Siliceous and Delicious

…at the starting line for the drag race to end it all.

After a very busy but extremely nice weekend (a home all to ourselves, socializing with young people, and completely devoid of stress), I had a bit of a struggle to get back into it today. This is a final confirmation of the “losing the groove overhead” problem that’s behind my rationale to not take weekends off starting in January. It was unavoidable—after all, we can hardly show up at Xmas without gifts—and though it didn’t help productivity, it was a much-needed respite from the weekends of the past few months.

Once I got back into it, I pretty much finished up the code refactoring. Took longer than planned, but I’m on track. Andy asked again (!) about how it was going, and when I said I wasn’t quite as far as I had hoped, he emphasized again that it was not to early to start writing, and that I ought to try to get this project wrapped up as soon as possible… Duh. But it is a good idea to make it my goal to have written at least something by the time I leave for Europe on Friday. It doesn’t have to be much, but to have something down on paper will no doubt make me feel much better, and soften the ground for the real dig-in when I come back.

Also met up with Mateo this morning who had a very insightful way of talking about what makes the academic path so difficult (for him—but it had a lot of resonance for me). As he put it, to really get behind your project, you have to take what you do seriously, and that’s a really difficult thing to do. It sounds facile, but there’s something quite profound in there about believing in what you do, about commitment, about seeing the value in it—and, well, deciding whether what you do is something that’s to be taken seriously.

Against the backdrop of an emotionally exhausting and not particularly restful weekend, a Monday morning of some vague hope that I can wrap up this morphospace nightmare before the calendar year is out. Had a bit of a freakout this morning, realizing just how little time remains before 2011 turns to 2012.

Anyway. There’s some character cleanup I need to do before I can be satisfied that my matrix is at least internally consistent. I think. I’m actually really uncertain about whether to invest the day it will take me to implement a consistency check on the matrix… I’m just so fed up with it already.

Small detour to avoid making that decision. Eliminated character # 72 (“domed areolae”) because it was a duplication of #76 (“velum topography”). Not that it matters, since #76 (now #75) is an “axed” character in the cull that removes characters with too many “?”, “v”, and “n” values.

Next small detour. Summing the values of each column, kind of like the axing cull just mentioned, but looking at just how many of the valid character states are actually non-zero. There are some good candidates for further axing here (I’m not including characters already axed by the above-mentioned cull).

• #4, only 2
• #6, only 1
• #7, ony 3
• #14, only 2 (topographic sectors)
• #36, only 5
• #37, only 4 (ridge, spines on mantle)
• #44, only 5 (rays)
• #54, only 3 (setae)
• #56, 57, only 2 each (spinules, hair-like filaments)
• #58, 3 only (collar or carina)
• #76–83, between 2 and 5 only (Pore structure identified as pseudoloculate, Alveoli, Porelli in between pores, Passage pores, Bullulae, Hypocaust, Pseudonodulus, Ring of specialized openings)
• #81, Hypocaust—none! Deleted!
• #106, only 1 (macrorimoportulae)

The best candidates for immediate removal are characters #6 and #106, because they are singletons (only one non-zero or invalid state). Although #4, #14, #56, and #57, and #79 also just have 2. Is that the threshold? Or 3… or 5…? Yech. I don’t know. What to do?

Move on again. I also need to get these Cretaceous (Crustaceous?) occurrences into my Neptune file. Maybe that’s what I need to do. OK.

It’s been a long slump. And, though I somehow feel like I’ve said this often before, it feels like it’s been a real low point. But after a really great DSA yesterday, I feel much buoyed by my recognition of my own resilience, thanks to Beau’s really rather brilliant question (“if the wiser and capable self you know is in there could meet the you in the fog, what would you say to yourself to get yourself out of this funk?”). I haven’t yet formulated the pep-talk/positive inner monologue reprogramming incantation yet, but something about realizing that the power to get myself out of this mess lies within myself seems to have rattled something loose. Achingly, grindingly, things are starting to ease back into motion.

