Reading

To me, one of the best things about working at a university is the almost unfettered access to books. If my university library doesn't have it, they can borrow it from a huge network of other libraries, which includes both university and public libraries. Consider the two books the library just had delivered for me: "The Take-Charge Career Guide for Scientists" and "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Hinduism."

The first book is part of my continuing effort to educate myself about what work you can do with a physics degree outside of academia. I like academia very much and I like to think that I have a fairly good understanding of how it works (at least for a relative newcomer to academia). But about 40% of students with an undergraduate or graduate degree in physics immediately go to work in industry. (Thanks, American Institute of Physics, for all your useful statistics) Most professors simply don't have experience with work outside of academia or national labs. (And in physics, we call everything beyond those two things "industry".) So professors don't know what advice to give students about employment, and they often don't even know what kinds of jobs people can do. Whenever I get a chance to go to a talk or read a book about this, I take it, and I hope I'm accumulating useful knowledge that I can pass on.

The second book is because of the Indian classical dance I've been learning for the past few years (Bharata Natyam). The people that I meet in class are all Hindu, and the dance itself is part of Hinduism. I know a lot about Christianity and can fake my way through discussions about Judaism and Islam, but I'm simply lost when it comes to Hinduism. Of course, when I went to the university library it had dozens of books on the religion, but it was all so academic or historical or philosophical that I was lost. I wanted a book at the level that, if it were written for Christianity, would say, "Christians hang often wreaths on their doors or walls during the weeks before Christmas". Basically, I want to know how it's lived day-to-day, so I can understand my friends' conversations, but I also want to know the deeper meaning of some of the things I am learning. And it looks like those embarrassingly-named Idiot's Guides are going to be just what I need.