OK, so I went back and looked at some of the blogs I posted over the past few months. It became fairly obvious to me that I have focused on the difficulties and battles that dominate my life as a college professor and full time researcher. Unfortunately I have failed to highlight the numerous positive aspects of my job. Without question or reservation, I love my job and would not trade it for anything. So giving mention to these highlights is easy and long overdue.

There are some fantastic aspects to being a college professor doing medical research. No two days are the same so the job has incredible diversity and challenge. Boredom is never an issue. I actually have a lot of control over my day to day schedule and the structure of my job, so I can come and go when I want – to a great extent. There are meetings that need to be made but some days I can sleep in and work late, or get to work early and leave when I want. The key is to be productive writing grants, papers and the like.

I am privileged to work with some fantastic and gifted people and some great students. It is quite gratifying to watch and mentor burgeoning scientists as they develop. Their successes become my success.

One of the biggest buzzes I get professionally is when I get a chance to impact on people’s lives. My entire career has been working with the ethos to “help people” and I am getting to see some of this work benefit people. The hope that more work will be able to help even more people keeps me going.

Just to be playful and complete; I want to do something different with this blog. That is, I will add to it and update it to bring up new positive aspects about what I do. So please feel free to come back and see if/how the list below grows. My hope is that I will be able to frequently give positive mentions about the college professor lifestyle.

1. With my job, I am doing what I wanted to do when I was a kid. I regularly tell people, “the man became what the little boy wanted to be.” What more could anyone ask for?

2. My job and career has allowed me to travel all over the world. I’ve lived and worked in Paris France, Oxford England, Moscow Russia, Tokyo and Nagoya Japan. In my first post doc I lived in Paris and learned a language and culture as well as learning from successful scientists.

3. I was at a scientific conference recently and met a unique and colorful guy with a vision focused on developing novel therapies for patients with neurologic emergencies such as traumatic brain injury, stroke and seizure. It was a highly stimulating and energetic conversation that gives me hope for the future of developing new things for those patients. It is just so cool to be privy to some of the cutting edge things that are on the horizon.

4. We had an awesome response the first time we tried a new experiment. It is great to see a new bit of data. Please check out the blog, “The Story of the Datum” for more info.