Aw, Now I'm All Warm On The Inside

Hey Friends,
Man do I feel great after some time home! Big thanks to everyone who played a part in that awesomeness, and, for those whom I haven't seen in a while, here's hoping our day will come soon.

To clarify, I got to spend a day or two in the Twin Cities, bus over to Milwaukee for a week to attend an ecology conference courtesy of St. Olaf, and then a couple days split between the Twin Cities and home before flying into Roswell tonight. MAAAN that felt good. Felt nice and warm on the inside, as opposed to here where i only feel warm on the outside.

Ecology conferences are great. More generally, I'm a fan of any gathering that reeks of science. I loved the symposium each spring at Olaf, and this ESA meeting was pretty much that, but more intense and lasting a week, the content of which covered pretty much all research contemporary in ecology. sweet! I'm finally feeling very, very motivated... like, grad school motivated. Seriously.

My rationale for taking a job in monitoring (as opposed to research) was to see another side of what people do with biology degrees. College is great for getting a thorough look in how people are using their degrees, at college. And in regards to biology, that's going to be research and teaching for the most part. Yet there's a slew of other stuff, the non-ivory tower stuff like catching lizards with sticks and getting your truck stuck, that just doesn't get represented. perhaps rightly so. and you know what? I really haven't cared to advance in monitoring, at least based upon what I've experienced so far. But now i know. So... grad school?

I told myself I'd have to have a real passion for something before pursuing it at the graduate level. And, I think ESA might have opened my eyes to something. Firstly, how confusing and convoluted the field of ecology is! Many if not most of the research presented at a place like ESA goes something like this.

So, I draw inferences about (hypothetical construct) and support the current model of Dr. So&so et al. (year), based upon the past (3 - 6) years of my life spent bent over a patch of soil observing (latin name of organism, probably 30+ letters and uninteresting) as a case study.

Not to diminish research in ecology (heavens no!), or to suggest it should be done any differently. That's just how a great deal of it runs. Doing something not terribly interesting to people at large (i.e. sampling soil, counting maggots, measuring carapaces, etc.) to support or refute some construct developed by someone else twenty years ago. As a result, a lot of biologists I've met have an organism that they've pretty much banked their careers on (at Olaf for example, Freedberg = turtles, Crisp = leeches, Porterfield = fish esp. long-eared sunfish, etc). I'm not sure I'll ever have a passion for any particular case study like that, but you never know. I see myself more as a theory guy.

And, I love evolution. yep, at a personal level too. Feel it pretty much explains everything, and when I think of academic biology in my time beyond St. Olaf, its pretty much always geared toward applying evolutionary theory somehow. It's a definite grad school possibility for me, though yeah, vague at this point. I found myself gravitating towards the evolution-related talks at ESA, and was interested to hear that the evolution guys have their own conferences as well (according to one ecologist I talked to, evolutionary biologists are seen as more competitive, and less collaborative, than ecologists. That natural selection, i tell ya. gets into your brain.)

So for now.. yeah, more stuff to figure out. Viva la evolution!