Farewell to 2020

With less than four hours to go to 2021 as I type this, I wanted to cap off a turbulent year with one final post.

Where to begin? I have so much to be thankful for over the past 366 days. Just under a year ago, in early January, I flew through Shanghai airport on my way back from visiting family in California, just a few days after hearing about a new disease called “COVID-19” which was showing up in China. Thankfully I avoided catching it, either then or since. And while multiple members of my family caught it back in the U.S., they all survived more-or-less unscathed, a fortune not shared by millions of grieving people around the globe this year.

My PhD research has also thankfully been mostly unscathed by the tumult of transitioning to working from home from early March. Indeed, it's hard to imagine a more upset-resistant project than mine: my data is all archival (so I don't have to worry about observing runs being disrupted), I already had it all downloaded on a hard drive I can bring with me, and all my research happens on my university-provided laptop (so no worrying about the Swinburne supercomputer being down or having a faulty internet connection like many of my fellow students). I've continued to make slow but steady progress over the past ~9 months, and haven't had unavoidable delays like students in other fields who were doing lab work have. While the transition to working from home initially produced psychological stresses not unlike a house move (which was interesting to observe), once those wore off after a few weeks I've been quite happy not to be taking lengthy public transportation every day, and am probably going to continue working from home for the remainder of my PhD. (Which should hopefully be finished before the end of March.)

Sure, what I'm calling The Great Melbourne Lockdown was a bit rough. But I made it through with a guaranteed student stipend, the newly-discovered ability to order groceries online from my local grocery store, and the natural propensity of an introvert (or maybe just a hermit) to be at home when given the option. The winter was miserably cold, since keeping my room warm all the time in Melbourne's "What's insulation?" housing would've been prohibitively expensive with a space heater, but when, outside of the tropics, aren't winters miserable? (I'm channeling it towards motivation to find a job in the tropics again.) And on the plus side I didn't have to tramp a kilometer to and from the train station every day no matter the weather—on near-freezing rainy days I could time my daily walk with a break in the clouds, or even skip it altogether.

So on the whole, I really do have many things to be grateful for this past year. But what's on the horizon for 2021? 

Well, as mentioned, I hope to be finishing up my PhD and submitting my thesis by the end of March. Along the way I plan to submit two papers, containing the results of my three and a half years' of work. (I'm also contemplating a series of posts covering my research aimed at a layman audience now that the results are nearly done.) This is the time of year for astronomy jobs to be posted, so I'll be kicking the job hunt into high gear next week. It's no secret that I miss Hawaii and will be checking for jobs there, but who knows where things will go from here? I'll be looking for astronomy jobs first, but the skills I've learned from my PhD are quite broadly applicable; this year's put a lot of things into perspective for me, and I wouldn't mind potentially putting my skills to work in a medical field for a few years.

In the meantime, the prospect of summer is looming in the near future…probably. While we had some extremely hot days in late November presaging the approaching estival season, the weather here in Melbourne took a dip back to cooler temperatures for most of December. I've been wearing warm clothes and occasionally running the heater the past two weeks (including on Christmas) due to the antarctic cold fronts blowing up from the south lately. Now, as much as I dislike being cold, I can at least mitigate it with clothing and heating; cooling down from Melbourne's intensely hot summers (with nights that sometimes barely cool down) is a bit trickier, as the AC unit we got installed last year is out in the living room and doesn't really reach back to my bedroom. Supposedly we're in for a cooler and wetter summer due to a La Niña year in the Pacific, and I will happily take that over the more typical Melbournian summers I've endured the past few years. (I've also got a new gadget that might help out a bit with that, but I'll save a full discussion and review for a post early next year…)

As we approach anno Domini 2021, I'm feeling fairly upbeat. Yes, there are the multiple promising vaccines that will hopefully bring an end to the worst pandemic in a century; but I'm also really looking forward to finishing this PhD into which I've poured a tenth of my life and moving on to something different. Exactly what, I don't know yet, but that's the exciting part. I've been reading two books lately: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, by David Epstein, and Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement, by Rich Karlgaard. Range is a study about how many of the greatest breakthroughs and innovations throughout history have come from people who, contrary to the prevailing wisdom of specializing ever more deeply in a single subject, were broadly acquainted with many, allowing them to see and make connections their more specialized peers weren't equipped to. And Late Bloomers complements that by documenting many people who, despite society's push for us to be high-achievers by our 20's, bloomed and discovered new talents much later in life.

Range argues that instead of knowing exactly what we want to do for the rest of our lives before college, we are actually very ill-equipped to make that decision and should instead spend time during and after college trying various different jobs and experiences out for short periods of time, both to become more well-rounded and experienced and to have a better chance of discovering what exactly we want to do. Late Bloomers similarly advocates for patience in figuring out our path, due to full brain development demonstrably happening later in people these days (with a median age around 25, but even into late 20s or early 30s), and being open to the possibility of change and discovering new talents and interests throughout life.

Taken together, they've been very comforting to me. I've been secretly bothered for a long time by the way my brain doesn't really fit with the prevailing societal pressure to “pick something early and specialize in it forever.” My interests shift with the years, and I've held several jobs over the past decade rather than a single one. Range taught me to look upon my breadth of experience as an asset rather than a disadvantage, and Late Bloomers taught me not to fear the changes of time, or to worry about not already having changed the world or become a multi-millionaire. I've learned a lot over the course of my PhD; research methods, for sure, but I've also had time to become much more knowledgeable in Python (which will serve me well for any number of possible jobs) and I've discovered latent talents like painting and music scoring I never knew I had. I've learned that maybe research (or at least academia) isn't for me like I thought when I was younger, and I'm eager to try something new when I'm done with my PhD. Between it all, while I don't know what the future holds, I'm feeling more optimistic about it than I have for the past few years. And with that, here's to a Happy New Year 2021! Hau'oli Makahiki Hou!