Tagging along from one of the previous posts about people’s jobs, what are your favorite things about your job. If you can’t think of anything, then what are your least favorite things about it or what do you think you’d like to do instead if you could?
My favorite thing is the appreciation we get from passerby. I’ve never had a job where people are genuinely appreciative of what we are doing, and it’s nice to get that feedback from people even though the work itself can be pretty difficult. If there wasn’t that for my job, it would certainly be less rewarding.
I’m in academia. I like how many vibrant and wonderful people I meet. I love asking PhD students to tell me about their research areas, which are often so absurdly niche that I have no idea what it means, but I love being made aware of my own relative smallness. And I love being challenged to think about my own privilege in being here, how the ivory tower of research has been and is still a force of oppression in the world, especially in the context of colonialism. I like being challenged in this way because it prevents me from becoming comfortable in my ideology and challenges me to think of what science would look like in a fair and just world, and indeed, whether it would exist at all. These might seem like odd things for me to count as my favourite aspects but it’s because I love science, and I firmly believe that if you have to lie about something in order to love it, that love is no true love.
I think a lot about how to reach other people, to share the love that I feel for my subject, and though I haven’t done much teaching yet, I look forward to being able to learn from my students as they learn from me.