Today I visited my university where I spent 4 years doing research. Making friends, finding love, picking up coffee drinking habits, and a ton more. Many of my closest friends I met there. People I miss, and more than that, it reminded me of the life before pandemic. Why? Because soon after I finished my PhD pandemic heated up. Going to café for coffee with colleagues after lunch, walking around the campus, chatting with random people about random things, all those stupid things now seem a lot more precious and exciting.

I’m a researcher, my current job is not research but I worked in research centers for over 6 years. The experience you have is going to be very different country by country, university to university, department by department and research team to research team. What’s guaranteed is that there is a low chance you wouldn’t be affected by politics and grant money drama. The fitness function is flawed, people are optimizing on number of papers or just getting a paper accepted in a reputed conference or journal (depending on your field of study).

I work at a tech company. Even though we have our own products sometimes (more than I’d like) we take consultancy projects. Basically we rent out our engineers and data scientists, hourly, I know it sounds like a particular profession that is often frowned upon but what we do is totally legal in most of the world. Any how, there’s a new project that we are working on with this other company.