There's an interesting - if perhaps slightly macabre - discussion going on in ITFF about the shootings in Alabama.

And an odd thing that it makes me think of. (And I almost hesitate to post this, but, whatever. Accuse me of being a Pollyanna who tries to see the good in any situation). For years, after a negative experience in graduate school at the University of Michigan, I believed that I was "insufficiently focused" or "not quite smart enough" or "too much of a dilettante" or whatever to be "cut out for" a Research I school. That, if I were "good enough" I'd wind up teaching and doing research at a Research I school, but I wasn't, and so I was best off accepting what I could do.

In light of some of the things I've read - comments about the "Harvard attitude" and such, I'm coming to realize it's NOT that I'm "not good enough" for a Research I school, it's rather that:

a. I prefer to have a life outside of my work

b. I am almost certainly insufficiently aggressive to survive at a Research I place.

And both of those things are just who I am: they are not bad things or good things. They are me, and I need to honor them more.

And, once again, I realize that the place I did wind up fetching up was probably the best sort of place for me: most of my focus is on teaching, but I LIKE teaching and I think I'm at least reasonably good at it. And what research I do is not the sort of get-up-at-2-am-and-truck-into-the-lab-to-check-cells kind of thing; it's the kind of thing I can fit into my life, rather than fitting my life into my research. (Fitting your life into your research is fine for some people, not for me.)

So again: rather than berating myself for not being more monomaniacal about research, I should perhaps be grateful that I was wise enough (even, perhaps, without even thinking about it) to wind up in a career somewhere that is a generally good fit for me. That I am not, as I have sometimes accused myself of, "wasting my life" (because I don't have more publications or more prestigious research), I should rather be happy that I have a diverse life, where I can make time to read books (not about biology) and knit and quilt and play the piano and try to get a room full of snickering teenagers to focus on what the Parables are trying to teach us. That my role in this world must be intended to be something different than someone who generates grants and research almost to the exclusion of everything else.