I tidied up the spreadsheet for the morphospace matrix to ready it for an influx of new (Cretaceous) taxa. I dug up the papers with Cretaceous occurrences. In the first one (Fourtanier, 1991), I chased down all of the references to other Cretaceous diatom occurrences that I hadn’t seen yet, and found they were all dead ends (well—the Barron, 1985 reference about the CESAR core from Alpha Ridge is published in an obscure book which I think I can’t be bothered to track down). Moved on to look at what genera are actually listed in the Cretaceous samples. The genera are Coscinodiscus, Eunotogramma, Gladius, Hemiaulus, Pterotheca, Pyxidicula, Rhizosolenia, Stephanopyxis, Triceratium, and Trinacria. Remarkably enough, only Eunotogramma, Gladius, Pyxidicula (though this seems to be similar to and perhaps synonymous with Stephanopyxis) are new. Phew. I think Pterotheca might be a resting stage, but I need to check when I’m back at the office.

Next, the second Cretaceous assemblage (Hajós and Stradner, 1975). This one lists a heaped metric assload of taxa. Including these ones not already in the morphospace: Acanthodiscus, Cerataulina, Creataulus, Epithelion, Goniothecium (isn’t that a resting stage, too?), Helminthopsis, Horodiscus, Incisoria, Kentrodiscus, Longinata, Odontropis (hmmm? sounds familiar), Poretzkia, Pseudopyxilla, Pteritheca, Pyrgodiscus, and Rattrayella. Holy shit. That’s fourteen new genera, at least. Yech. Si, se puede. Onwards! Oh. Missed a page. Tubularia, and Xanthiopyxis, which I’m pretty sure is a resting stage taxon.

And, the third assemblage, Gersonde and Harwood (1990). The most famous one. Here we have Amblypyrgus, Ancylopyrgus, Archepyrgus, Basilicostephanus, Bilingua, Gladiopsis, Kerkis, Kreagra, Microorbis, Praethalassiosiropsis, Rhynchopyxis, and Trochus. Yikes. That makes a total of 33 more genera to code up. Barf, barf, barf. Si, se puede.

Well, it ain’t pretty, and it ain’t much, but at least I’ve done something today. Better than the last few weeks. Things are moving upwards. Hey, ho, let’s go!

It’s been an adventurous month. Much learned, but also much exhausted—and I’m looking forward to a time of less job-hunting insanity ahead. There are some more options to explore, but there is also a renewed sense in my mind that I need to focus on the morphospace, and get it done, and move on and get the rest of my thesis done, before I can do anything else.

With that in mind, I gave myself some leisurely time this morning to think about what I want to accomplish this week. I picked a couple of tasks for the morphospace—trawling the literature for Cretaceous diatom occurrences to expand the temporal reach of the data, reading a number of papers and Sofy’s thesis—and also set aside some time to follow up on Laura’s recommendations based on my self-assessment exercise. I also scheduled some time for exercise and, crucially, some time to schedule the next week. This may sound like a joke, but I actually have found this to be one of the more important factors in keeping myself on track—it’s one thing working through the OmniFocus list, reviewing, adding, checking, and selecting tasks for the week ahead, but it’s quite another to make sure that’s not just a one-off event followed by a fall from the horse and several weeks in a ditch.

I was definitely having a hard time buckling down and actually getting to work research-wise, my brain still being fully absorbed in career-thinking mode, so I actually spent a bit of time researching one Laura’s leads, a company called Forrester Research. Although their website was a bit opaque, I found a pretty decent description of what they do elsewhere on the web:

Forrester Research is a market research firm focused on Internet and technology. The company sells reports and research briefs to corporate clients. Company reports cover factors such as market forces, industry trends, and consumer behaviors. The company also provides consulting services and online tools.

I found it somewhat reassuring that at least somebody could explain in a paragraph what the company actually does—which seems to be better than many of the companies I’ve come across recently…

Settled down at Darwin’s this morning to stay out of the rain and away from the office, where that uncertain new officemate awaits (or might await, who knows). Caught up on scheduling my week, decided not to go to the graduate consulting club this evening (it’s just not me—I don’t want to be on campus for an event starting at 7:30 pm unless it’s something I’m really passionate about, and I guess consulting case prep just isn’t one of those things). Decided that since Google is the one employer coming to the career fair on Friday that I’m seriously interested in working for, I’d look into what branches of the business I’d actually be interested in.

