Sunday, September 12, 2010

Poor, neglected blog

Since I haven't written here in MONTHS, and haven't written consistently in probably years, I would be shocked if anyone is reading this. So thank you, whoever happens to be here!

I have now been graduated and working for a little over a year now, and am still adjusting to life outside the ivory tower. And, to be frank, I'm not sure if I really love it. So I want to go back to school for a PhD? No, not right now. But someday? I probably won't be able to resist.

It's funny, it's not that "real life" is hard and that I want to go back to the "easy" life of academia, as people would probably suspect. No, it's more that I am finding this working life is not as challenging as the academic world was and I'm finding my mind is gasping for more.

My job itself is pretty great, and I have done some things to make it more intellectually stimulating (and it is much more intellectually stimulating than many jobs out there), but it's still not quite enough, I think.

I want to push at the boundaries of what it is that we know, not just use already existing information, and find *answers* to the questions I have in the clinic.

In a typical clinic day, there just is not the time to hunt down answers to all the of questions that come up: how many times a week should I see this patient? How much progress can they make with factors X, Y and Z? Should I use this approach or this approach? And even if I did manage to hunt down answers to those questions, the odds are that I would find that zero research has been done on a given topic.

In an ideal world, half my time would be spent in a clinic and the other half would be spent doing research on clinical topics (or at least theoretical topics that could affect clinical practice).

Will that happen? Hopefully. Soon? Maybe not. It is pretty darn nice not having homework!