What is your goal?

What drives you?

I’ve been speaking with undergraduates a lot recently, consulting about their career plans, and the discussions can be interesting.

I tinkered a lot as a kid– taking things apart, modifying them, doing crude experiments. Maybe you did similar things. One time I found something interesting and shared it with mother. She asked, “When you found that, did you wonder how it works, or how you could make money with it?” My answer was the former. But since she asked, it made me wonder if I should think more about the latter. So much so that I felt bad that my answer was the former.

Do you want insights, or impact? They’re not always mutually exclusive, but imagine a case where they are. Which would you pick?

Do you want a paper in Nature that is cited less-than-average, or a preprint that never got published but everyone knows?

Would you rather write a paper that is under-appreciated because it isn’t communicated clearly, or a paper that is well-cited but of questionable novelty?

How about a key insight into an obscure but fundamental part of physics with no practical application, or a modest engineering improvement for efficiency that is rapidly adopted, and results in small but significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions?