Some people can feel stimulated and intellectually fulfilled while sitting alone in a study, poring over books and articles, and living in their own heads. I’m not one of those people. I need other people around me to get my gears turning. I need to bounce ideas off of friends and colleagues, and I need them to bounce ideas off of me. I can learn things through reading, but in order to really understand something inside and out, I often need to have a conversation about it.
That’s been a problem in recent years. Time was, I could step outside my office at Brown to use the copy machine, and I’d end up having an impromptu conversation with a colleague that would give me a new idea for a paper or help me solve a problem I had been working on. A grad student would knock on my door, and we’d end up talking for an hour about some new topic or subfield. Spontaneous conversation and collaboration was one of the exciting parts of academia.
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