Recently, I had the interesting opportunity to attend the Ontario Universities Fair in Toronto, representing the University at which I am a professor. The fair is something relatively new. It certainly wasn't around when I was a high school student. It's an opportunity for senior high school students to hear the pitches of various Universities and colleges in their vicinity and thus, in theory, make a more informed choice about their career paths.

In Ontario's somewhat socialized system of publicly funded education, I'm not completely comfortable with the idea of being called upon to "sell" my institution to potential "clients". I don't view education as a product, but more as an opportunity of which every citizen should avail himself. But that's a topic for another day. Suffice it to say that I was more than willing to discuss career options with young people, and to offer the unique qualities of our institution where appropriate.

What was interesting, and not particularly surprising, was the extent to which mass media had overly influenced students' expectations of their careers.

When I was their age, the big TV shows were things like "L.A. Law", and the big movies were the various John Grisham adaptations. This continued for some years. Indeed, I recall having several despondent discussions with my fellow science grad student’s years later about how our society had become "law obsessed". The rush to law schools was fairly evident, as was the resultant glut of underemployed law grads.

In more recent years, TV has brought us the return of the sexy medical drama. Shows like "E.R.", "Gray's Anatomy" and "House" top the ratings. So most of my current students --and pretty much all of the high school students I met at the fair-- are convinced that they are destined for medical school. My interviews with the latter suggest, however, that few have any idea what life as a doctor really involves. It's informed in large part by what they see on television.

Moreover, their inability to separate medical life in the USA --which is what is portrayed on their favourite TV shows-- and the realities of life in Canada's socialized system is quite telling. It suggests a dramatic overwhelming of Canadian identity, at least with respect to expectations of lifestyles pertaining to the professional class, by foreign media.

This is most evident when you consider the recent annoying trend of the medical crime drama. "CSI", "Cold Case", "Bones", "Crossing Jordan" and a score of other shows have come, gone, lingered or transcended in recent years. Not surprisingly, a very large number of senior high school students approached me at the fair with the very saddening question, "How do I become a CSI?"

Where to begin? As far as I can tell, "CSI" is an American term that is only relevant in certain cities. The educational backgrounds and certification requirements of crime scene investigators vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Some are police officers. Some are medical examiners with MDs. Some are specially trained by law enforcement institutions, like the FBI. And some are recruited directly by municipalities.

Indeed, fresh out of graduate school, I actually once had a job interview to become a "forensic pathologist" in Toronto, a position that would have involved collecting biological samples at crime scenes and performing laboratory tests to assist in police investigations. The interview took place in a court room and involved a simulated cross-examination.

It was sort of fun. But I was wise to the reality of the job. Despite what the TV shows might suggest, crime scene investigators aren't 20-something hard bodies dressed in Gucci, working in softly lit high-rise offices and engaged in mob hits and terrorist plots when they're not off having whirlwind romances with casino bosses and deputy mayors. In truth, they're average-looking, very hard-working middle-aged dudes and dudettes in stained lab coats, working in a dank basement with a single 60 watt light bulb dangling from the ceiling. They're barely paid enough to afford their one-bedroom downtown apartments, let alone to buy Gucci. And the samples they collect aren't always bullet fragments and blood drops; they're often pools of diarrhea, vomit and bile.

With student after student interrogating me about the appropriate crime scene investigation education path, one question kept occurring to me: what exactly are high school guidance counselors doing these days? Are they simply showing kids DVDs of "CSI Miami" and leaving the room? Hmm, maybe I should teach my classes the same way.

This weekend I gave a talk at a conference meant for "professionals" of a particular ethnic group of which I am a member.

The word "professional" has always baffled me. Technically, I think, a professional is someone who gets paid to do what they do. Historically, the word has been used to describe people who work in certain high status fields, like Medicine, Accounting, Engineering and Law. There's some rationale in claiming that a professional is someone employed in a field that is overseen by a licensing body that guarantees high standards of conduct and of technical ability. By this definition, doctors, accountants, engineers and lawyers certainly qualify, but so do electricians, plumbers, machinists and a host of other highly skilled workers who typically don't frequent --and who aren't invited to-- the cocktail party circuit.

