Reflections on Podcasts

I’ve been enjoying building out a set of podcasts with Georgetown faculty over the past few months. The podcasts can be found here.  The title of the series is “faculty in research,” to communicate the passion driving long-run interest in key research questions.

First, it’s great fun for me to learn how faculty conceptualize their own research careers, and I’m grateful to those faculty who subjected themselves to my poor interviewing skills.

Second, there are some lessons I’m learning from the interviews.

While some of the faculty were interested in a key set of questions for many decades, even from youth, most have a circuitous journey of interests. It does seem true, that almost all can make conceptual connections between the various phases of their career. But many ended up pursuing a set of interests quite different from those they considered in their youth.

Connected with this, there were several faculty who communicated that much of their course in life was not planful. In some sense, they see their journey as having surprising turning points. This was especially true for those who made risk-taking decisions in their careers that took them in directions that were not completely obvious.

Many faculty conveyed the importance of mentors in their lives. Many used the same set of mentors for decades in their lives. The mentors were key to important life decisions, changes in the foci of their research, and changes in positions. It was clear that the mentors cared about them as persons as well as scholars. These were loving relationships, with great mutuality.

Another theme was how the juggling of the three duties of an academic (teaching, research, service) itself changes over the life course. Several noted how pregnancies, childbirth, care for young children necessarily produce adaptive mechanisms to remain productive as a scholar in the face of changing time demands. Many noted how they increase their attention to bigger issues or more challenging questions as their career evolved. The payoffs had lower odds, but were potentially higher. And the scholar felt the questions were the most important to address.

Many of the faculty were engaged in combining knowledge from multiple disciplines. Some were doing this by reading across fields and teaching themselves. Others were collaborating with scholars in different fields, who shared an interest in the same problem, but had different knowledge/skills to address them. What was clear is that collaborators also tend to become friends. So, the pleasure of collaboration was not just derived from discovery, but also the social connectedness that any friendship provides.

Most who were collaborating across fields noted that exchange of language and achieving mutual respect deserved careful attention. Patience was required. Identifying the synergies across two fields often requires at least two minds, and they emphasized the importance of active engagement over time. Collaboration took time but the rewards far outweighed the costs.

I was honored to interview these colleagues. They have successfully found how to use an academic environment to nurture their research interests, while simultaneously educating the next generations of leaders in their fields and serving the larger communities.