#115. 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)?

Let me get this (likely obvious) truth out the way while it’s still early: just because a day is great, doesn’t necessarily mean the context around it is also great.

The events of this day took place when I was at the arguable peak of my career relative to my age¹. I had recently been promoted at work ahead of schedule, becoming among the youngest at my institution at my level, and as part of my increased freedom and motivation I had begun collaborating with some PhD researchers in my department on more advanced projects.

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.² It was being hosted on the sprawling fifth-floor condo patio of Fernando, a research director, and was a fairly small get-together – with about ten or so researchers, plus me and a few of Miles’s old Master’s classmates. A beautiful summer evening right before the Canada Day long weekend, and we ended up going until one in the morning.

And although nothing crazy happened, it was a generally awesome event. We had our burgers. I drank a bunch of Smirnoff Ices. I had a long conversation with Javier on his research at the Deposit Insurance Corporation³ while he was casually flailing a giant knife around for some reason. Jose showed up late with his latest friends-with-benefits (his words, not mine). Neerad went on about the upcoming Euro Cup finals 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 describing my forays at a certain Cancun nightclub the past winter⁴.

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 – with whom I was conversing 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, in truth, the six years that followed this went alright. Some of those research projects materialized into something (though much less than we’d been hoping). I had some notable successes in the immediate years following, but then some bumps in the road stalled my personal and career growth for a while after that. All in all, those years did not match what could have be reasonably expected as I sat on the patio that night sipping sweetened vodka staring out at the limitless possibilities ahead.

Good news is, I still have a lot of time to get back there and then some.

Which, to someone who at least thinks of himself as ambitious, is probably the right measure.
Miles had actually left to start his PhD at Penn the first time two years ago but unfortunately failed their infamously difficult qualifying exams and had to come back.
Which he’d left our institution for a few months ago.
More on that much, much later.