When I meet someone for the first time, I run through a standard set of questions which quickly tell me a bit more about them:
1) If you were stuck on an island for the rest of your life, what 5 albums would you want with you – that is, what albums could you listen to over and over again? (It is striking to me how little people are willing to divulge about their personal music tastes – it’s more sacred than religion)
2) Describe your job or research area in 50 words or less.
Question number 2 is a blast to ask, because in contrast to question number 1, there is no right answer…yet it is still rather challenging for many to achieve. In science, or that is, in science funded by others, succinct communication is critical; however, many feel the need to make their work appear as recondite as possible. Perhaps this is to make themselves appear more intelligent, or more likely it is since they don’t have a firm grasp of what they do either.
Regardless, I am always impressed when someone can answer #2 quickly and effectively – clearly they understand the larger question I am trying to get at which is masked behind the original question. Once I asked a friend Jason what he did in his new job – we were at a restaurant – and he picked up a ketchup bottle and said, “I don’t make this ketchup, but I know who does. And the restaurant doesn’t know who makes this ketchup, but they know me. My job is to make sure this restaurant gets their ketchup without having to know how to find it.”
Superb.
So I’ll give it a go, in 50 words or less:
“I study brain cancer, which only occurs in certain parts of the brain. Its location might explain why it is able to survive cancer treatments, so I engineer models to mimic the brain environment and study cancer cell behavior with these models.”
And there are even words left over!
So please, give it a shot in the comments section. Describe your job or area of research in 50 words or less, so that it would make sense to someone you just met. And if you get the hang of that, it’ll only be a matter of time before I ask you about albums and stranded islands.
I am a project manager for a health care company. I oversee the project of implementing “smart pump” technology. Intravenous pumps deliver medication and the “smart pump” technology assists in the preventation of medication errors (overdosing by misprogramming, etc…).
Mine is super easy. I’ve met lots of people where when I have heard what they do I just sort of smile and nod blankly. I like that what I do is simple and does not need describing for people to understand it.
My job description in 50 words or less:
I am a massage therapist.
I can probably reduce what everyone else does down to about 10 words or less, yet when I have to do the same for myself it is difficult. Here is my attempt:
Men have an X and a Y chromosome. Women have two X chromosomes. To make the number of X’s equal between them, one X is randomly “turned off” as females are developing in the mother. I use stem cells to study how that process happens.
I am a Mother to three little girl’s under the age of 4. That should about sum up my day’s!
I think this is great practice. If I had to do it to someone cold it would probably go like this “I use a dual strategy gene therapy approach to remove a secondary receptor for HIV and replace it with an anti-HIV gene in blood stem cells (aka adult stem cells) in hopes of repopulating an infected individual’s bone marrow with HIV resistant precursor immune cells as an HIV treatment.”
As a side note, I know you read a lot of magazines David, do you happen to read “Technology Review” published by MIT? My boss/lab was the cover story for it recently. It’s about the project that led to the one I just described.
I do mortgage refinance loans. There you go…5 words or less. The other question about music is an easy one for me. 2 Billy Joel collections and 3 Beatles albums ranging from 1964-1970.
I am a Financial Technician for a government contractor who runs federal background investigations. I work with bankruptcy documents, federal and state courts, creditors, and other agencies to verify information regarding a candidate’s financial history as they have provided it on the initial application for federal clearance.