Traveling: Research + Work + Fun

Forewarning - I have a bunch of stuff to do before I go to the airport, so this will be a shorter blog. I'll try to do more when I am at the airport.

At the end of the day, I honestly believe that traveling should have a little bit of all these three elements. You should go to a place to enjoy the location, the different foods and cultures - which is the fun part. You should also spend sometime learning about the history of the place, the settlers who landed there, the great wars, and pay a little tribute to the soldiers - this is the research. The works part differs from research in one aspect - what is your career focus. If you are a computer scientists like me, then spend some time looking at the companies in the areas (especially start ups) or talking to people about company names. It gives me a good guideline if I were to apply for jobs in this local, what are the high end jobs and what are the other ones.

Sometimes you will be traveling for Work (like I did when I went to Banf this summer), or you will be traveling for research (like I am today); so it is important to keep your goals in mind and readjust accordingly.

The goal for this trip is finding people to interview and to conduct as many interviews as possible. This is difficult for anyone who is being thrust into it pretty suddenly. Professor Tagliamonte talks about the "friends of friends" approach as the best method to do this (this approach is meeting someone and having them introduce you to their friends, and then you get introduced to the friends' friends, etch). This puts a lot of stress on the "first impression" stage of meeting someone. First you need to engage them in a good conversation, then you need to be charming enough to convince them to sit with you for an hour and talk about their lives. While you're doing this you also need to make the whole experience so fun that they will want to ask their friends to help you.

In my opinion so far, the hardest part is the introduction. First there is overcoming that anxiety of talking to a complete stranger (which I have practiced a lot in the past few weeks)...Then you need to come up with charming and witty small talk to keep the person engaged - you really don't want them to walk away or think you're creepy. Then I'll have to introduce the project and hope that they are willing to meet again for the interview itself.

We got lucky because Professor Tagliamonte has set up some interviews for us (actually so many that I think our Monday is more or less completely booked). Hopefully we can branch out from there by using the "friend of a friend" approach. That would make life easy.

But who wants easy!? I know that I'm all about pushing myself - do the hard/uncomfortable tasks, and do them well. So I know I want to find my own contacts and explore the project at every root I can.

So bringing this back to where I started... I've covered research, because that's what I'm doing there - researching and asking the people to tell me about their city. How do I cover work? Well, what better way to meet new people than starting an educated/witty conversation about my discipline (something I'm supposedly good enough at that U of T will give me my degree in it). How will I cover fun? I'm going to enjoy everything I can! Talk to a stranger and be like, "Are you from around here? What restaurants would you recommend? Wow, I love your accent. Were you born here? So I'm here from Canada for a research project and I think you'd be perfect for it, would you be interested in hearing about it?" And BAM, I got a new person to interview - I hope it's that easy, hahahaha!

Anyway, I'd love to hear from you guys. What suggestions do you have for me and my team? Give us sample scripts to try, or anything you've done that's worked.

I'm going to continue packing.

Au revoir à tous!
"The art of communication is the language of leadership." - James C. Humes