Nice reflections, and I love the retro pictures :)
What you say here makes a ton of sense, and resonates with my experiences in the natural sciences. As a graduate student and postdoc (briefly), I was very very focused on building my own analytical skill sets and mastery over various parts of the literature. Now having been a PI for over 5 years, my role (besides being hopelessly over-committed and spread too thin like every other academic) is basically two-fold: 1. mentor, advise and generally teach students, and 2. be part of multi-disciplinary teams. These two roles generally blend. At the end of the day, I am often struck by how little mental bandwidth is left for actually being the one to deploy the armory of techniques and knowledge that seemed so important earlier.
So, yes, the road ahead looks more and more to be about leadership and less about individual 'genius'. I have come to appreciate and respect many more aspects of what that means, now that I have seen how poorly run and lead many (most?) of our organizations (whether public or private) really are. Yet carving out time for individual 'deep work' is absolutely vital to avoid burnout and becoming an 'empty suit' academic PI in my opinion. Balancing these poles seems analogous to what you discuss above. We need both. As you say, the scientific, engineering and social challenges at our doorstep are formidable and multi-dimensional. If we don't have ways to put our sharpest, most creative minds productively to work inside healthy, functioning institutions, we simply won't make it. We might very well have all the technical answers needed (increasingly I think we do) - we just can't seem to get there from here. For now. Hopefully that changes!
Nice reflections, and I love the retro pictures :)
What you say here makes a ton of sense, and resonates with my experiences in the natural sciences. As a graduate student and postdoc (briefly), I was very very focused on building my own analytical skill sets and mastery over various parts of the literature. Now having been a PI for over 5 years, my role (besides being hopelessly over-committed and spread too thin like every other academic) is basically two-fold: 1. mentor, advise and generally teach students, and 2. be part of multi-disciplinary teams. These two roles generally blend. At the end of the day, I am often struck by how little mental bandwidth is left for actually being the one to deploy the armory of techniques and knowledge that seemed so important earlier.
So, yes, the road ahead looks more and more to be about leadership and less about individual 'genius'. I have come to appreciate and respect many more aspects of what that means, now that I have seen how poorly run and lead many (most?) of our organizations (whether public or private) really are. Yet carving out time for individual 'deep work' is absolutely vital to avoid burnout and becoming an 'empty suit' academic PI in my opinion. Balancing these poles seems analogous to what you discuss above. We need both. As you say, the scientific, engineering and social challenges at our doorstep are formidable and multi-dimensional. If we don't have ways to put our sharpest, most creative minds productively to work inside healthy, functioning institutions, we simply won't make it. We might very well have all the technical answers needed (increasingly I think we do) - we just can't seem to get there from here. For now. Hopefully that changes!