They have a /edu section to their website, which touts a variety of products and applications but did not give me the sense that there was an actual business unit dedicated to education or education-specific technology. In a blog post about their Boston office there were, likewise, several educationy-related activities outlined, but they mostly seemed to be something the resident engineers and programmers did on the side, rather than as their main job function. Read through all the job postings in Boston—it seems what they’re looking for here is experienced salespeople for management positions, or computer programmers. That’s not me. Not clear where or how their google.org type of jobs actually exist, and whether there are actually any positions dedicated in an educational direction. Hmmm.

The exploration left me a little bit disillusioned, although it’s always possible to take the sort of approach that Evan suggested, those many months ago—choose the company, and decide what position they need to create for you… I’ll have a chat to the Google person on Friday and try to scope them out a little.

Eventually did a bit of work, though interrupted by a horror story from second year Steven Jaret (who just failed his quals) and another rub-it-in defense by a fellow G6, Jenny. Found that, though time, there is basically no pattern in the expansion of morphospace. Fuck a duck. Yucky, yucky, yuck. Makes me sick. Here’s the depressing plot:

Well, that’s not good. I’m going home. What a steaming pile of dung.

Had a very reassuring meeting with Andy this morning, who was very excited about the morphospace results I showed him and appeared to be very optimistic about their potential to form both a “good thesis chapter and a good paper”. We also discussed how to proceed with the book chapters the PlanktonTech Germans had requested, and each (later on in the day) submitted an outline for a chapter to them. Done.

Buoyed by that morning conversation, I went along to the Job Acceleration Workgroup meeting, which was mostly about “elevator pitches” (not very useful for me, as I don’t really know what I’m angling for yet, but illuminating to see how difficult it is) and the schedule for the weeks ahead. Crucially, I had a great conversation on the way out with a fellow PhDer who was also interested in consulting but has become quite disillusioned with the idea; it was nice to make contact with a kindred spirit.

Later in the afternoon, I returned to R to press ahead with the morphospace and address some of the major problems I ran into late yesterday. Mainly these centered on the genus names in Neptune not matching the genus names in my morphospace. I discovered, and fixed, further errors in Neptune:

1. Aulacoseira is misspelled as Aulacosira in Neptune.
2. According to my notes Bolli says it’s Lisitzinia after all, so I changed it back.

Unfortunately, something with the factors was going very wrong, and I now have to go back over what I did yesterday and start again. I had also accidentally merged Liriogramma into Asteromphalus, which means the former didn’t come up with any matches in Neptune when called from the matrix. Anyway, I’m not sure I’ve been renaming things properly, so I need to go back and start that whole thing over…

For Mediaria, Campyloneis, and Stictodiscus, I also had two entries each in the matrix, to distinguish between different valve morphologies. This doesn’t work with the Neptune integration, since I can only have a 1-1 mapping, so I took the triangular form of Stictodiscus and the raphe valve of the other two and threw the other lines out of the matrix for the reanalysis. I just removed those lines out of the .txt file which I call from R (they’re still in the .numbers file for future analysis).

The solution to the renaming problem was simple but profound (aren’t they always?): my genus names were being stored in the data frame as factors, so trying to change the value of an entry or set of entries to a string not found in the factor levels caused a problem. The solution was simply to read in the data frame from file using the read.table option as.is=TRUE, which suppresses converting strings to factors. Less memory-efficient, but appropriate.

Fixed the names, but since re-running the distance matrix was going to take some time, decided to head home at 5:20 and let it run there.

Monday was a pretty devastating day—better documented in DSA notes than I will here, but leaving me reeling on Tuesday. By the end of the day, I felt much better, having talked it through with Kati and Beau; I came to the point where the realization that I have a working identity, shaping and forming, and that it doesn’t include surrounding myself with people who think labor unions are an undesirable thing to be associated with.

I took most of Wednesday, too, to recover, getting some exercise in the morning (it turns out that having a strict schedule is the best way to accomplish this, and I’m glad to report that I’m back on one!) and going to see a couple of 1st-year talks in the afternoon, motivated by the last vestiges of collegiality left in this graduate student.

