1 Day With a Grateful Heart

A blog that I randomly found a while back, and now keep up with every day, is doing this thing called "30 days with a grateful heart," which means she's going to write a blog post every day for a month about something she's thankful for. And she invited her readers who write blogs to do the same thing. I don't know if I'm going to do very many of these, but here's at least "1 day with a grateful heart."

My Wonderful Job

I have a really cool job. It's one that has the potential to make a lot of people jealous, I think. The reason it's cool is because I get to study physics every single day. For me, there is nothing more interesting than physics. The whole reason I majored in physics was simply because I think physics is really really interesting. That's it. And now that I'm done with school it means that I get to keep studying physics every single day. Just the fact that my job is to study physics makes it a great job.

It's also one of the best work atmospheres I could ask for. I get to be a part of a research group where I have professors, research faculty (like me), and students all collaborating to be successful on several projects at a time. It's good to collaborate because some of the guys in the group are ridiculously smart, but can't do an experiment if their life depended on it. There are also guys like me who are less smart, but actually know how to do experiments pretty well. This way I don't have to be as smart as I should be and they don't have to have steady hands like I have. Also, it's just a fun group. We pick on each other and have fun at our meetings. All 7 of us young guys go out to lunch every week and it's just fun to have guys who are both coworkers and friends.

The pay is "amazing." Now, many people would say that the pay is quite low, but it's my highest paid job I've ever had, so it's A-okay. I get paid enough to pay for rent, lots of food, bus pass, student loan payments, cell phone, fun, and there is more than enough for me to be able to save up for a big expensive bike ride next summer. I'm very thankful for how well I can get along with the amount I get paid.

Just the security of having a job is incredibly comforting. I went to an interview for what I thought was a research faculty job at Denver University yesterday. I was excited at the possibility of the job because the research was incredibly interesting and I had hopes that the pay would be higher than what I get paid at Mines. At the end of the interview I asked how much the pay would be and he said that he could only hire me as a grad student. That was quite a let-down. Since I was only about 5% interested in more school, I declined his offer to go to dinner and left. This was disappointing, but I am so thankful to already have a job at Mines. This misunderstanding would have been devastating if I was at the point of desperately needing a job. But since I do have a job, I'm able to see this as having better direction on where I should go. That direction being to stay at Mines for a while longer. Maybe I can get some papers published and maybe, just maybe, I can become a lecturer at Mines someday. Who knows what could happen, but I'm just thankful to have my job at Mines.