“If you could choose a field site, what would you suggest?”
B, who does various biophysics work, asked me this. B gives me the impression of being a very capable businessman. He can transform what he and his students are interested in, want to do, and want to protect into stories that can secure funding, and into media that can persuade/teach/design other people and things. The meaning of his question is that those projects he does allow students to choose their own topics, and then they find specific methods and resources for experiments and modeling techniques.
I immediately thought of countless events that had deeply impressed me in daily life that I would like to return to in fieldwork.
For instance, 8 years ago one morning, Kyra caught about 500 armored catfish. Their shiny black armor, firm mouth suction cups, crawling upstream. This armor allows them to dominate ecosystems all over the world.
“What would you suggest” is actually similar to “regretful but with remaining capacity.” That is, you can find current resources to do something without needing permission (on this specific date), so you only need to focus on what you want to learn and do. Of course, there are still many limitations, but this perspective of focusing only on remaining capacity feels good. And because of regret, it feels particularly serious and in need of governance.
After talking with B, this idea kept coming back to me over the past two weeks. I found many people with this mindset among my college classmates. Like Ujeza, my first friend in college, who has also recently become interested in biomimicry. Although our interests are both preliminary, I feel she will definitely follow her interests to learn and develop, so if I were to raise myself, I would definitely let this feeling bloom. She surely has anxious meaning questions too, but I can more easily imagine how she would execute this. Otherwise, what I’ve observed: self-starter thinking. I’m not yet sure of the specific implementation differences on startup, academic, big corp, and government paths. (What is the thinking model of capable people in academia? What is the startup mentality?)
The pattern is to find a side project/value that interests you or that you care about, and then to expand it vigorously. For example: reducing emissions in the steel heavy industry/shipping industry, plastic degradation, diverse intelligence, maternal health, open-source scientific publishing/basic science funding.
To be honest, I aspire to that sequence of knowing what you want and then pursuing it by any means necessary. So what about for me? Well… wanting to communicate with plants, somewhat. The breath is unclear. But when others help summarize for me, it becomes very clear. What I can do and want to do is to be in a large room, walking alongside someone and then connecting them with another person, where they have a section of the path they could walk together that they previously didn’t know about. A matchmaker?? Looking at it this way, I should ==consult with friends more about how to effectively facilitate multi-party cooperation intent meetings.