Decision time

Here is a blog entry that I drafted back in January of 2013, when I was getting ready to retire from my NASA job. It includes thoughts about my 30-year career as a scientist, and it is interesting to compare what I was saying then with how my life has evolved at this point (late 2016).

Much as I prefer to read such up-beat, amusing blogs as that of my friend Bonnie Herold (tenacioustelleroftales), I'm afraid this one is going to be entirely too serious to have any amusement value.  It is about the decision to retire from my NASA job at the end of this month.

I write this while on break from the 93rd Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society, of which I've been a member for 30-some years.  The conference is in Austin, Texas, by the way, somewhere that I've always wanted to visit. I've been able to walk around the downtown area, but not to get out and hear music. 

These conferences always wear me down, being an introvert who is so very de-energized by being in large groups of people for extended times. It's a meeting being attended by 3300 people, and at any one time there are about 25 papers being presented, in different rooms spread around the Convention Center.  The highly motivated and conscientious participants will create a custom schedule for themselves, scurrying from one room to another in order to optimize the experience based on their particular research interests.  I have found that to be somewhat frustrating, as one will frequently arrive at a presentation room only to find that you have missed the introduction of the talk you were interested in and thus keeping you guessing for the rest of it about assumptions or methods, or even finding that the talk you wanted to see has been canceled.  So I try to optimize by session rather than individual talk and try to make myself comfortable for several talks in a row.

There are so many aspects of these conferences that in the past have always worn me down, some related to the science content and others related to the networking.  In the case of the latter, it may be running into someone whom I haven't seen for a long time, only to discover that they don't remember me.  Or spending a lot of time asking myself questions like, "who will I have lunch (or dinner) with today?"  For someone who has just a little bit of social anxiety, this is tiring.

This time the experience is particularly unique, in that I intend to retire from my NASA job at the end of the month, and so this may well be the last conference I will ever go to.  And it may be the last time I will ever see certain people that I have enjoyed interacting with at various points in my career.  People such as my dissertation adviser, who is just a little older than I am, still working hard, and totally taken aback when I told him that I would be retiring soon.  He had presumed that there was some kind of conflict at work, as his first question was "What happened down there?", referring to my Huntsville location.  (I assured him that that was not the problem.)  Or former students or younger colleagues of mine for whom I feel fondness and well-wishes as they build their own careers.

And so what's going through my mind as I sit in the presentation rooms or walk the gathering areas has more to do with my decision to retire as with the moment at hand.  I am thinking about my career and whether I'm ready to let go of it.  Indeed, I'm considering whether retiring from my NASA job is really the same as quitting my career, as I can still continue through a couple of other avenues.  I could try to get a job with someone else (most likely on a contract working in the same area as I am now), and I will also have the opportunity to work for free, in an "emeritus" position or to seek opportunities to teach atmospheric science or applied math at UAH. I probably could also do some teaching at UAH if I wanted to pursue that.  So, retirement does not necessarily equate to career suicide.

A lot of the conflict in my mind has to do with my dissatisfaction with a 30-year career that simply has not met my expectations.  Looking back, the reasons for the lack of satisfaction have been fairly clear.  From my dissertation work, to the follow-up post-doc work, and then to my early NASA career work, I became absorbed and very productive in topics that I found fascinating but that came to be judged by the science community as simply not very relevant or important.  My publication record was very good, but citations of my papers by others were practically non-existent.  When I wrote proposals for funding of future work based on the past work, most of them were rejected.  So 25 years ago I took up a suggestion by my boss to do a one-year stint at NASA Headquarters in D.C. to build up my contacts and to become more familiar with the NASA mission priorities.  And that did lead me into an area of study (Doppler wind lidar) that kept me going for a number of years and brought interaction with a great group of colleagues across the country and in Europe.  However, the work was canceled due to budget constraints (twice, actually) before the instruments were ever built, and for me it led to no publications other than conference presentations.  Meanwhile, the institution I was at simply did not have the infrastructure to support the work I wanted to do (data assimilation and numerical weather prediction), and at that time it was not so easy to do that kind of work outside of those places (Goddard Space Flight Center, for example) that did have the infrastructure.

All this relative lack of success added up to frustration, discouragement, and demotivation, though there were some positive times, too. One work assignment that I enjoyed was being Mission Scientist on ATLAS-2 and -3, which were Spacelab missions to observe Earth's middle and upper atmosphere and the sun's input into it. The photos here were taken by NASA photographers during the ATLAS-2 mission. For ATLAS-1, I did not have a formal role on the mission but was the "anchor" on the NASA TV show, "Today In Space" that covered the mission. When the opportunity arose shortly after those missions, I got into management as deputy to our earth sciences chief at Marshall.  At least I could contribute to helping others do their jobs better and more easily.  I think I did well in that position, but I worked in relative anonymity with respect to the broader community, and I didn't meet my original hopes (when I was a grad student and committed to the field) of doing important research. I missed using my mathematical and numerical analysis skills, and I continually reminded myself that I did not get a Ph.D. to be a bureaucrat.

When my boss retired, he encouraged me to take the lead role and expressed great disappointment in me when I did not do so. But I felt that I simply did not have the "gift of gab" to be the strong representative and salesman for our department that he had been.  I felt like I was a good "down and in" manager, and not so good at the "up and out" stuff.  We had a key member of our group coming back from his own stint at NASA HQ who I thought would make an excellent manager, so I deferred to him.  I acted as his deputy for a while, but quit at first opportunity (when another individual expressed interest in the job), as he and I did not work together nearly as well as the previous manager.  With his blessing, I decided to try my hand again at just being a scientist.

Well, this story is dragging on, so I'll cut to the chase and say that, while I was successful in some important respects, I never again became truly a publishing research scientist.  I've recently provided badly-needed leadership for an important airborne flight project to study hurricanes (that someone else had initiated), so I take some pride in that.  I believe that it will prove in a year or two to be successful, but we haven't yet gotten to the point of being able to publish some significant science results.

I could stick around until that publication becomes viable, but I am very inclined not to do so.  My days at work are boring (my own fault -- no one else to blame!), and I often feel that they are sucking the life out of me.  I constantly wish that I didn't have to come in for 8 hours every day, looking forward to the evening and to the weekends.

So, back to the retirement decision.  I feel like I need a long break -- at least a couple of months -- in order to get things into perspective and make a final decision.  However, something deep inside tells me that the break needs to be complete -- that as long as a return to work is pending, I will not be free to explore what it means to not work at my NASA job, and thus a "final decision" still cannot be made.  Problematically, this is something like a "catch 22."  So I've concluded that I need to give it up and trust that I will be as resilient as I've always been and will be able to find my way, whether it's leaving this career behind or picking it back up in some other capacity.

Now that it’s 2016, it is interesting to look back on that decision and ask if I have any regret about it. Financially, it has worked out just fine and should continue to do so into the future. But should I have tried to improve my situation rather than quitting? That’s the big question, and it’s one that does not have a clear answer. I do enjoy having my days to myself, being able to tackle home projects as the inspiration hits me but with no pressure to do so; being able to tend to my physical fitness with virtually no time constraints; being able to do volunteer work for my church or other worthy entities as I wish and am recruited to do so; being able to surf the internet and catch up on Facebook without feelings of guilt; being able to create new beer recipes and to share the results with friends who also enjoy good beer. I look forward with pleasure to every new day, whether I have it planned full or not. How can I complain?