The following excerpt is from an article Dr. Jeff McDonnell (PhD) authored in volume 383 of Science (March 2024):
As a Ph.D. student, I spent many days and nights standing on a steep forested slope in the rain, measuring how water drops move into the soil. I loved the outdoors, and it was more like play than work. Many nights, I would dream about my research. I was endlessly curious about what I saw in the field and thrilled when I could connect it to what I read. My ideas seemed to flow like the stream I was trying to understand. But when I became a professor, I was inundated with responsibilities and my creative stream slowed to a trickle. It took me decades to figure out how to revive it.
When I started my first faculty position, I no longer had the freedom to focus solely on research or think deeply about any given topic. I was consumed by pressing demands—staying one class ahead in my teaching, completing reviews for journals, the constant drum beat of proposal writing. As my lab grew, I became more of a research manager than a researcher. I let grant opportunities guide decisions about what research to pursue. I was like a scientific dilettante—flitting from one project to the next.
Read the complete article in Science