He noticed it before I did, but that's part of what he's good at. It was December of my third year as a grad student and I was showing signs of burnout. He told me to take a few months off from the thesis work and throw myself into something completely different with equal or greater intensity. A day of walking around in the snow (Stony Brook saw heavy December snows back then) was enough to find something. I couldn't send an email between Stony Brook from Brookhaven National Labs. Not that I sent emails at the time. A project in mind, I celebrated with a piece of tart cherry pie.
Computer networks had been emerging, but didn't connect into something that made it easy for one part to talk to another. The brilliance of TCP/IP wasn't universally recognized, but several of the unconnected silos were moving towards it. Connectivity was going to happen. I had decided to write a gateway between two of these networks starting from a point of zero network experience. Most of my programming was in FORTRAN and CDC assembly language on batch machines. Three months later I had something that worked well enough that people used it. Very little engineering blood flows in my views, so this seemed like a major victory. Refreshed, I was able to jump back into worrying about particle physics. I'm pretty sure I made more progress in the months that followed than if I hadn't taken the little sabbatical.
A few years later my director called me in for a chat as the new year began. I had only been at Bell Labs for a few months and was still finding my way around when he told me my background wasn't broad enough to be a good researcher. To broaden myself he wanted me to "pick something completely different from anything you've done and give me a report after you'd played for two weeks." It was a great education and went on for about four years until he moved to a different area. It was then that a "two week sabbatical at the beginning of each year" had been added to my employment contract. I haven't found anyone else at the Labs who had it as part of their employment agreement, but more than a few did something like it on their own.
Some mini-sabbaticals were great, others were dead ends. All were learning experiences. They managed to get this introverted person to the point where he could search out experts. They taught me how to identify the type of person who might be the most useful - after all, Bell Labs had uber-experts in several fields and many of them were the wrong sort of person to talk to.
It's a good way to add a bit of breadth. After leaving what was left of research at AT&T a bit more than twenty years ago, I continued taking these mini-sabbaticals. I follow something of a ritual. On the 30th of January I write down a half dozen or so unconnected areas I know very little about. Areas where two weeks of study might get me to the point where I could begin to ask a question or at least know if it's really interesting. Usually there's something by the evening and, for reasons unknown to me, I mark the occassion with pie.
Tomorrow is the 30th of December. That means I need to bake a pie.
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