Jobs I might have liked.

Bill Nye, on his show for kids, used to have a feature called "Way Cool Scientist" in which he featured some interesting science-related job.

(My memory is that often the "Way Cool Scientists" were actually engineers or technicians, and I was a little bit annoyed that they all got lumped together).  

(Also I would like to argue with They Might Be Giants's album Here Comes Science for the same reason. Didn't they notice that several of the songs are about engineering or technology?  But.  I digress.)

Anyway, every once in a while I come across some cool kind of research, and I always think about it as "Maybe I should have majored in that." 

Here is a nifty slideshow about a cool bit of linguistic field research.  It looks just like the sort of thing I would have liked to study, if I had been a linguist instead of a chemical engineer.   I know, I know, these things always look a lot more glamorous when they're done than when they begin, usually with a lot of very tedious background research, trying to figure out what's already been done and what's left to figure out.  Actually the beginning can maybe be more exciting than the middle part, when the annoying intractable little problems start to crop up in earnest.  What I'm getting at is that I'm aware that when NSF decides to make a nifty slideshow about your research, they are cherry-picking the nifty parts on purpose, and editing out all the non-nifty parts, so that people will look at it and think:  Cool!  Let's make sure the government keeps giving money to the Nifty Science Foundation!  Still:  nifty.

h/t Literal-Minded, in a post worth reading on its own and that explains a little more about linguistic clicks.

(Disclosure:  My own doctoral research was funded partly by the NSF.)

Comments

[Christy Porucznik]

I usually think that if I wasn't an epidemiologist I would have been a meteorologist. I like recognizing patterns, classifying things, and making predictions. It's a fun what if game to play.

[bearing]

I would totally never have pegged you as a weathergirl wannabe ;-)

[Hannah]

Why not? Did she not rush out at the start of any downpour and stand on top of the highest thing she could find and stare at the sky for the next hour or so? For fun?

(putting on my grad of Oklahoma, home of many many (crazy)meteorology students, hat)

[Christy Porucznik]

Instead I just get myself on tv a lot as a spokesperson and get flamey comments for doing such radical things as advocating for breastfeeding.