cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Today was my last day of work at the University. I am finally going home in a few days. What did I get out of this past year? It was like being a phd student for a year. I worked in a lab doing cutting edge forest ent0mology work, in terms of g3nomics, phyl0geny, evolutionary biology, mycology, trees and insects. I was the embedded communications guy, but I was treated like any of the incoming phd candidates and post-docs and I think I learned as much as any of them did. Technically speaking, I am both a high school drop-out and a college drop-out. I have neither degree. To be invited and accepted into this world at the top of a particular area of academic biology was an honor and a privilege. It legitimized the years of work that I've done as a science journalist, clawing my way up from being the subject of weird news as a professional hunter. I started out in this neighborhood as a guy who killed and ate deer and taught classes on the subject. I was a notorious Neanderthal, covered in national news as the weird meat guy. And somehow, I leveraged that into working in the preeminent f0rest ent0mology lab studying invasive species. I left on my own terms. I mostly hate G@inesville and realized that my kids would be miserable living here, so didn't bring them down and instead opted to stick it out for one full year and give notice for that. For the last year I was treated as an equal among a broad scientific community. I learned so much from them. Entom0logy, of course. And fung@l ecology. And every week we had these amazing conversations in the lab about concepts in evolutionary biology and fishing and inv@sive biology. And they learned from me. Hell, how couldn't they? Everyone in this entire lab has been in college their entire life. They've never done anything else. Undergrad to masters to Phd to post-grad. I was literally the only person in the whole organization who had ever done anything else. And I've done a lot of anything else. It's a weird situation, moving out in a few days and about to drive back to Virginia. Poor Christa. In love with me. And she's great. She's done nothing wrong. But I have to go home and try to put my life back together. 2:50 a.m. - 2019-09-28 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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