Age, creativity and brain activity
A few months ago I got an official letter from the university to inform me that I would be fired on the 1st of December on reaching the retirement age:
“we thank you for your contribution and hope that you will enjoy your well-deserved retirement.”
Although not totally unexpected I needed some time to recover from the message. Even at age 65 I still have useful ideas that may be worth exploring.
In many countries -also in the Netherlands- it is even forbidden by law to fire somebody for reaching a certain age. In the US it is considered to be age discrimination.
Fortunately, after reaching the “AOW status” I am allowed to continue using my brains as a guest of UU. To my surprise my ongoing period of research is one of the most creative of my life. The combination of accumulated experience of 30 years at IMAU (!) and six years in Miami and at Rijkswaterstaat, seems to be a powerful one I wasn’t even aware of. I am simply too curious for what may emerge in the coming years. And doing research into the dynamics of the ocean is so much fun.
Doing good quality research is important, but in order to be successful you also have to advertise it and radiate your enthusiasm; if you are not enthusiastic about your own work, why would somebody else be…
After drafting and submitting a paper on the results one then encounters an unpredictable and unavoidable component: the reviewers. I have saved reviews of my early papers and it may be instructive to quote from two of them:
“Personally I am enchanted with this contribution. The basic idea is straightforward, clear and very interesting. It is the kind of paper that makes the reader’s brains work. I therefore recommend publication.”
“Unacceptable! It is little more than sticking a plate in Kirk Bryan’s model and seeing what happens. I suspect that with properly resolved boundary layers the model Agulhas Current will round the tip of Africa….”
The first quote is from a review report on my paper ‘Frontogenesis in an advective mixed layer model’, a paper I submitted in 1982 to the Journal of Physical Oceanography. I consider it as one of my best papers and apparently the reviewers agreed. However, in spite of the enchantment and praise the paper was hardly mentioned: since its appearance some 35 years ago it was cited only 15 times (Google Scholar). Making the brain work is not a guarantee for success...
The second quote reflects the reviews of another early paper (1983) on the Indian-Atlantic connection around South Africa. This time the reviewers were unanimous in their negative judgement to turn it down. But the editor wrote me that he didn’t agree: he had worked on the topic himself and had gotten stuck. So he accepted it and may have saved my career by that move. This paper has become a basic one for a branch in physical oceanography on the global (overturning) circulation and its relation to climate (such as the ‘conveyor belt’), with an accumulated number of citations of several thousand and a dedicated Chapman Conference in 2012.
So, my best papers are not the best reviewed nor cited. That is due not only to limited self-advertisement (‘selfies’) but also to a phenomenon I would like to call ‘ideas-piracy.’ That’s however a topic to be discussed in a future issue of this newsletter.
If you suffer from positive thinking then the message from the above is that there is no reason to worry: some papers will fly, others won’t, both in an unpredictable fashion. Be proud of your good research, enjoy the successes and accept what you can’t control such as the varying mainstream and fashion in our research field.
That applies not only to the individual scientist but also to the institute as a whole. IMAU is such an institute: over the past decade(s) we have established ourselves as a high quality University Institute playing in the ‘primera division’. I have had the privilege to be IMAU director during much of that start-up period while being surrounded by a unique team of scientists, technicians, modellers and support staff.
As director of IMAU I will be succeeded by Michiel van den Broeke. I am convinced that he will stabilize and strengthen the institute as much as possible and it is without any doubt that I hand it over to him.
Will de Ruijter