Kudos to the Experimenter
Triggered by reminders of few who surprise me as expectant readers of my blogs I am writing this to share the reasons for my absence from the blogosphere: my summer romance!! I fell in love all over again for the field of research I committed into discovering facets that reminds me of the dizzy elation of first few dates. Having lived through rigors of first year of study, summer was a time for (surprisingly!) more work and lots of reflection. What follows is the tale of my rejuvenated affection for the choice of my life’s work.
It is said that your context defines who you are. What have you been educated in and what profession you choose can radically transform you as a person. On top of this if you choose to study human behavior the ripples in your own being can be plenty. Your life becomes your own laboratory, where all interpersonal interactions become the experiments for testing your implicit theories and everyone who you come across becomes the source of data. It may sound like an intellectual burden where you are unable to ever shut off the lights of your lab at the end of the day but it’s far from it. As you apply the ideas and theories you assimilate to your own life it unlocks doors that you never even knew existed. The ‘aha’ you experience every time your hypothesis is supported or rejected is worth all the cognitive churning. And the best part is that the answers to these conundrums have the potential for you to develop into what Neale Donald Walsch calls as ‘a grandest version of greatest vision you ever had about who you are’.
This thus has bolstered the respect I had for those who are veterans in the field. As easy as it may sound, succeeding in the academic world that revolves around human behavior is quite a daunting task. You are expected to be in your ‘research lab’ and excel all by yourself but the ideas that you work on can only be generated by interacting with others. Considering the limited time and energy one has, the balance can be quite hard to achieve.
Having crystallized your ideas, disseminating them through publication is equivalent to climbing Mt Kilimanjaro right after conquering Mt. Fuji. In consonance with people and their eccentricities, your theories are bound to be complex. But mind you to get published you need to churn and turn them till they live up to the ‘grandmother test’ which means that what you write must be understandable if your grandmother is the reader. Unlike the lucky few who get away with being esoteric, the rest have to toil hard to capture the complexities of individual behavior in a few pages.
To add more fun, the review that your manuscript goes through can crush the confidence of even the toughest cookie. Considering the volumes of articles written on how to constructively take all this scathing criticism on every word you write is evidence of the fact that you need to perform what all yogis have been attempting all their life- depersonalize your self from the outer world. So you get feedback from the editor that in many direct and indirect words imply that what you have done over the last two years has as many holes as a block of Swiss cheese, you may cry, you may become defensive or you may laugh, but you can only succeed if you scratch through the surface and use the comments to go back to the drawing board and re-work.
It is hence not surprising those who still persist and succeed can be categorized as a quirky lot in living-a-normal-life terms. I, on the other hand, prefer to call them explorers driven by a fuzzy ‘calling’ that can only be experienced.
This tacit eulogizing does not in any way imply that all researchers of human behavior are somehow evolved beings. Like all middle-range theories this idea has its own boundary conditions where you will find a deviant with zero sensitivity toward others or an exception with a head bloated the size of a beach ball. But fortunately my sample has majorly been perceptive people who are genuinely interested in discovering themselves and others by employing admirable persistence.
A saying I recently read partially answers the why of the rigmarole that this species has chosen as a way of life: ‘It’s an experience like no other experience I can describe, the best thing that can happen to a scientist, realizing that something that’s happened in his or her mind exactly corresponds to something that happens in nature. It’s startling every time it occurs. One is surprised that a construct of one’s own mind can actually be realized in the honest-to-goodness world out there. A great shock and a great joy.’
– Leo Kadanoff
More power to knowledge and curiosity!!!!
Triggered by reminders of few who surprise me as expectant readers of my blogs I am writing this to share the reasons for my absence from the blogosphere: my summer romance!! I fell in love all over again for the field of research I committed into discovering facets that reminds me of the dizzy elation of first few dates. Having lived through rigors of first year of study, summer was a time for (surprisingly!) more work and lots of reflection. What follows is the tale of my rejuvenated affection for the choice of my life’s work.
It is said that your context defines who you are. What have you been educated in and what profession you choose can radically transform you as a person. On top of this if you choose to study human behavior the ripples in your own being can be plenty. Your life becomes your own laboratory, where all interpersonal interactions become the experiments for testing your implicit theories and everyone who you come across becomes the source of data. It may sound like an intellectual burden where you are unable to ever shut off the lights of your lab at the end of the day but it’s far from it. As you apply the ideas and theories you assimilate to your own life it unlocks doors that you never even knew existed. The ‘aha’ you experience every time your hypothesis is supported or rejected is worth all the cognitive churning. And the best part is that the answers to these conundrums have the potential for you to develop into what Neale Donald Walsch calls as ‘a grandest version of greatest vision you ever had about who you are’.
This thus has bolstered the respect I had for those who are veterans in the field. As easy as it may sound, succeeding in the academic world that revolves around human behavior is quite a daunting task. You are expected to be in your ‘research lab’ and excel all by yourself but the ideas that you work on can only be generated by interacting with others. Considering the limited time and energy one has, the balance can be quite hard to achieve.
Having crystallized your ideas, disseminating them through publication is equivalent to climbing Mt Kilimanjaro right after conquering Mt. Fuji. In consonance with people and their eccentricities, your theories are bound to be complex. But mind you to get published you need to churn and turn them till they live up to the ‘grandmother test’ which means that what you write must be understandable if your grandmother is the reader. Unlike the lucky few who get away with being esoteric, the rest have to toil hard to capture the complexities of individual behavior in a few pages.
To add more fun, the review that your manuscript goes through can crush the confidence of even the toughest cookie. Considering the volumes of articles written on how to constructively take all this scathing criticism on every word you write is evidence of the fact that you need to perform what all yogis have been attempting all their life- depersonalize your self from the outer world. So you get feedback from the editor that in many direct and indirect words imply that what you have done over the last two years has as many holes as a block of Swiss cheese, you may cry, you may become defensive or you may laugh, but you can only succeed if you scratch through the surface and use the comments to go back to the drawing board and re-work.
It is hence not surprising those who still persist and succeed can be categorized as a quirky lot in living-a-normal-life terms. I, on the other hand, prefer to call them explorers driven by a fuzzy ‘calling’ that can only be experienced.
This tacit eulogizing does not in any way imply that all researchers of human behavior are somehow evolved beings. Like all middle-range theories this idea has its own boundary conditions where you will find a deviant with zero sensitivity toward others or an exception with a head bloated the size of a beach ball. But fortunately my sample has majorly been perceptive people who are genuinely interested in discovering themselves and others by employing admirable persistence.
A saying I recently read partially answers the why of the rigmarole that this species has chosen as a way of life: ‘It’s an experience like no other experience I can describe, the best thing that can happen to a scientist, realizing that something that’s happened in his or her mind exactly corresponds to something that happens in nature. It’s startling every time it occurs. One is surprised that a construct of one’s own mind can actually be realized in the honest-to-goodness world out there. A great shock and a great joy.’
– Leo Kadanoff
More power to knowledge and curiosity!!!!
posted by Garima at 3:42 PM
1 comments
