Ungoodbye

I suppose this could be one of those notorious closing posts where I linger on all my sadness about leaving and review the ups and downs that made this experience life-changing.

On the contrary, I've decided this post should be an ungoodbye. Neither am I willing nor am I required to say my goodbyes to this way of life just yet. 

While sorting through my emotions in the last few days, I came to the surprising conclusion that I am not so attached to Costa Rica as I am to the OTS community that has challenged me, supported me, and given me constant intellectual stimulation for months to the point where I feel a renewed passion for gaining every bit of knowledge to which I have access. Because each answer leads to better and better questions.

And thus I also am fully converted to being a team player in academics. While we all know that having people from 5+ different disciplines talk about the same issue makes for a very interesting, productive discussion, I don't think this is something sufficiently practiced in academia. The curse of having so many specialists is that there's not often much incentive or initiative for interdisciplinary brainstorming to occur until a pressing issue demands it.

I do health, it's what makes me tick. But I hope to work with ecologists, historians, biologists, educators, artists, political scientists, agronomists, linguists, engineers, etc., in the future. 

Ofcourse, you're thinking this is obvious stuff  - but can we do it better? What if we were encouraged in youth to not only define our own interests, but to also never be satisfied with our own perspective even in the very beginning of asking questions about the world around us? Maybe there's a better way to ask.

I like to think that the work being done within a discipline has implications for any other discipline. Perhaps it's irritating to some folks in academia, but I do wish we were all at least giving a nod to the big-picture implications of what we do, because those are the currents that connect our seemingly distant islands of ideas and give us the hope of progress.

So...where I am I going with all of this?

I hope this is a glimpse of my future: this life as a researcher, this intellectual wildfire, this desire to always be surrounded by bright, engaged minds filled with wild ideas to which I never would have independently arrived.

Ciao, San Vito, I'll see you in October with more surveys and a field notebook in hand.