In colloquial usage, a professional is someone who takes his or her job seriously, and by virtue of that seriousness produces work of a quality beyond that expected of a non-professional. A "professional" hit man, for instance, is presumably better at killing people than the violent kid next door, and will do so more efficiently and with less drama. Hit men are rarely invited to conferences and "networking" events, however. This is probably a good thing.

The word "professional" is sometimes used as a proxy for "wealthy". Many ads on dating sites, for example, explicitly state a preference among suitors for "professionals", since a professional is typically among the top earners of our society; hence the association of the word with cocktail parties and "networking" events. Yet garbage collectors and bus drivers --professionals that are well paid, indeed-- are usually excluded from such events. Ironically, students and unemployed cubicle jockeys feel right at home brushing elbows at these suit-wearing, wine-sipping exchanges, while their wealthier and better trained smock-wearing brethren do not.

I'm not really sure what point I'm trying to make here, except that we so often hide behind euphemisms to obfuscate the crass classism of our activities. In modern parlance, "professional" really means "white collar", and carries with it an implication of advanced social status. This is a tad ironic, since "white collar" no longer means wealthy, ethical or sophisticated, which are presumably the traits one is expecting at "networking" events. Maybe the plumbers, bus drivers, tool makers and short order cooks of the world are already holding champagne parties and "networking" events to which we of the snooty, degreed class are not invited. I wouldn't blame them.

I really enjoy stepping outside my comfort zone. For me, this can take the shape of taking a class in a subject area quite orthogonal to my career, or attending a random event or starting a project in a realm in which I hold minimal to no expertise.

Along those lines, I recently attended a little known event called "Podcasters Across Borders" (PAB), which is a cozy affair traditionally held in Kingston, Ontario, that attracts independent podcasters from across the world, though mostly from Canada and the USA. For those not in the know, a podcast is essentially internet radio (or sometimes video) usually "broadcast" in the form of streaming audio from a website or as a downloadable MP3 file.

Many mainstream media providers, such as the CBC in Canada and NPR in the USA, produce their own professionally rendered podcasts. Indeed, I had the very good fortune of having been recently interviewed on two CBC podcasts: the technology show "Spark", and Radio Canada International's "Indo-Canadian Report". Both shows are also broadcast on regular radio, but service a fair chunk of their audience through online downloads.

A new business partner and I have decided to try our hand at creating a high quality, regular podcast. The details will have to wait for another time, lest this unnamed partner beat me senseless for letting the cat out of the bag too early. But the important thing here is that I know nothing about the medium or the tradition of podcasting; that's her thing.

And that's what brought me to PAB. As someone who spends a great deal of time at conferences and public meetings relevant to my discipline, usually behind a microphone, it was a thrill to attend such an event as a complete naive newbie, with no expectations placed upon me for either expertise or vocal participation. So this is what relaxation feels like?

The content and participants of the PAB event are irrelevant to this article. Rest assured, it was a fascinating event in which I learned a great deal about technology, unseen electronic social networks, and a global phenomenon of private citizens sharing their personal tales with the faceless masses of the internet; and where I met some very nice people. In short, non-professional podcasting in its present niche format seems like blogging with a lot more effort.

What was curious, though, was how a presentation on the monetization of this free user-generated content was received. An interesting model was put forward wherein income could be effectively generated by selling ad space in around one's podcasts, supported by some sophisticated market research and product marketing. I could see where the podcasting purists might object to this seeming taint on the altruism of their efforts. But the fact remains that the sector likely will not evolve without considering its economic aspects.

And that's where my mind got going. I think there's an opportunity here to meld small business practices, regardless of one's sector, with the social media interactivity and subtle marketing of podcasting. I already lightly tie my business practices in with my day job as a university professor, and heavily tie them in with my extensive online activities, which are ostensibly pursued for fun. My Facebook and Twitter feeds, for example, are essentially silliness, but both drive traffic to my blog, which is sometimes a tad more serious. That in turn drives attention to other elements on my website, and generates enthusiasm from me to explore thoughts and avenues that may or may not end up being financial profitable, but always result in an interesting outcome.

In short, I'm now wondering how podcasting and other such rich media social networking can assist the process. Stay tuned, I'm sure I'll work it out eventually!

