Odd Job Descriptions
Slightly related to the posting a few back about the unusual job title, this tale concerns me and an odd job description.
I don't usually toy with job recruiters — at least not intentionally — but sometimes it comes out that way, although I don't talk to them all that frequently these days. More often than not, rather than being the answer to their dreams, I end up explaining their job descriptions to them with brief and entertaining lectures about engineering disciplines or sub-fields in physics, or just clarifying some vocabulary so they can realize what they are really looking for and not waste their time with candidates who have nothing to do with matching the recruiter's needs. At least I feel like I've helped out even if I didn't get the interview. Alas, none have ever indicated a desire to hire me as a technical-understanding consultant.
Anyway, once I had a recruiter ask me "what would be your perfect job?" Whew! Usually I feel like there are too many "perfect jobs" for me to pin it down to just one, but in a fit of inspiration I said "One that requires a knowledge of partial-differential equations."
You can bet the silence that greeted that response was deafening, and that our conversation didn't last much longer. Of course I was being flippant and a bit impish, but it also is a very precise summary in very few words that captures a good part of my experience as a working physicist. I spent a good number of years doing research in thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, and light-scattering spectroscopy — all fields (if some of you will pardon the pun) governed by partial-differential equations (or "PDEs", as they're often called familiarly).
Sometimes is strikes me as odd because, although I can remember having learned calculus because I remember taking the courses, I cannot remember what it felt like not to know calculus. Althoiugh I can pinpoint the time in my life before which I had no idea what a differential equation was — let along a partial-differential equation — I can't even imagine what it was like not to know. All the concepts have soaked in too deeply. I wonder whether I've lost the empathy that would make it possible to teach calculus to someone else.
There's no moral to this story, really, except perhaps to suggest that if you do run across a job requiring a knowledge of partial-differential equations, you might give me a shout.