This morning, however, anxiety levels surged again. There was an email from PlanktonTech informing members of the structure of the forthcoming Springer Verlag book associated with the project—including two (!) chapters written by me. Spoke briefly to Andy about this, who agreed to take the lead on one of the two, but wanted an outline by tomorrow, by which time the Germans had requested a first structural draft. Then, there was an email from Dave Lazarus, telling me about his wonderful new project that is essentially my diatom diversity project, except for radiolarians, though he appears to also plan to include diversity calculations for diatoms. He is presenting the results with his PhD student (I didn’t even know he had one) at the TMS (micropalaeo society) meeting in France next week. So, it seems I am scooped, again, in a way. Fantastico.

To add dung to the steaming pile, there was a reminder from OCS that the sign-up deadline for the job acceleration workgroup was tomorrow, so I had some thinking to do this morning. Do I take my visceral response from Monday at face value, and drop out of the on-campus recruitment experience altogether? I decided that I would take part after all, go to events and talk to people, eat some free food, but not apply for anything that isn’t 100% convincing. There are sure to be one or two companies that will interest me—notably Google—and it can’t hurt to get a bit more experience in the process. So I spent some time re-shaping my resumé to incorporate Laura’s feedback from Monday, and submitted it to Amy to sign up for the workgroup. Crucially, though, I didn’t change the RSMU section. I was president of an organization called “Royal School of Mines Union”, and I’m not going to lie about it. If I had worked at the Microsoft Corporation or the RAND Corporation I wouldn’t doctor my resumé and say I had been a member of the “Microsoft Collective” or the “RAND Organization” if I was applying for a left-leaning job. On the one hand, it just seems idiotic to lie in that way. On the other hand, keeping that line on my resumé is, I think, a good canary for my own happiness in the application process. If a company is going to take offense at the word “Union”, then they’re probably not a good fit for me. End of story.

Maybe this seems like a small and inconsequential thing, but it carries some symbolism for me—a commitment that I’m going to be true to my values, to my gut feelings, and to the pursuit of a kind of work that feels genuine. And I think as long as I keep that in the forefront of my mind, stay true and honest to myself, I’m OK to go ahead and milk the job-hunting/on-campus recruitment program for what it’s worth.

The non-work portion of my worries finally out of the immediate way, I settled down to trying to get some actual research done as well, in preparation for meeting with Andy tomorrow morning. Loaded the Neptune database up in R and created a new field, N$Genus, containing only the genus name (strsplit’d out from the N$Species field). Made adjustments in the dataset to reflect mistakes I discovered in the process of describing the genera:

• Bachmannocena is a silicoflagellate (leaving this in, it simply won’t be called in the plotting)
• Bacteriosira is Bacterosira misspelled
• Bruniopsis is a synonym of Neobrunia
• Calloneis is Caloneis misspelled (wow, holy shit… there are only two occurrences of this genus?! WTF?). Round also considers this to be the same as Pinnularia, but as I coded both taxa I wanted to check for consistency and keep both in there for the time being, perhaps expunge them at the end
• Charcotia is a synonym of Actinocyclus; again, left this one in the matrix to check for coding consistency, and left it in the Neptune database as well
• Denticulopsos is Denticulopsis misspelled
• Dicladia is a resting cell (leaving this in, it simply won’t be called in the plotting)
• Goniothecium is a resting cell (leaving this in, it simply won’t be called in the plotting)
• Huttonia is a synonym of Neohuttonia (again, only ONE occurrence… holy shit, that’s awful)
• Liradiscus is a resting cell (leaving this in, it simply won’t be called in the plotting)
• Liriogramma is a synonym of Asteromphalus, retained for comparison
• Lisitzinia is Lisitzina misspelled
• Macrora is incertae sedis or at best a silicoflagellate, not a diatom (leaving this in, it simply won’t be called in the plotting)
• Muelleriella and Muelleriopsis are resting cells (leaving them in, they simply won’t be called in the plotting)
• Naviculopsis is a silicoflagellate (leaving this in, it simply won’t be called in the plotting)
• Neodelphines is Neodelphineis misspelled
• Odontropis is a resting cell (leaving this in, it simply won’t be called in the plotting)
• Opephoneis is probably supposed to be Opephora
• Periptera is a resting cell (leaving this in, it simply won’t be called in the plotting)
• Pseudorocella is a synonym of Macrora and thereby not a diatom (leaving this in, it simply won’t be called in the plotting)
• Pseudostitodiscus is Pseudostictodiscus misspelled
• Pterotheca is a resting cell (leaving this in, it simply won’t be called in the plotting); Pterothecas its misspelling
  
