It's been a crazy couple of weeks here in Syracuse since I got back from China. Certainly, for the last week, I haven't even found time to blog, even though there have been lots and lots of things to talk about. Anyway, tonight the cosmology group took me out for dinner and drinks. It was a lovely time. The cosmology group here doesn't have very well defined edges, since there are many collaborations involving high energy theorists and cosmologists. But the people there tonight were my colleague Cristian Armendariz-Picon, our postdocs Levon Pogosian and Nicolas Chatillon (who, for example, we share with high energy theory) and my graduate students Alessandra Silvestri and Eric West. This group is working on a wide variety of topics in cosmology and particle physics: anisotropic cosmologies, modified gravity, perturbations in models of cosmic acceleration, baryogenesis, inflation in supergravity, braneworld models, dark matter, and many many more. As you might imagine, this makes for a stimulating environment. This post isn't about anything particularly deep, but one thing I hope our blogging can achieve is to give an idea of what it is like to be a scientist, and what are the pluses and minuses of the career. For me, evenings like tonight are one of the big pluses. Working with other people who love what they do the way that you do is a wonderful experience, made even better when they become friends. Tonight we talked about life, about cosmology and about physics gossip over burgers and a couple of beers (well, I had a clam sandwich, but that didn't seem quite poetic enough). Great fun! It is true that we live in very difficult times for science. Funding is hard and science is under attack. Certainly, my co-bloggers and I have written about these problems many times. However, it is equally important to point out and remember the great things about life as a scientist. If you want to follow this career path it will undoubtedly be difficult, involving many years living on a graduate student stipend, further years of career uncertainty as a postdoc, and insane hours at relatively low salary for your training if you are lucky enough to become a full-time research scientist. It is a hard and exhausting job. And it is definitely worth it!
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