I think it's because I now realize how much I want to share the "how I got to what I am now" before I spend too much time talking about the straight-up details of my new job.
University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) was my first postdoctoral position following graduate school, and it has been pretty great. I generally like my coworkers and my work, Austin is beautiful and vibrant, and I got to live with my bestest favorite person (from whom I was separated for the immediately preceding two years while we finished graduate school shit). While here I've met some incredible people, officiated some incredible roller derby with the incredible Texas Rollergirls (fourth in the world, what, what!), and tasted some incredible food. Unfortunately, I've also done some incredibly trying work setting up a new lab, paid an incredible amount in parking costs, and placed an incredible number of miles onto my leased car.
More recently, funding became an increasingly pressing issue: my PI's grant is ending, and despite good scores on an NIH R01 grant, it will be unclear for months yet if there would have been money to support my continued work in the lab. I applied to become a research educator for the awesome Freshman Research Initiative at UT, but funding is tight, and the program did not have funds to support new "research streams."
This, and the rapidly approaching end of the lease on our condominium forced the hard question: Can I commit to another year in San Marcos, locking in a long commute for both myself and the love of my life, without a guarantee that I would be employed during that time?
So, a few months ago, I started hunting for jobs in San Antonio. After all, my fiancee's permanent position was in San Antonio and I was already skating there once or twice a week with the Alamo City Rollergirls. In June I blogged that looking for academic positions was comically complex. . I know that I love doing science in the lab everyday, but the counterintuitive expectation that successful scientists leave the bench to become administration, teachers, and managers just felt stupid. I wanted off that tract, and I wanted off badly. Desperately unsure about what I wanted, I reached out to a lab that had posted a technician position, for which I was ridiculously over qualified.
But then I met this scientist and he was all human, and it was like, what do I want again? Because working with these people could be pretty awesome. Sure, it's another huge academic leap from one discipline to the next, but the cost-benefit was so disparate compared to my situation with UT-Austin: guaranteed funding, carpooling to work with the fiancee, and only a short drive from roller derby practice. We could live in a city near things and people, have social lives, and visit nice restaurants without spending more time in the car than at the table.
So, I started a new job on August 1 at the University at Texas Health Sciences Center San Antonio while still working (albeit long distance) with the group at UT-Austin. I was pretty entrenched at UT-Austin position, my exit was swift, and I had a lot of people with which I had to coordinate all of these changes (remember all of my undergraduate assistants?). The undergraduates with which I was working are now finishing some of the behavior that I help start before I left. It's so strange stepping away from a project before its natural conclusion, hoping that those I left behind pick up the slack. I know that they can, but I've never had to test that trust so completely in the past.
And like that, I know relatively nothing again. I'm a behavioral neuroscientist in an electrophysiology lab that uses patch clamp to examine dopamine signalling in a myriad of systems. It's a bit like starting graduate school or starting the last postdoctoral position - it's an opportunity to demonstrate that I'm adaptable. At least, until it all starts over again, again.