• Raphidodiscus is Rhaphidodiscus misspelled (though Round et al. make the mistake, too)
• Screptroneis is Sceptroneis misspelled
• Simonsenella is Simonseniella misspelled
• Stephanophyxis and Stephonopyxis are Stephanopyxis misspelled
• Stichodiscus is Stictodiscus misspelled
• Thalassoithrix is Thalassiothrix misspelled

This done, I backtracked briefly to complete a plot I meant to make earlier, breaking down the morphospace into more groups. The result was pretty disappointing. Rather than showing more structure, the subgroups of the pennate and centric groups totally overlap and don’t at all occupy different areas of the space. So, that intuitive failsafe first test of the morphospace that Andy had suggested way back when,  as a response to my doubts about the project (“it has to be true, for example, that the invention of the raphe represents the invasion of a new area of morphospace”)… failed.

To close, some country song lyrics that sum up my feelings about graduate school quite nicely (via the VPhD forums):

Well, you filled up my head with so many lies.
You twisted my heart till somethin’ snapped inside.
I’d like to give it one more try,
But my give-a-damn’s busted.

Slightly delayed, but much more optimistic start to the day. Beau has made some excellent headway in laying out a path ahead for the DSA book, which has me very excited about a project completely outside the realm of academic work, but still about academic work. Unfortunately, my MacBook has run completely out of storage space, to the point where DropBox is now complaining and will no longer sync… This is problematic. Especially as I am working from the new Starbucks in Harvard Square this morning, which is a very conducive atmosphere indeed. I priced out the cheapest bailout I could find (short of replacing the SSD in the laptop with a spinning platter hard drive, which I’m unwilling to do—I think the slowdown would drive me insane), which is to replace the optical drive with another SSD and put the optical drive in an external enclosure. That, unfortunately, comes out at $200, which is a bit of a hefty price after the financial burden of the wedding…

Began implementing the fantastically supportive structure that came recommended from DSA yesterday, and felt a marked improvement in productivity immediately. Well, almost immediately—stopped by the new Starbucks in Harvard Square on my way in with Kati, and, while I immediately hated myself for it, loved it. I will have to start working there, it is the perfect, quiet, focused spot with an excellently relaxing view, lots of power outlets, and their Clover coffee is actually surprisingly good, considering I usually very much dislike the “charbucks” approach to coffee making…

Anyway. The definitive highlight of the day was meeting with Andy—remarkably, on his instistence. I led off with an apologetic admission that I really hadn’t done anything since our committee meeting, but he was very understanding and gracefully waved it off with a platitude about how sometimes life takes priority over work. Thought this was very grand of him. We talked over and solidified plans to have the morphospace done and dusted by August 1st, and have a chapter in the bank by the time the new semester begins. This was reassuring, and he reiterated his belief that it was entirely realistic to aim to finish by next summer—and if not then, in time for graduation in January (2013, that would be). I want to shoot for May 2012, but it’s nice to have that parachute at the ready. Just in case.

Then, he very carefully enquired, it might worth starting to think about next steps, and wanted to know whether I had any thoughts about it. I answered quite honestly that I’d been both thinking about it for a while, and was entirely undecided. I went on to say that following the academic track was an option that I was considering, but if so it would be a teaching heavy job, since that was what I had enjoyed most. He nodded earnestly and added that I was also very good at it, which I thought was very nice of him to say. I also said I was considering options outside of academia—in business and industry—but that I was at the beginning of learning what my options were there, but that I was open to possibilities outside of science. I mentioned how Kati and I had been talking about locations, and how being on the East Coast was a prerequisite, and that we might well choose a city before we choose a job—rather than following a dream job into the wilds of, say, rural Indiana.

