 Anybody who tells you that doesn't have your best interest at heart, either as a scientist or as a person. Good morning. Today is going to be a fun day. It's a beautiful, sunny summer day. I'm working on refereeing a paper and putting edits into my own paper, so I'm enjoying the scientific process on both ends. In a couple hours, one of my friends, a grad student, is going to give her PhD defense. So she's going to stand up for an hour and give a summary talk about all the work she's done here at UW over the last six years. She's heading off to a postdoc in the fall, so we'll say goodbye to her soon. This career is full of lots of change. People are moving around. You make friends with people in grad school for many years, but as a postdoc, you know people for a year or two, people move around a lot. But anyways, the talk is always fun, and that's one of my favorite events, to go and celebrate somebody's work. And then a bonus, my office mate brought me cookies. All in all, today's looking like a good day. One of the fun things about big universities like UW is the environment. Not just the campus, the campus itself is beautiful and is a good place to work. The environment around it, you end up getting lots of little restaurants and cheap, divey places for students to eat. But I've always enjoyed that juxtaposition. You have these big, expensive buildings here at the Ivory Tower where people are working, where cutting-edge research is done. There are Nobel laureates walking these halls. Then you go off on the hunt for like a $4 burrito. We just got done watching that PhD thesis exam. Went really good. Learned a lot about massive stars. I usually work on small math stars, so it's cool to look at things that are way big. Alright, it's far too nice out to stay cooped up in that office. So I'm leaving work a little early to go home. Do a little writing. See, one of the great things about life in academia is the schedule is pretty flexible. I mean, if I'm teaching or if I have meetings, then obviously I can't move times around. But for the most part I get to structure my own days. Now this is both a blessing and a curse because there's no one watching the clock. There's no one saying you have to do anything at any given time. It gets really easy to be ineffective with your time. It makes structuring your work really hard. And especially when you're trying to be creative, most people think that flexibility is good for creativity. It is not. It might be good for divine inspiration, but it's not good when you need to produce creative content like science or writing. Oftentimes our flexibility is a real detriment to our productivity and our creativity. People also seem to think that academia has great work-life balance because you have great flexibility. Downside is people email me in the middle of the night. There is implicit expectation that I could be working at any given time. So I try to go home and set boundaries. I'm actually quite serious about setting boundaries for work things. I don't need to work every waking minute to be a great scientist. In the first couple years of grad school, I did work most nights and lots of weekends, and I burned out on that. Now I work evenings when something's due, when I have to have something done, and I almost never work on weekends. This idea that in academia you should be working 60 hours a week, it's garbage. It's not true. Anybody who tells you that doesn't have your best interest at heart, either as a scientist or as a person. The related comment is, I spend a lot of my time doing other things, like not just writing papers and grants. I do a lot of that. But I also mentor students. I work with people as a collaborator, which doesn't always have an immediate personal payoff for my work. And I also enjoy outreach. I give public talks. I make YouTube videos. During graduate school, I spent a lot of time writing a blog. I actually want to talk about the blog. I think my blog, my writing, is an interesting story to tell. So check that out for an upcoming episode. Part of being an academic is not just writing papers and books and articles. A true part of being an academic is being genuinely curious. And if that takes you to things outside of your narrow sub-discipline, then good. That's success. That is intellectual academic curiosity. And it's why I've developed a reputation, at least I hope I've developed this reputation, that I encourage students and people around me to explore side projects. Go where creativity and curiosity takes them. The best moments I've had as a scientist are ones where I've said, G.I. Wonder.