casualphysicsenjoyer

This is a crosspost from https://chillphysicsenjoyer.substack.com/p/pursuing-physics-research-part-time. Intro Disclaimer - I’m a part-time research associate doing biophysics with a uni research group in the UK. But I have a day job in an unrelated field that pays the bills. Whilst I’ve read many personal accounts of research from full-time research students in the academic system, I haven’t heard as much from those pursuing research part-time - independently or otherwise. I’ve always found this weird. Out of the set of people who are really interested in stuff, most people can’t, or don’t want, to go into academia full time. There are loads of valid reasons - financial, skill or geographical constraints. And so, doing unpaid research on the weekends seems like the only way for this kind of person to sate their interests meaningfully. And so I wonder why I haven’t read as much stuff by more people doing this kind of thing. So as someone doing research part time alongside their day job, I wanted to reflect a bit on my priors about likelihood of success, and about trying to do two things well. The main thing that I wanted to argue is that one's effectiveness doing research part-time is probably a lot higher than the time adjusted effectiveness of a comparable researcher. Specifically, I think there are loads of arguments on why its a lot larger than just (effectiveness of a comparable researcher) * (part time hours / full time hours). And it's more fun! Background For the past year, I’ve worked in finance whilst doing biophysics research part-time at a university. I work on spectroscopy. It took me around four years to get in the place where I could comfortably hold a job in finance and also find a supervisor. After I graduated I worked for big corporations for several years. It got to a point until I could manage my working hours so that I could leave reliably around 5pm, giving a few hours in the day left to work