To my enormous relief, Andy nodded understandingly and  said he would of course support me as best he could in whatever decision I took. He also said that if I went off to do something outside of science but stayed in the Boston area that I would always be welcome in the lab, and that if I wanted to continue doing research on the side there would always be space in the Knoll lab for me. This, again, I felt was a very kind gesture—as unlikely as that outcome might be…

Weird day. Started by finally reading the paper for lab meeting this afternoon. Then got into a conversation with Jc about the failures of my projects, why they had all failed, and why I wasn’t—as Dave Johnston had apparently commiserated last night—working on a project that was worthy of my intellect. While I was flattered at the compliment, this brought up all sorts of unnecessary feelings of frustration about all the things that haven’t worked out, all the ways in which I feel I’ve been misadvised, dropped, ignored, and just plain unlucky. I went on for way too long about it, but maybe I needed to vent. It’s been an overwhelming few days with the thoughts about life after graduation/job hunting, planning the wedding, and trying to move the wretched thesis along.

Then spent the promised hour researching the companies and organizations represented at the energy & environment jobs fair. Some reasonably interesting companies there—it’s actually kind of surprising to me how many companies seem to be doing something along the line of what Beau’s company does, albeit in a more specialized fashion… Consultants seem to be everywhere. Everywhere. After about an hour, it all started blurring together—sure, here or there a company had a circular job posting that I vaguely felt I might be able to press a square application into, but who the hell knows? Ultimately I still have no idea whether there’s a position for someone with my background and skills at any of these places. And even less of an idea whether I’d enjoy it.

After lunch, headed off to a very surprising careers fair—surprisingly positive. Met some really rather friendly and fun people involved in what seem to be pretty interesting lines of business, particularly the smaller ones. Walked away with a sense of having genuinely enjoyed chatting to people about what their companies do, and feeling tremendously more optimistic about the task of finding a job. I really didn’t expect the conversations to come as easily as they did. I think I’m really a lot better at it than I give myself credit for: there almost always seemed to be an interesting question, a relevant connection or a humorous detail that sprang to mind at the right moment and kept the momentum of each conversation up, the mood light, and the awkward silences at bay. It really helped boost confidence that two of the people I talked to were (very) recent Harvard grads, both of whom had gotten their jobs through this very career fair last year or the year before! With this many contacts made in just an hour and a half (about as much as I had in me before I was well and truly exhausted), I feel quite confident that something good will come my way in the next year and a half!

I feel like I should record my contact details and interactions somewhere, to keep a record of details, impressions, and leads—perhaps this blog is a good a place as any, being that I can search through it by post tags and categories. Memory is already beginning to fade, so here I go:

