As a postdoctoral researcher, I sit in the great maelstrom between the carefree optimism of graduate-student life and the relative security of a tenure-track professorship. My research is just as interesting to me as it always was, but contracts are temporary and the competition for long-term employment is fierce. e uncertainty of my professional future has made me revisit my ideas on what I like about science and how I see a scientist contributing to society. Of course, science can mean

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... ent things to different people. Some see it as a body of knowledge accrued by scientists. Others see it as a process by which scientists come to understand the natural world. It can be practical and applied, but also esoteric and theoretical. In reflection, I have come to understand that by following an agreed-upon set of rules, scientists can instill confidence in the conclusions they are able to draw. Science is process oriented, and in providing society with a framework for posing questions, collecting information, conducting analyses, and drawing informed conclusions based on the best available information, the scientific method is one of humanity's greatest cultural contributions. I would guess that my first exposure to science was quite typical. As a child, I was an avid reader and I especially enjoyed books about dinosaurs. I was awed by creatures that were so much more spectacular than anything I had ever dreamed could be real. As I got older, I became more interested in books about the solar system and was 1 Scholarly and Research Communication volume 5 / issue 1 / 2014 Richard J. Vogt is a postdoctoral researcher in the