How do we all do folks? Taking time out of my trip through the roaring twenties of life (just turned 25 yesterday) to rant, and I'll catch up with what ad was best during the SuperB owl later.
I have, as of this past January, worked two straight years at a federal research laboratory under a cooperative institute, and am looking to make that 3 to 3.5, primarily because I am passionate about sustainability, the environment, and especially the invaluable resource that has been in my regional back yard all my landlubber life: The Great Lakes. This passion (I'm being honest with the term here) keeps my occasional disagreements with those I work with in perspective. It also drives me to find ways to make that lab more productive. Don't get me wrong, it is already, and we're pushing out a ton of public material to try to explain what we're observing and concluding.
While working there, I have learned a good many things about science, about government, about the private sector, about the interplay between all of them, and so on and so forth. We interact with a lot of people of many different backgrounds, and in that sense, the group of people we work with is quite diverse. In my personal life I have also interacted with more varieties of people too, and while I won't shy away from the fact I have made a handful of mistakes (social errors, you name it, I am thankful to say it could be worse), I cannot stress enough the valuable insights and understanding of life I have gotten between work interactions and those of various bars and clubs.
