WP 4

Going into WRIT 340, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Jumping off of WRIT 150, under a more immediately relevant to me medical topic, every prompt had room to explore under a fairly broad scope of health, prompts had a good amount of guidance without being a direct cookie cutter railroad where you had an idea of where you were generally going, but your angle and interpretation of health could change depending on the piece. I wrote about autism fairly often when prompts fit and used an occupational science or psychological lens often.

In WRIT 340, I found myself stuck often. There is much more freedom to write here than was in WRIT 150. We were encouraged to find a general wheelhouse and explore within that and I thought I had a clear one — autism. I’ve studied autism for years and participated in various groups that sought to further understanding of it through research, education, advocacy, or more clinical experiences. The vagueness of prompts wasn’t entirely ideal, but surely I could handle it. After all, if I wanted to consider research as a possible back up plan or option to pivot into at any point in my career, I’d need to be able to steer myself. To an extent, I could say that this was a test run to see how I did in a more free environment to do whatever research I wanted. In theory, at least.

In practice, things didn’t go so well. I admit, multiple confounding factors were at play, but I suffered terrible burn out this semester and it tainted my passion for autism. It wasn’t the usually easy road I was accustomed to in terms of inspiration and motivation. I knew burn out was real and it’s possible that it would’ve happened eventually in my career anyway, but there’s still a degree of heartbreak associated with losing that passion for even a moment.

I’d say that this burn out taught me that going into pure research/hard academia probably isn’t in the cards for me. Going into this, I knew that I liked structure a lot and that my ideal ratio for structure to free form would be semi-structured, somewhere pretty structured, but with enough room to experiment a little and show off a little bit of individuality here and there. If forced to choose one or the other though, I’d probably choose structure. It’s safe in terms of knowing what’s expected and while it can be dull at the worst of times, it’s less overwhelming than staring into the endless abyss of possibilities.

That’s part of what was so terrifying about the WPs of WRIT 340. Not that that’s an excuse for anything, it’s probably a similar phenomenon for many who come from STEM backgrounds who come into such a broad environment when you’re so used to structure and X causing Y behavior in a formulaic approach. Where creativity can be expressed, but within certain parameters with theory and given problems/case studies as your guide.

It’s with that reflection that I can say that I’m not permanently burnt out on the topic of autism. From clinical perspectives, I love thinking about how to help autistic individuals and their families. I don’t need to be in a lab to realize that the most fun I had in this research experience was when I was talking to people about their experiences, even if I didn’t feel like I could really help them with too much other than share their stories. A noble thing all the same, but I felt the interest as a student and learner not as much as someone who wanted to report those stories.

Academia isn’t exactly supportive of that. I was already unsure about how good of an educator I’d be as a professor, but it seems like even the research end of things would be a struggle. Is there space for qualitative research, interviewing subjects and maybe having research assistants transcribe the interviews to then analyze through coding? Sure. But would it be acceptable to have a primary investigator just do interviews and not do much of the actual coding or writing? Hardly.

Knowledge is valuable of course, but an academic’s purpose is to then share that knowledge to further their field and further build that knowledge. A clinician has knowledge and can share it with patients or clients, but they are not always actively furthering their field with additional research, writing, and reporting those findings or additional analysis of potential areas to further direct research.

I think I still really do love autism deep down. I still have my passion for it even under the murkiness of not knowing my exact path, if anything, I only crossed one of the possibilities of what I might do in the future off the list. I still do find occupational science interesting and I do still care about my psychology background. I’m genuinely excited to start my next step on my path, something I haven’t felt since the beginning of my burn out. I’m excited for more patient interactions and grounded discussions, but at the same time, I’m thankful for the opportunity to do this exploration of my interest. Yes, burn out is horrible to experience, but it saved me potentially a lot of trouble trying to make that theoretical career path work if I faced burn out as an academic where I’d potentially have my job at stake and needing to figure out everything as a working professional as opposed to the relatively lower stakes of a student.

Maybe I found that I’m not cut out for that path long term. But I did enjoy learning about lived experiences. Experiences that I think I really would enjoy exploring and helping in other ways. Expressing creativity through smaller innovations or modifications in existing treatments to be even better as opposed to the radical creation of new theory or writing on the greater philosophical underpinnings of it.