Reseach Travel

There have been times that I have been disappointed that my research keeps me in my office. Sure, sometimes, I have to walk across the hall to the Math/Physics Library, and there have been a couple of trips to Venable Hall, which I can see from my office window, to visit the Chemistry Library and once to show some research to some collaborators. There was even a trip to Pittsburgh for the annual meeting of Society of Rheology a couple of years ago, but that was not specifically related to my particular research issues apart from giving me a much better feel for the background. I'm talking about travel to actually do research. For example, I was quite jealous of the grad student I met when he was tracking bear radio collars in the Cumberland Gap National Historic Park. His research involved camping and hiking, and while he did of course bring up the bad points--he was once knocked unconscious when a bear he was trying to collar sent him flying 15 feet into a tree trunk--it still seemed much more fun that just sitting in an office.

But then there's this story about a Duke grad student who was arrested and convicted in Armenia on a research trip. Granted it is just a suspended sentence, but a two years in an Armenian prison doesn't sound like fun to me.