Feeling Torn on Research Areas

As the title of this blog suggests, I am really into business behavior. Macro to micro, I eat it all up. Really? Eat it up? Yes. Case in point, I am reading a Micro Network Theory text book instead of, oh, something my boss suggested.

BUT

I am an engineer! I was trained in engineering, I do engineering and I am good enough at engineering that I have a considerable number of people asking me to do engineering for them. Oh, and I am a womyn engineer. How great is that? I am paving the way, breaking barriers etc.

So, why would I leave engineering to go to the 'soft' behavioral side?

I wonder how many other women are out there in similar positions. Who entered a field in which they were the minority and made a great go of it, but decided that they just wanted to do something else. It is not the lack of feminine energy in my office, or discrimination that has driven me away from engineering, it is the lack of interested projects. Interesting from a management and human side. Yes, I work with very complex systems, but the systems don't excite me. I want to innovate, I want to experiment and improve the world. Come to think of it, one of my major issues is that my sector of engineering is not particularly innovative. We are pretty boring, doing today what we did yesterday kinda folks. And I just don't fit in with that mentality. I get bored easily, I need lots of new challenges. I want to put in extra work to try something new. I want to discover new ways of solving old and new problems and I want someone to appriciate that. Certain people like it, but over all, my innovations have been squashed. So many times in fact, that I am scarcely inclined to innovate at all.

In the end, maybe it is not that we are not welcome in this profession, maybe it is that women engineers are too innovative for the engineering community. OK, I obviously can't speak for all women engineers, so THIS women engineer is too innovative.

Mining Secret Data

I am applying to Business PhD programs. My life is in a slow rotation around this concept of business research, and getting to do this sort of research for the rest of my life. As an applied business person, I have a million questions that I want to find answers to.

Should I implement enterprise social networking technologies?
Should I reorganize our administrative department?
How should I split my time between business and production? (Strange, but I am trained to do both)

Part of my problem is that I do not think that there is one answer. I have a really hard time justifying actions, so sometimes I just do it, and hope that it turns out OK. It is frustrating and it is not how I want to live. I want to have answers, or at least be able to tell someone why there is no answer yet.