We’re having a colloquium talk today by a former student, class of 2010, who initially started grad school in physics, but left after a couple of years to do business consulting, and now something in data science. This is part of an effort I’ve been making in the last several years to bring in people with a physics background who aren’t in traditional academic physics positions, so students get a better sense of the full range of their options.

Kinda-sorta related to this, I’ll be giving an invited talk at the APS March Meeting on the 17 years ([Jeremy Piven in Grosse Point Blank voice]: Seventeen! Years!) that I’ve been talking about science on social media. If you’re at the meeting and up early on Tuesday, I’ve promised to offer reflections on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and whatever else, so stop on by.

Both of these generally fall under the heading of “career information and advice,” and those plus some other stuff I’ll only subtweet, as it were, have me thinking a bit about my career to this point.

And, you know, that feels kind of weird. Not because there’s anything particularly wrong about reflecting on things– I realized not that long ago that I’m probably close to the midway point of my minimum academic career. This is my eighteenth year at Union, and it’ll be another fifteen years before both kids are out of college. That’s a reasonable point to be taking stock of things.

What feels weird about it is that the word “career” to me carries a connotation of intentionality that I don’t think fits with my actual path to this point. I don’t feel like I have a career that was the result of any kind of coherent plan, it’s just a bunch of stuff that… happened.

It is true that I went to grad school with a plan of sorts– I decided my undergraduate professors had a pretty good gig, and went to grad school hoping to end up a professor at a small college. While I’ve ended up more or less where I wanted to be, though, all the steps along the way have been pretty random. I ended up at NIST by way of a chance connection, got a post-doc by cold-emailing a half-dozen people and asking if they had any openings, got hired into a faculty job through another chance connection, and so on. Even the NSF grant that I got was for a project that only came up because I gave a lab tour to a visiting speaker who realized the system I was building for something else was possibly relevant to his work. There’s a huge amount of luck in every step of that.

And that’s just the formal academic part of my working life. The stuff I’ve promised to talk about at March Meeting is from the writing side, which is even more random. I started blogging as a lark, and ended up getting paid for it because an intern at Seed magazine liked my work and recommended me for the initial batch of ScienceBlogs bloggers. The talking-dog books happened because one of my posts randomly went viral, and got the attention of an agent. I’ve ended up doing talking-head spots and consulting for TV shows because somebody randomly googled up one of my blog posts, and I’m now in a spot where reporters randomly call me up to comment on sports stories. (The most recent example is being quoted in story about college football, though there are others.) I’ve gotten years of hate mail from Patriots fans because a guy I play basketball with talked me into writing a piece about underinflated footballs, which led to a couple of other articles, one of which turned into a chapter in an academic book.

It’s all weird and random and unfocused. I’m not completely surprised that I’ve ended up writing books– I’ve always enjoyed putting words in a row, and could’ve envisioned writing popular science books at some later time– but the way that came about is not anything I planned, or even would’ve been able to guess at.

But of course, the same is almost certainly true for just about everyone. The former student who’s giving career advice today is on our speaker list precisely because he’s gone through career shifts that probably seem at least as random as anything in my CV. I suspect that people who make a detailed plan for what they’re going to do at a relatively young age and follow it through in a coherent way are a very rare exception. Most of us are just going from one weird thing to another.

On some level, I guess that makes it less weird to be thinking about all this random stuff as a “career.” It doesn’t make it any easier to pull it together into some coherent message to deliver to others, though… I’m looking forward to seeing how today’s distinguished alumnus deals with that challenge, and not so much looking forward to needing to do it myself a month or so hence.