One of the things I wanted to do this summer is visit friends and relatives who I will likely not see once I leave the US. My road trip through the Midwest has been part of that. In Champaign-Urbana (Illinois), I attended a family wedding and caught up with cousins and aunts. I ate ice cream with my friend E, a tradition we have maintained since graduate school, and I spent time with his lovely partner J and their menagerie of guinea pigs, a rabbit, and a cat. I ate pizza and played Little Chicago with my friends in Kankakee, where I grew up.
I also got to say goodbye to physics. For the past fifteen years, I have attended an annual conference of physics educators. I gave my first professional talks there, as a terrified young graduate student. I met professors who encouraged me and argued with me about my research and who were probably the anonymous reviewers of my published papers. I watched the students in my cohort graduate and do postdocs and become professors who now bring their own students. As my career progressed, I became the person looking for work to promote or fund, who spoke on behalf of my organization. This conference was so important to me that I planned my wedding around it.
Because it is a relatively small community, I consider many of them friends, not just colleagues. The conference was located in Grand Rapids, Michigan this summer, just five hours from where I had been staying earlier in the week, so I took the opportunity to say goodbye. I didn´t attend a single talk or workshop, I just sat in the hallways and lobbies and waited for people I knew to walk by. Because of the pandemic, attendance was light, but I still got to have long conversations with many people, including my doctoral and postdoctoral advisors, people who really shaped me professionally, and who are good friends. It felt amazing to see all the important work that will continue without me, and to say goodbye, in person, to the community that made me the physicist and professional that I am.
6 comments:
That is lovely. I'm glad you got that opportunity.
That seems like a pretty heavy experience.
that's so amazing you went to say goodbye in person, did you tell them in advance?
That sounds so final
This was such a nice post!
Alexis, I announced it on Facebook a couple of days prior, but I wasn´t sure who would be attending so mostly I was just counted on running into fun people unexpectedly.
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