• I was the very first person through the gates, having arrived about ten minutes before the official start of the event, and so I enquired whether I would be awarded with a lollipop for having won the fair. I was rewarded with some chuckles and a Rolo by Brittany Lin, Manager at PowerAdvocate, as well as a promise that if I mentioned the lollipop she’d remember who I was. Clearly something to follow up on. I, on the other hand, am having trouble remembering much about the company. They sell software and “intelligence” to utility companies, and I seem to remember they had developers who wrote the software, who seemed to be fairly stationary in the Boston office, and then people in “Client Services” (where Brittany works) who travel a lot to the clients and help them implement the software. She seemed to emphasize it was quite a small, entrepreneurial sort of company where she could feed back quite quickly from her experiences with the client to the developers of the next version of the software. She had done an internship at some large, corporate firm (in the financial sector, I think—I can’t remember) and hated the rigid, cubicle-bound experience. She went to PowerAdvocate because she got the sense it was the exact opposite sort of company, and seemed to have found this to be true in her experience thus far. There did seem to be a lot of traveling involved with her, and her sister (who works on the financial side of the company I think) was up late into the night working during crunch time when new products come out (or something—don’t remember the details), but on the whole she seemed satisfied that the “work-life balance” was something the company actually realistically respected, unlike most of her experiences in the corporate world. In the year and a half she’s been there, she’s only worked on the weekends once or twice.
• Next, I spoke Julia Palatine, who works for Apex Green Roofs. The chances of getting a job with these guys are electron-microscopical, as they’re a tiny business and currently only hiring interns and a project manager (someone with construction experience—i.e. Stuart, not me), but what a cool company. They build and maintain green roofs—planting cool shit on top of new buildings, and going around to weed and maintain them. What a cool thing to do. She did say I should send my resume, and that you never know—and I will do that, just because you just never know what may come of it over the course of the next eighteen months. Anyway, I grilled her for a good long while about how their business works, how the roof gardens are built, and how they weather the winters… just because I thought it was really, really cool.
• My next stop was at the booth for Genscape. Sarah Knight—who works in their HR department—gave me a much clearer idea of what it is these guys do (or maybe I was just starting to hit my stride at this point). In any case, they sell information on energy (mostly electrical grid stuff)—capacities, flow, utilization—using all sorts of fancy magnetic sensors and their own software. They are hiring for a few different positions, but the one I talked to Sarah about was as a Power Market Analyst: these guys show up at work at 6, and have about 6 hours of super stressful work—they have to collect and analyze the data from overnight, and prepare a daily report for their clients—that gets sent out a couple of hours later, and then they spend the rest of the morning making calls to their clients to follow up on the reports. Sounds kind of intense, but weirdly interesting. The best part—by 2:30, they get to go home, and on Fridays they’re off well before that. How cool is that?! Their offices are on Huntington Ave in Boston. She also gave me the name of Mark Doolin, a graduate of the Anthropology department at Harvard, just down the hall. An undergrad, admittedly, but at least someone I could talk to who’d have a bit of a sense of where I’m coming from—and a way to start the conversation, at least.
• Next I stopped by the eye-catching display of MaxLite, a company that makes LED lights and is hoping to conquer various sectors of the market with this super-efficient technology. I talked to Charlie Andersen, a really young and enthusiastic guy, who also turned out to be a geology grad from Amherst (so we had both a common background and a common acquaintance, Whitey Hagadorn, to talk about). He seemed pretty jazzed about his job because it’s a fairly small company, and he’s both able to turn his ideas quickly into results, and is both able and called upon to perform a lot of different tasks—not a boring, do-the-same-thing-every-day sort of job. He’s also coming back to Harvard to do an MBA, so he may be a useful contact to have in any case—since the company is located in NJ and probably not the place I’d want to work.
• My last stop was at a company called Harvest Power, who are conveniently based in Waltham, and who turn organic waste into energy and profit (by operating a distributed network of biomass gasification, anaerobic digestion, and composting plants). It’s an interesting business model because it makes something useful out of waste that might otherwise be landfilled, but it also generates profit at both ends of the process—collecting revenue in the form of tipping fees paid by the waste producers at the input, as well as from the sale of the output (energy and compost soil). Again a good connection, Molly Bales, the woman I talked to, was a Harvard undergrad who minored in the EPS department, so again we had some common ground to chat about. There wasn’t too much in the way of direct practical application of her skills on the job, though she mentioned that the “wedge paper” (I assume this one), which she read in a Schrag class, had come up and turned out to be quite handy. She seemed to very much enjoy the job, and gave me the sense that it’s a quickly growing company. When she joined they considered themselves a start-up, which they no longer do; they aim to go public within two years and foresee a lot of growth in the meantime. They’re not hiring for specific positions (beyond internships—yech) at the moment, but she did suggest I send her a resume since these things can change rather quickly. Working in Waltham didn’t sound appealing, but Molly said she loves it—she lives near in Porter near the commuter rail, which drops off at the train station in Waltham just a short walk away from the office, so she’s selling her car as she has no more use for it. Not bad!

As a final hurrah for the week, and very much against my better intuition, I sent an email to the OEB administrator asking to be put on the schedule for Mike Foote’s visit the Tuesday after next. Mike is the Chicago paleobiology heavyweight, and Jerry Mitrovica was (rightly) very impressed by him—and has been urging very firmly that I meet with him while he’s here to try and see if I can impress him into offering me a post-doc in Chicago. Now, a post-doc is of course the last thing I want (and never mind that he might not be in Chicago that much longer since he’s here because OEB is trying to lure him to Harvard), but it can never hurt to make connections, especially when it’s with someone like Mike. He’ll probably think I’m an idiot (I have a good track record in that regard with Chicago folks—Mark Webster basically told me my project and the reasons for doing it were crap when he came through on EHAP, and of course there’s the years of history with Charles… well, Gene Hunt at least was really nice), but whatever. Who cares what he thinks, perhaps he’ll have something helpful to say.