One of the truly sad parts about academia and science is that as you go deeper and deeper into a subject, the circle of people who speak your default language shrinks. Academic siloes are real, and they prevent many scientists from taking a broader perspective of their work and communicating to those without a research background.
I’ve always wanted to push back against this. As you probably know from this site, I prefer plain language. I’ll use technical details when necessary, but we can go a long way to convey scientific ideas without them. Much like you can enjoy the emotional pull of a piece of music without knowing the intricacies in creating the piece, you can enjoy science without being an expert.
That’s why I applied to ComSciCon.
I think one of the main mistakes I’ve made in the past is discounting the role of people in how much I will enjoy an experience. Whether I was trying a new activity, thinking about work I wanted to do, or pondering which topic I should study, I would focus on the thing itself, and less on the conditions surrounding it. In particular, I would make my choices purely by if I was going to get anything out of the activity.
During my Master’s degree at Perimeter Institute, I changed my thinking for the better. Instead of focusing only on if an activity interested me, I started asking a new question: Who will I meet and interact with?
This question changed how I viewed life. It helped highlight how much potential enjoyment I was missing out on by not factoring in the interactions I would have with others.
For example, because I pushed myself to spend time with the others in my Master’s program, I developed friendships that I will have for the rest of my life. In the moment, I may have thought that going out with friends was pulling me away from the “real” reason I was in this program (to learn theoretical physics). However, I see now that the friendships I formed during the program were the point. They are more valuable than the physics I learned. This might not be true for every student, but it was for me.
I notice this now in my life quite a bit. As an introvert, I often discount or neglect the value of interacting with other people. I may instinctively only question if the activity is enjoyable. But once I remember the value of friendships and human interaction, I find myself saying yes to a lot more activities.
The friends you make and the people you meet, they are worth so much that it’s probably worth having a bias towards doing activities (particularly new ones) just to kickstart friend formation.
When I was an undergraduate first getting into research, I focused on hiding my lack of knowledge over growing from my confusion. I would often nod along while my supervisor said things I didn’t understand. I would fool myself into thinking that I could figure it out from context. I didn’t, since these were technical matters. I suspect that the mental structure my supervisor had in mind differed greatly from my own.
Insecurity held me back as a scientist. I didn’t want to expose my lack of understanding, and if I did think I understood, I didn’t want to check, because that meant I could have been wrong. I preferred projecting the illusion that I understood, even though in the long run it meant I understood less.
This experience reinforced an important lesson: speaking and writing are easy, but communicating is difficult. It’s one thing to transmit words and ideas, but quite another for the receiver to absorb them and build similar mental structures to your own.