#137. BBQ at the Peak (Thursday, June 30, 2016)
What was your best day…of being at a high point (that you didn’t know at the time)?
The thing about life peaks is that you won’t know if you’ve experienced one until later. In most cases, much, much later. (The peak of my relative intelligence was the earliest entry on this list, #89.)
In 2016, I was arguably at the peak of my career relative to my age1. I had recently been promoted at work ahead of schedule, becoming one of the youngest people at my institution to reach that level, and with the increased freedom and motivation that came with it, I had begun collaborating with some PhD researchers in my department on more advanced projects (#124).
This led me to being invited to the going-away barbecue of Miles Ritter, a junior researcher who was leaving to do his PhD at Wisconsin in the fall. It was being hosted on the sprawling fifth-floor condo patio of Fernando (#17), a research director, and was a fairly small get-together—with ten or so researchers, plus me and a few of Miles’s old Master’s classmates. It was a beautiful summer evening right before the Canada Day long weekend, at the exact midpoint of this peak year. And we ended up going until one in the morning.
We had our burgers. I drank a bunch of Smirnoff Ices. I had a long conversation with Javier about his research at the Deposit Insurance Corporation while he was casually flailing a giant knife around for some reason. Jose showed up late with his latest friend-with-benefits (his words, not mine). Neerad (#58) went on about the upcoming Euro 2016 final and how bad the English soccer team was. I accidentally grabbed the last samosa Fernando was planning to eat and (needlessly) regretted it the rest of the night. I entertained the others with stories from my forays at the Coco Bongo nightclub the past winter (#4).
What really made this event special was the people I was with. This wasn’t my usual crowd, but a group of brilliant academics—most of whom had at least ten to fifteen years on me—whom I was talking with like regular colleagues and equals. In that moment, with only a quarter-century mileage of my own, I felt for perhaps the first time that achieving true greatness in my field was not only likely but inevitable.
And as multiple entries on the main list demonstrate, most of that inevitability has yet to materialize. The decade plus that followed this went well enough, with real successes alongside enough setbacks to disrupt, but not completely derail, the trajectory I imagined that night. All in all, things did not quite match what I could reasonably—if optimistically—have expected as I sat on that patio sipping sweetened vodka and staring out at the limitless possibilities ahead.
The good news is, I still have a lot of time to get back there and then some.