I'm an epidemiologist, a word derived from "epidemic", which means that I'm supposed to know something about diseases. This past week, several people have approached me for "expert" commentary on the emerging swine flu pandemic. I'd like to declare for the record that while I've written a few articles about pandemic influenza, I'm by no means an infectious disease specialist. However, I thought I'd say a few defensible things about swine flu nonetheless.

We have reports of the first death in the USA, while Canada's tally holds at 13 cases, but no fatalities. These numbers are to be expected. They are the result of travelers returning from the endemic zone of Mexico. As far as I can tell from news reports, there have been no cases in Canada of someone contracting the disease from someone who has just returned from Mexico. This means that the system is working as it should: those returning from Mexico with the disease are being quarantined and treated... for the most part.

The fatality rate thus far is about 5-7% (which is actually higher than the 2.5% rate of the world-changing pandemic of 1918). Also, the cases in Canada have all been of the mild variety, which means there is a reasonable expectation of full recovery for each case. This is not the Bubonic Plague. In other words, if current controls are kept in place, there is every expectation that our very thorough and professional public health infrastructure will keep civilization quite safe from this disease.

As for what we can do to protect ourselves, do remember that I am not a medical doctor, but a research scientist, so my advice carries no medical authority. However, my opinion is that we should just do what our mothers told us: wash our hands, sneeze into our elbow pits, don't touch our faces or mucous membranes before washing first, avoid extremely crowded areas (like sporting events, theatres, etc) and keep ourselves in good health to maintain robust immune systems. We can do the latter by practicing good daily health: eat fresh foods, particularly fruits and vegetables; enjoy moderate exercise regularly; get lots of sleep; drink lots of fluids; avoid stress; practice basic hygiene; and avoid unhealthy products like alcohol, tobacco and preservatives.

This is a peculiar time for an entrepreneur whose business is public health. On the one hand, there is an opportunity to capitalize on public fears and anxieties by positioning oneself as either a calming or inciting authority. Or one can view the opportunity in different terms, as a responsibility to apply one's unique skills for the betterment of the public good.

I'm not a fan of profiting from fear, yet I will likely make a few bucks here and there by writing articles about pandemic flu. The danger is falling prey to the seduction of the moment, of overstating the risk posed by the disease because, frankly, we are all subconsciously motivated to create an environment where in our skills have heightened value.

For this reason, I am making a concerted effort to avoid saying too much about swine flu. Or at least that was the plan.... and yet here I am still talking about it!

I guess I'd better stop :)

I have a good life. I'm completely aware of this fact, and daily turn my face to the sky and thank the Powers That Be for my great good fortune. I've created for myself a career that is fun, somewhat profitable, flexible, never boring, full of adventure, and sometimes even a bit sexy.

And sometimes all those aspects collide into something resembling comedy.

Next month, the University at which I'm a professor is hosting something called "International Development Week", during which we will feature several events and many big name speakers around the themes of Human Rights and Global Development. Our keynote speakers include, among others, Canadian political stalwarts Maude Barlow, Lloyd Axworthy and scion Alexandre Trudeau.

As a member of the advisory committee to the event, it's my great honour to liaise (when I can) with potential speakers and contributors. Thus, last week I found myself booked for an appointment with the new ambassador from one of Canada's key allies, a gentleman who I hoped would agree to join the ranks of our top tier presenters. Well, our meeting at the embassy fell on the coldest day of the year... and during a week when my every waking hour had been spoken for, thus I was unable to tend to some basic personal needs, like laundry. It also occurred in the middle of a transit strike here in Ottawa, a city-wide crisis that has created a fair amount of trauma, chaos and woe.

So I found myself running late for this very important meeting with a foreign dignitary. Stupidly having no clean clothes of suitable quality (remember, no time for laundry!) I threw on the only clean pair of dress pants I had available ---and they had a gaping hole in their crotch! But at least they were dark grey, as were the long underwear I intended to wear under them.

I had intended to walk to the embassy, given the bus strike. But I was running late, so I turned to my environmentally friendly alternative: I booked a car with the car-sharing organization of which I'm a member. I rushed to the lot to get the car, and found, due to the unbelievable cold, that the windshield was covered with a half a centimetre of solid ice. And, of course, the car was devoid of both an ice scraper and windshield wiper fluid.

