The Unacknowledged Costs of Academic Travel
I travel a lot. I travel for conferences, for planning meetings, for NASA collaboration meetings, for filming, for launches… for a ton of things that are related to my work. I can’t really complain about the travel; I get to see the world while being exposed to new ideas and new opportunities, and to cultures and cuisines I’d never experience in the confines of St Louis. I can’t complain about the business travel, but I can wish that it came at lower personal cost to academics — especially those academics who must travel but lack a travel budget.
Right now, I’m at 35,000 ft somewhere over Arizona. I’m on my way home from spending just over 24 hours in San Diego. For several hours, I enjoyed the productive boredom of working in the Phoenix Admirals Club. This gave me a chance to contemplate things and stuff. More accurately, I contemplated spending and stuff. My 24 hours of work-related travel cost me the tips I left, the insane mark up on the Kleenex I bought at the airport (because of the cold I picked up), and the cost of the coffee that went beyond what I can expect to get reimbursed (but needed to keep functioning through sleep deprivation). This trip, I got off cheap. There wasn’t anything I needed to buy to work effectively while traveling. I didn’t lose anything during this trip. It could have been a whole lot worse.
