As I write these thoughts, we are winding up our 2023 CINA MSI Week (details in the article below). By all accounts, the week was a huge success, and I am grateful to the CINA team and all of our researchers and colleagues at DHS for their efforts and support. Dr. Joe Rogers, CINA’s Workforce and Development Lead, led the development and execution of the event and I am especially grateful for his expertise and commitment to providing a meaningful and enjoyable week.
At MSI Week and on several occasions recently I was asked about my career path or had the opportunity to hear someone else explain their own, and some common themes emerged. First, figure out what you really enjoy doing or want to do, pursue it with every ounce of your energy, and don’t let anyone talk you out of it. The result will be, as one colleague put it, disbelief that you are actually being paid for what you do. Second, consider the reason for your work; several colleagues recently expressed deep satisfaction that their work made the world safer or better is some way. They acknowledged that their individual contribution was small, but that great results are usually the product of combined effort by many individuals over time, and each plays a critical role in the eventual success. Finally, on a personal note, I have changed jobs on an irregular but frequent basis in a 35+ year career, and I am finally able to summarize my job choice process: do interesting and hard things that matter. This simple statement has guided my career, which has been neither smooth nor predictable nor without setbacks, but it has been exciting and rewarding. I am able to end each day pleased by what I did and what I am a part of. If I haven’t lost you by this point, then please allow me to explain that I share the above not because you asked for career advice (most of you didn’t), but because I increasingly meet similarly minded people that inspire and motivate me – they chase their passion and sometimes sacrifice personal and financial comfort for it, but they are uniformly happy.
Finally, two related thoughts on “doing hard things”. First, I frequently comment on how hard the DHS mission is, and I’d like to offer three examples to illustrate the point. Starting big, consider the challenge of climate change, which is reducing habitable land, making already limited resources more scarce, and inevitably driving human migration. Next, consider the problem du jour, fentanyl. It’s nasty, novel, and deadly, but we will eventually wrestle it into submission. Unfortunately, it will then be replaced by a new threat, likely both familiar and novel at the same time, and we will turn our attention to that. Lastly, consider the threats and opportunities presented by technological advancement – not just AI, but communications, travel, medicine, and most other aspects of our lives. As others have noted, the pace of change has increased, and will likely continue to accelerate even though it has already outstripped our ability to evolve accordingly, so we learn to adapt within single lifetimes instead. This sampling suggests a problem space that includes multi-decadal slow burn problems, shorter and sharper problems that reload, and really thorny ones that defy consensus. Since the center works on some of these problems, this leads me to my second “hard things” thought, and that is the set of unique challenges that an organization like DHS’s Office of University Programs (our sponsor) has. The office has a relatively small number of people charged with managing a sprawling ecosystem of researchers under a regulatory, legal, and operational environment built for other DHS functions. There are too many projects and too many players with deep expertise to closely monitor them all, so the program managers and staff are left to delicately balance responsible oversight, trust, and a tolerance for risk that most of us never see. I make this observation to share that we do see these challenges and appreciate their complexity, we deeply appreciate the dedication and service of those involved, and we remain on the same team and fighting for the same things – a better world, and a safe, secure, and free homeland.