, a wide variety of things. As a former Division I athlete, I love sports. I think fighter jets are awesome because I can't fathom the engineering that is behind that. Ditto techonology, in general. How cool is a 9T MRI image? I'm a political junky. I'll even watch FoxNoise to hear what those clowns say. I'll read my wife's Urology textbooks just to know about nephrectomies. I wrote/edited a book chapter in prostate cancer screening and wrote/edited a manuscript on cloacal exstrophy just because I enjoyed finding the information and really felt I needed to remedy what could only be called a remedial control of the English language displayed by some of the attending urologists training my wife.
In reality, I don't think that I love science enough to do science forever. What science has provided me is the chance to learn more and more stuff. From engineering, to imaging, microsurgery, to pharmacology, molecular biology, to the practice of cardiovascular perfusion. There is a boatload of crap out there to learn. But, I don't know if I've ever truly been passionate about science or about my own science outside of the fact that it was my project and finishing it would earn me my PhD, or post-doc, or faculty appointment. Well, now that those bones have been eaten, it's time to make some hard decisions.
So, it's time for Dr. Shepherd to get found and get a job. It's time for me to put some of my unique skill set to work and use all of that training for something other than pipetting and suturing mice. If you love to learn stuff, for me, there's nowhere better to go than a place where you know very little and are very intrigued. For me, that's business and economics. Specifically the business and equity management of biotechnology, pharma and healthcare.
Let's see if I can find a new project.
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