In an additional benefit over being a postdoc, I set my own hours and don't wake up to an alarm, which I think has resulted in a marked improvement in mood and health. Although I work from 11pm-3am many nights out of the week, I get to sleep in every day.
The biggest challenge is that the hours when friends are likely to want to be social are also prime money earning hours, so I'm constantly assessing opportunity cost when choosing when to be social. And I've already taken one vacation, a week and a half, I thought making no money would be stressful, but it turned out to be less of a problem than not having my laptop (which got left behind in the TSA line). Like many things in life, it just takes careful planning and saving money beforehand.
That presumes that they'd be able to get the same fare numbers during those additional 4 hours. I can see 11pm-3am being a fairly high-demand time. Not sure if there's an equivalent time slot with similar demand.
According to this NYC stats sheet (page 8), there's a sharp drop off after 12. 8 AM -> 11 PM is better most days. Although, who knows, maybe Lyft has some special pricing.
Doesn't the lack of intellectual challenge in your work stress you? I don't think I could do such a mundane job and still feel fulfilled. (I mean that without an ounce of judgement—just remarking about the shift from academia / high education to "unskilled" labor)
during my free time I've been playing around with julia, entered (and failed) at a bioinformatics contest (I have zero bioinformatics background), doing a bit of toddling around with ML, algorithmic trading, and I'm doing a lot of behind the scenes stuff on my nonprofit.
Shortly, I'm going to be filming a web series called "sciencerides", where I take rides with and interview science and math folk. Although I fully intend to interview grad students, postdocs and undergrads in addition to "more well know scientists", I've already got a commitment from Frank Tangherlini, who is a noted physicist and inventor of the "Tangherlini transforms" which are a take on the Lorentz transformations but presuming the speed of light might be anisotropic. I think it is likely, I will be able to interview Hamilton Smith, the discoverer of restriction enzymes, and Clyde Hutchison, inventor of site-directed mutagenesis. I'm also going to try to interview Kristen Baldwin, who is the first scientist to clone mice from adult neurons, Floyd Romesburg, who made the first organism that replicated with nonstandard DNA bases, and Douglas Prasher, who is the unsung hero of flourescent proteins.
Actually to me the most important interview that I'm going to do, however, is one that I have for sure lined up, which is by a mathematics teacher who has had impressive success teaching underprivileged, at-risk middle school students and completely turned around their performance in mathematics.
Being a PostDoc has its highlights, but mostly, it sucks, especially in life sciences, due to pathetic pay, unstructured hours and the suckiness is generally impossible to convey to someone who has never been one. Just 'cause it's research don't mean it's rainbows and ponies.
Very tangential, but why did your laptop got left behind at the TSA line? Did you just forget it or was it something to do with the TSA itself. Since I have to travel to the US soon, this makes me a bit nervous.
The biggest challenge is that the hours when friends are likely to want to be social are also prime money earning hours, so I'm constantly assessing opportunity cost when choosing when to be social. And I've already taken one vacation, a week and a half, I thought making no money would be stressful, but it turned out to be less of a problem than not having my laptop (which got left behind in the TSA line). Like many things in life, it just takes careful planning and saving money beforehand.