Freewrites. (7/2026)

I miss writing.  Since leaving academia I have found myself remembering my PhD fondly and yearning for something similar. For a long time, I thought I missed research and pushing the boundary of knowledge, but this does not hold muster. At my day-job at NVIDIA the bulk of my work is supporting universities. I get to work with professors from prestigious colleges with fancy titles and brilliant ideas. Occasionally I will coauthor papers with them, but more often the collaboration ends at technical support for their work. In some ways I am more immersed in research than I was during my doctorate, but I am writing less than ever. While I know of at least one coworker that enjoys writing, many of my colleagues are fully immersed in research and technology. They will leave their job and then happily do home lab projects on their custom-built compute infrastructure. My university collaborators are not much different. A professor I work with at Princeton, when I asked what he does at home, outside of his work in astro-physics, told me that he "does material physics research". This lifestyle does not interest me, and apart from some rare instances in time where obsession struck me, it has not appealed to me. I do not wish to shut my computer off at the end of the day, turn on a different computer and dive deeper into technical problems. Despite this, I still find myself with a certain level of "unfulfilled-ness" in regard to my pursuits, and I really think the thing I miss is communicating through writing. 

To this end I am going to try and post on here more often. Topics will be varying. I have read a lot about housing policy this year, so surely that will be in there somewhere, but I expect my interests will wander drastically. I also don’t want this to be too formal. While my previous few blog posts were about research I had mused at and conducted, the blog posts to come will be about broadly non-technical topics. I want to structure these more as freewrites than anything else. Just a means to get some thoughts on paper and out into the world. If someone reads it cool!