Professionalism

I have never been accepted to anything (a scholarship, a college, a job, a research opportunity) that asked me to write an essay, or a statement of intent.  I consider it a small miracle that I even got into the college that I'm going to now.
I'm not sure why this occurs, but I do know that when I have written essays I have had a few ideas in mind, some of them dumb (I'll let you decide which).

- Honesty is the best policy.  If this wasn't true, and I did get the job based on boasting, how would I know if the job was "right" for me?

- Money is not as important as everyone thinks it is.  I used to bring up in statements of intent how cool it was that this research opportunity would trade money for my time to perform a duty that I would do even without being paid!  I still think there are more relevant alternatives to capitalism, but I don't know what they are yet.  I'm currently living comfortably, and could live slightly poorer and be okay, for me the only reason to make more money would be to accelerate an idea (Example: to build an orphanage, start a company or publish a book), but since I don't have that money, I don't have anything but flighty ideas.

-"There is a perfect job".
Under this mentality I have bounced off of dreams of being a entomologist, a molecular gastronomer, a UN peace negotiator, a materials researcher, a science educator and a stand-up comedian.  Here is a quote to describe the kind of thinking I'm trying to make stick when analyzing myself: This advice ruined my life for three years: "Find a job you love and you'll never work a day in your life." I wish I had never heard it. The obsession with finding bliss in a job where I could change the world, put a dark cloud over everything I did -- nothing was good enough because I couldn't find the job that gave me the epic satisfaction I was always told to go and find. My advice to my 21 year-old self: get to work. Do work. Whatever you are tasked with -- do it well, do it better than everyone else. Hard work is not always fun, it's daunting and never ending and you have to choose to be happy doing it. You are not Steve Jobs. Find happiness in whatever job you can get and in the fact that you have one. Don't dwell on not being totally in love with your first or second or fifth position. Finding your way both professionally and personally is a messy, broken road -- your first wobbly steps after school are not going to lead you directly to utopia, stop expecting them to. If I could tell myself anything when I graduated it would be, get to work. The happiness will follow. -Caroline Weller, News Editor

- I am missing a key aspect or talent.  This was a big idea for me my freshman year of college, and I'm only recently starting to grow out of it instead of shifting from lack of skill to lack of skill.  I realize that it doesn't take a supermind to be a physicist or a teacher.  Our cult of personality/professionalism would have one think that it takes a certain kind of person for a certain kind of job, and that some people are made for upper class, and some people are made to not contribute to society.  This is true in the sense that different people have different aptitudes but in terms of there being an intrinsic barrier to a way of thinking, falling into that loop denies my capability of learning. But it is a hard idea to break myself from if I measure myself and evaluate my professional success relative to the success of others.

- I am not "driven".  I think this when I compare myself to other people.  This is not true, I am driven, but rarely does it come out in an essay that I write for a research opportunity.  My drive is not spontaneous.  I can tell that I'm driven because of how I react to doing work, but so often my drive is buried under the above ideas and under a misinterpretation of what it is to have a job.  I confused "drive" with "passion", which is all of the want and none of the work.  I used to romanticize and imagine myself living on the road for an indefinite amount of time.  I might even say that writing this blog has some amount of romanticism.  I still romanticize a little about joining the Peace Corps but less and less I am distracted by the passionate aspects of those things, and I pay attention to the reality of them.  For instance, searching for advice for potential Peace Corps volunteers, I found repeated instances of "don't expect to change the entire world" and this doesn't seem discouraging as much as it is relevant, right now.

It seems to me that I could sum up these ideas with a description of myself as unrealistic.  And I agree that I have been unhealthily ignoring important aspects of what it means to be a professional, in favor of my ideas.  On the other hand, what would being fully realistic mean?  Does it mean that I only pursue self-interest?  That I work to prove something to myself and others?
I am willing to work hard, but again that mentality is only slowly being dug up beneath a pile of nebulous, untested ideas and fear of life.

Currently I am deciding between working on computational models of solar cell materials (even now I can feel myself wanting to make that sound more complex than it is, to wow you and to secure my esoteric position as a professional) or designing curriculum for physics and mathematics education.  I am tending towards the less glamorous (slightly romanticized) latter.

I want to be a teacher or an education researcher for these reasons
- I've always found that I enjoy teaching or learning a concept far more than I enjoy performing a calculation (though I do enjoy that also).
- I think it gets the right balance of figuring things out for myself and helping others figure things out for themselves (which is probably my favorite thing to do, ever)
- So often when thinking about my physics career, I feel like the rest of my life is separate from my thinking on physics.  I feel like education would allow me to write, to practice cello, to spend time camping, and to read actual books!  I haven't read anything in a long time, and I know that's probably attributable to a difficult college lifestyle, and not to professionalism in physics.

Professional physicists are, believe me, the prime example of specialists, and I understand the need for them but I want to deprofessionalize it.  I want to make science and mathematics tools you casually turn to when thinking about how you handled an argument with your girlfriend or tools you turn to to think about your career.  I think all of humanity needs a bit of assessment skills and intuition for design of thought experiments.  I can't fit all of this information on a statement of intent, but I can fit it on this blog.

To inject a bit of skepticism, maybe even my ideas about science education are only self-assembled hurdles.  I need to more deeply understand realistic ways of contributing to current society in ways that society needs, while also keeping in mind the possibility for changing it for the wiser, if there exists that possibility.  Considering this a fundamental problem with society has only caused my frustration at either myself or the entirety of society.  Instead the possibility for change seems more accurately described as a scarcely explored, ever-advancing frontier.

EDIT (3/22/14): More on my career as a scientist.
I am starting to separate the position of a scientist with being necessarily confused.  A very large barrier I had towards treating professional science like a humanistic profession was seeing other professionals as non-human.  I wouldn't connect with any of my professors because I considered myself fundamentally different, and I couldn't imagine myself becoming a mature scientist unless that meant being miles above (as far as intelligence goes) all but a select few human beings.  When I realize that I can realistically, and competently, contribute to a profession that very many normal people participate in, a career in not-watered-down physics begins to seem like an actual path, and not like a mysterious hard-to-enter realm.