{"id":2623,"date":"2017-04-07T23:39:12","date_gmt":"2017-04-08T06:39:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wesleyschan.com\/blog\/?p=2623"},"modified":"2017-04-07T23:46:32","modified_gmt":"2017-04-08T06:46:32","slug":"groupers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wesleyschan.com\/blog\/groupers\/","title":{"rendered":"fishing for groupers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jim asked me where I was going next after leaving the lab. No clue, I said. I felt quite lost. I put all my eggs in the grad school basket, and that basket fell apart as all the admission decisions rolled in.<\/p>\n

(Colleen: “Good! You need time to grow — away from school.”)<\/p>\n

~
\n~<\/p>\n

Jim said he figured I would be lost, even before all the admissions decisions came in. He told a story (as he likes to do) about how he spent a summer in his youth catching grouper gonads.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Jim never said how big the groupers he caught were, but this one is huge. Photo credit: David Doubilet from National Geographic.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Catching fish gonads doesn’t sound like the most glamorous summer job after graduation, but it was what the temp agency offered him. He wasn’t in a position to say no. The task: catch the grouper, tag the grouper, release the grouper. “I got pretty good at it, too.” Other fishers would look on in disbelief when he released them.<\/p>\n

He took odd jobs like these long before he became the professor I\u00a0know him as.<\/p>\n

~<\/p>\n

~<\/p>\n

The larger point he was trying to make: it’s okay to have a long, windy road to wherever you want to go. Compelling careers and fully lived lives don’t have to follow straight lines.<\/p>\n

(they rarely do anyway)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jim asked me where I was going next after leaving the lab. No clue, I said. I felt quite lost. I put all my eggs in the grad school basket, and that basket fell apart as all the admission decisions rolled in. (Colleen: “Good! You need time to grow — away from school.”) ~ ~ … Continue reading “fishing for groupers”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s3MSpn-groupers","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wesleyschan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wesleyschan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wesleyschan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wesleyschan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wesleyschan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2623"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/wesleyschan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2677,"href":"https:\/\/wesleyschan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2623\/revisions\/2677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wesleyschan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wesleyschan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wesleyschan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}