love what you do

You know that saying, “do what you love, love what you do”? It’s been on my mind lately. I’ve been struggling with motivation at work, as mentioned in the January slump post. I don’t want to go into too much detail about work stuff here, but suffice to say that I’ve felt stuck with a lot of work that I find to be fairly isolating, which does not work well in terms of my motivation levels. For several weeks I’ve had that feeling of dread in the mornings, where I just do not want to go to work. It gets pretty old after awhile. I’ve been thinking about how to fix this situation, and I think the solution is pretty simple ~ I need to start doing what I love. As in, think back to things that made me excited about my job in the past, and then try to do those things, again. I was able to come up with a few ideas thinking along these lines.

First idea: I really enjoyed last year when I was helping out on a research project, playing a muti-functional role: helping out with data collection for experiments with spinal cord injury patients, then analyzing the data, making figures, discussing the results with colleagues and figuring out what else we should try, and eventually putting together our findings into presentations for several conferences last year – one of which I actually got to give in a podium presentation. That was fun. It was working through the good old scientific process. And, it was working as part of a team. We had the post-doc who was coordinating the whole thing, and the therapist who helped out with the patients, and the primary investigators who managed us, and the engineers who helped with the coding/equipment machining for running the experiments. There were lots of discussions throughout the process; it did not involve working alone. I got to interact with patients, who are always such cool people. The experiments were a lot of fun, which may sound weird considering that they consisted of testing withdrawal reflexes via electrical stimulus to the hand. But they were very social with lots of chatting – as part of the actual protocol! And, the scientific concepts that we were testing were pretty cool, too.

So how can I start doing that again? As luck would have it, today another post-doc asked me about helping out with one of her experiments with a stroke patient tomorrow morning. It’s not quite the same thing in that she’s doing pretty much everything herself in terms of experimental design/analysis etc, but I’d get back into the lab doing experimental work for a bit. Also – I think that things are finally getting ready to continue the next aim of the project I was describing above. Roles have transitioned since then, but I hope I can help out in a similar manner. And, this science is pretty cool too ~ using transcranial magnetic stimulation, another crazy science technique that stimulates the motor cortex to produce actual twitches in the muscles. This is to test how well the brain can activate different muscles in the arm when it’s in different postures – both for unimpaired subjects, as well as with spinal cord injured patients. And again, the timing seems right: tomorrow afternoon, there is going to be a practice session with the equipment, and I can tag along to see how this brain zapping stuff works.

Sounds like it is good timing for me to get back to the lab. Unfortunately, there’s been a snow storm predicted to hit tonight, which originally had visions of a lazy snow day at home floating in my head… but if I want to kick start my work motivation, I will have to suck it up and head in through the snow, so that I can finally attempt to get back to some more fun work. So far the snowfall has not been terrible, so fingers crossed that it does not dump too much more on us overnight!

In addition to getting back to more experimental work, I’ve also been thinking of other work tasks that were mentioned by my bosses earlier. One was to help put together a website for a new project in the lab, in a way that will make the information more accessible to the public. I get excited at the prospect of making some of this crazy science stuff a little more publicized – it seems that science education/media portrayal are pretty lacking these days, sadly. Also along those lines, my boss has grant money to put together a program for going into middle schools and helping kids work on exciting biomedical engineering projects, and asked me to help out. This is part of an effort to get kids more excited about science and engineering – since only 4% of US undergrads are engineering majors! That seems so low, especially when compared with 20% of European and 30% of Chinese undergrads. We need to spread the engineering love! Apparently, middle school is the age when kids start losing interest in science, so this program aims to help prevent some of that. It won’t be implemented until next fall, but it’s something to think about on the horizon.. maybe jotting some ideas about it can help spark my work excitement levels.

So there are some of my ideas. It is February after all, the love month ~ so may as well try to bring some lovin’ into my job, if I can! Do you love what you do? If not, any ideas for how to get to that point?