I would like to introduce you to Geoff Malcolm, a man who has been very important in my life. Geoff was Professor of Physical Chemistry at Massey University. In 1974 he interviewed me for my first job there, showing me around the tractor sheds and wooden huts which then housed what passed for Physics accommodation. Geoff mentored me in my early years, and he was the person who broke the news to me when I was appointed Professor of Physics in 1984. Later, during a period when I experienced depression and doubt, he gave me the best advice one can give to an academic promoted beyond their level of self-belief. "There is no one way to be a Professor", he said. "Be the sort of Professor you want to be". That advice helped save me, and I have passed it on to many younger colleagues since. I think you will understand why I regard Geoff with esteem and affection.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Geoff Malcolm
I would like to introduce you to Geoff Malcolm, a man who has been very important in my life. Geoff was Professor of Physical Chemistry at Massey University. In 1974 he interviewed me for my first job there, showing me around the tractor sheds and wooden huts which then housed what passed for Physics accommodation. Geoff mentored me in my early years, and he was the person who broke the news to me when I was appointed Professor of Physics in 1984. Later, during a period when I experienced depression and doubt, he gave me the best advice one can give to an academic promoted beyond their level of self-belief. "There is no one way to be a Professor", he said. "Be the sort of Professor you want to be". That advice helped save me, and I have passed it on to many younger colleagues since. I think you will understand why I regard Geoff with esteem and affection.
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Paul, I dug up my BSc Hons thesis this morning and have been flipping through it since. On the front page below the title stands the year: 1999. After 11 years of wandering around the globe doing research, I now look back and re-read my first laboratory efforts with no small amount of pride. It was not half as sloppy as my younger, ruthlessly critical self remembered it to be.
ReplyDeleteAll of which I have you to thank. Your lab and the energy you generated made it natural for me to put in 125%, and to believe in my own abilities. I did experiments on topics I knew almost nothing about and did it not with trepidation about the costly mistakes I might be making (at your expense, of course) but with excitement. I learned to share in your conviction that whenever an honest attempt at discovery is made, eventually, one way or the other, something interesting will come out of it.
As the years have passed and I am initiated ever deeper into the academic world there have been numerous occasions when this, some might say, naive optimism has been battered and attacked. What was once a very simple philosophy of how to be in the lab was sometimes buried so deeply under layers of expectations and external criteria that I hardly recognized it and not infrequently, have come to resent the very activity which I once loved.
Reading what you wrote about Geoff Malcolm I remembered that you are, like Geoff is to you, a mentor of great significance in my development as a scientist. And it pulled me back to a place in my memory I have not visited for a long, long time. Today, as I review my 50-page, plastic-bounded copy of "Measurement of Optical Birefringence in Soft Condensed Matter", glimpses of the enthusiasm and motivation I had at the very beginning of my career returned to me like guardian angels to point me back in the right direction.
I hope you will take that as another testimony (I know there have been many) to your impact on the people around you and especially on those who looked up to and benefited from your example as a mentor - I know that my experiences continue to guide me and for that I cannot thank you enough.
Vanessa
ReplyDeleteThat is a lovely testimony-I am very touched by it. To have motivated a new generation is all one could wish for.
best
Paul