Today marks six months at my new job. If someone had told me a year ago, when I was deep in the academic job hunt madness, that I would have found a job as intellectually fulfilling, interesting, challenging, and enjoyable as the one I currently have I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have believed it. Part of that is probably because I didn’t know this kind of job existed. As it turned out for me, everything worked out: the job hunt didn’t actually destroy me, I learned a lot about myself and the type of work I really want to do and the manner in which I want to do it, and I found this awesome job at an awesome place in California (and not half way around the world).
I have had the great pleasure to work on a number of really interesting and diverse* projects just in these first six months, many of which would never had been available to me in a more traditional academic setting. Moreover, the people that I have been working with are great in so many ways. There is a true sense of collegiality and cooperation, which I had experienced before, but never thought possible at the scale at which we have it here at SRI. The teamwork and support structure makes our large and complicated projects possible.
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*Diverse meaning that I am working on one project that reaches across the whole U.S. at multiple grades, another where I am helping evaluate a middle school science curriculum, another where I am part of a small team that is looking into the different use cases of a specific technology in science classrooms, and a big one where I’m leading a team doing a meta-analysis. Every day is a new adventure. :)
Cynthia D'Angelo 