The Unconventionalists

Nature (the journal) is running a theme this week on the future of the PhD. Some interesting convos going on in the comments over there, and I even found another cool book to read from it.
One blog post at the nature network stuck with me though. This scientist-in-training reflected on her unconventional aspirations and how others would react:

In the cover of my unspoken reality, I dared to be disappointed with my top 5 academic institution, where to entertain creative ideas of a non-traditional career in the sciences was to be exiled from the class of 'serious' scientists. A lullaby for a weaker child of chemistry. Enjoy your dreams of a lesser biology. She couldn't make it in the big leagues, they'd say. So I hide my dreams of translating science, colorful pages lost in a library of dull covers with obscure, impossible-to-pronounce titles. Surface Plasmon Resonance Series - Nanotechnology-based Sensors. Professor, here is my secret: such a library of science begs translation for the curious non-scientists. Thrilling stories of scientific discoveries that will make our fellow non-scientists as curious as we. Put me in coach. The only thing I know better than science, is the art and draw of language.

As someone with a non-traditional trajectory in medicine, I can hear her picturing others thinking "what are you doing here"... and have had others tell me the same thing. It can be frustrating at times, but I love her "Professor, here is my secret" line, it really captures how I feel when people ask my planned specialty or wonder how what I have planned with medicine...and why I persist on reading fiction in the middle of the semester. And then I run across quotes like these and feel a little bit better about it:

I cannot serve as an example for younger scientists to follow. What I teach cannot be learned. I have never been a '100 percent scientist.' My reading has always been shamefully nonprofessional. I do not own an attaché case, and therefore cannot carry it home at night, full of journals and papers to read. I like long vacations, and a catalogue of my activities in general would be a scandal in the ears of the apostles of cost-effectiveness. I do not play the recorder, nor do I like to attend NATO workshops on a Greek island or a Sicilian mountain top; this shows that I am not even a molecular biologist. In fact, the list of what I have not got makes up the American Dream. Readers, if any, will conclude rightly that the Gradus ad Parnassum will have to be learned at somebody else's feet.
-Erwin Chargaff
Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life before Nature