The "Re" in Research

I was nervous about coming back to the University of Washington.  Much of this was due to the normal nerves of starting a new project with new people, that nervousness that is really the energy you need to perform well and make a contribution.

Some of it was the anxiety of returning to a place you'd loved, a place that, at the time, you never wanted to leave.  Some of it was seeing people again when you knew you weren't at your best the last time you saw them.  Returning to UW felt a bit like I was going home to see family.  You want to see them, tell them you love them, but there is all this...baggage.

Also, when I come back to someplace I love, I am always apprehensive of the changes that inevitably occur.  People leave, restaurants close, new buildings arise.  There is this tension between wanting the place to stay as it was and being excited about what it has become.

But arriving on Monday, it's as if someone had hermetically sealed the Physics and Astronomy Building for the past eight years, only to unearth it for my arrival.  The classrooms and halls are exactly the same, down to the scratches from the handles on the bathroom doors.  And while there are new posters and demonstrations showcased in the halls, nearly all the ones that were there when I was a grad student were still there, along with many I had prepared myself.  The photos on the faculty board were the same, except for the addition of several researchers and postdocs, many of whom were graduate students with me.  Even a faculty member from another institution, visiting on sabbatical, was a postdoc here in 2001.  To top it off, one of my very first undergraduate research students is currently a postdoc in the department.  While many people are missing, there is a critical mass of faculty and former students that it gave me the strange impression that I had never actually left.  Feeling that I suddenly had been transported back in time, I spent much of the Monday and next day sitting in the visitors' office staring out the window, or roaming the halls in search of former colleagues.

On Tuesday afternoon during the Astrobiology seminar (same time, same channel), I noted one faculty member eating the same cup of soup, dozing off after the same number of minutes, watching a talk that could have come right out of the Mars Exploration Program, circa 2001, with somewhat more sophisticated robotics.  A prominent faculty member asked the same clarifying question the grad students already knew the answer to, the graduate students rolled their eyes in exactly the same way I used to, and another gruff researcher lobbed the same softball questions he was famous for in 2001.

This performance was repeated during the Astronomy Seminar on Thursday.  Except for a significant upgrade to the cookie and coffee selection, something in Seattle that is always immune to budget cuts, everything was the same.  I took the same seat I always took, near the aisle behind Emeritus Prof. G., who could snore through the entire seminar and still wake with enough time to ask for clarification on a subtle point we all happened to miss.  The speaker, from a prominent eastern university, still went over time by a number of minutes proportional to the prestige of his institution.

Surprisingly, the mainstay of my time at UW - pizza lunch - has changed the most.  All of the graduate students are new and shiny, the pizza is from a new (and better) pizzeria off the Ave, and the prices have gone up from $2.50 to $2.50 per slice.  They must be paying the grad students more, or instituted some tiered payment plan, because no one was complaining.

Pizza Lunch kicked me out of my timeloop revelry enough to remind me what I'm doing here, and by Friday afternoon I had made significant progress on my work.  The conversation helped during lunch, with everyone asking me about Utah, our farm, and our life, reminding me that I have roots elsewhere, and someplace to call home, that the last eight years were not just a vibrant, beautiful dream, but reality.