So, we stared at each other for a moment, each of us thinking that the other was really stupid. But let me start from the beginning …
I have been thinking some more about interdisciplinarity. I have written before about how different disciplines have different ways of thinking, and sometimes this gets in the way of mutual understanding. I have a story about how this panned out early on in my career, when I was working on my MSc project in a developmental genetics lab.
I recently came across this very awesome site called “lol my thesis”. The site challenges people to summarise the content of their dissertation in one sentence. The one-word thesis summaries range from the somewhat surprising (“Irish cultural history is defined, before and after, by one school teacher’s crazy lifelong dream of becoming a martyr, because druids.“) to the somewhat less surprising (“If you take an obscure mathematical object and encode it into another obscure mathematical object, the result is an obscure mathematical object.“) to the somewhat depressing (“We will never know what a long dead writer wanted us to know about his work.“) Reading the entries on lol my thesis reminded me of a rather traumatic experience I had as a young grad student.
life and learning 