Having no time to acquire either a scraper or more fluid, and taxis being rarer than extinct animal species in this time of transit woes, I did the only thing I could: I drove the car with my head sticking out of the driver-side window, all the way to the embassy in -38 Celcius weather.

The good news is that I made it to the embassy on time, and even managed to remember to keep my legs crossed the whole time, lest I flash the ambassador with my crotchless pants.

And, oh yes, he agreed to take part in our event.

Is there a lesson to this story? Not really. As Homer Simpson once said, it's just a bunch of stuff that happened.

It's only a matter of time before the juggler drops a ball. For the past few months, I've been running my small consulting business, writing books, blogging like a mad man, and recently accepted a full time position as a professor at the University of Ottawa. Something had to give, hence my lengthy absence from this forum.

But I'm back!

Balancing several careers is a challenge at the best of times. But there does seem to be a certain clarity of partnership between science entrepreneurism and the business of academia; one feeds the other. My consulting business typically services governmental clients around the area of scientific review, contract research, expert input and oversight of other contractors. The same skills set is reflected in the professorial life, wherein one must oversee the work of students, review cutting edge research, conduct one's own research and regularly offer one's best insight into the work of colleagues.

For some, keeping the two worlds separate might be an issue. For me, blurring the line between them is the whole point.

Last month, I joined the Toronto-based philanthropic group "Vea'havta" on a medical mission to the interior of Guyana, which happens to be the nation of my birth. (I have been involved in other projects in Guyana, but this was my first time dealing with remote, forest-dwelling peoples). There, we engaged in providing basic clinical care while conducting community-based health education interventions for AmerIndian peoples living in really remote villages. When I say remote, I mean that we took a bush plane two hours to a landing strip deep in the rainforest, then rode a dug-out canoe another two hours to reach our target communities.

The work that we did, while soulfully important, has a mercenary twang to it. I collected data on the types of medical questions the villagers were asking me. These data represent the gap toward which future interventions can be targeted. On the one hand, the data were collected altruistically to refine this important work. On the other hand, the data were collected selfishly for me to generate academic publications and thus satisfy a requirement of my professorial status.

The entrepreneurial element arises when I consider both the skills refined through this adventure (i.e., cross cultural communication, community education, intellectual work during physical duress, qualitative data collection and analysis), which can now be offered to future paying clients, and the opportunity to market these skills and this experience as yet another asset in my portfolio.

Increasingly, I am of the opinion that one should not strive to comparmentalize the various aspects of one's work, nor of one's character. Rather, by seeing every opportunity as a holistic experience requiring the full investment of my emotional and intellectual character, all avenues can be travelled simultaneously, resulting in both a richer experience and fuller resume.

And while this way of looking at things might appear, in many ways, heartlessly mercenary, the truth is that approaching both business and humanitarian enterprises as complete, holistic avdentures helps to ensure that the best of your abilities will be put to the task at hand, resulting --in the case of the Guyana mission-- in a maximal transfer of skills to a severely underprivileged and grateful population.

I love public speaking. I don't get why so many people are put off by it. It's famously said that many people would literally rather die than speak in front of a crowd.

Yes, I get nervous just before an engagement. I can't eat or drink an hour beforehand, nor can I have a truly casual conversation, though I almost always have to try, given that addresses are typically preceded by cocktails and random shmoozing. But even the uncomfortableness is part and parcel of the entirety of the public speaking experience, and all of it must be savoured.

See, there will come a time when each of us will have to shout or beg in order for others to pay attention to us; possibly in our old age. So when an opportunity arises to make scores, or sometimes hundreds (and on the very rare occasion, thousands) of people sit quietly and listen to what we have to say, we should jump at it!

Between lecturing to my classes and giving public presentations, I speak so frequently these days that I wonder if it will ever become truly second nature and butterfly-free.... and the thought scares me. After all, I suspect that most of the fun is in being nervous. When something ceases to scare or excite you, that thing may not have much importance anymore. Savour the fear.

From an entrepreneurial point of view, I think public speaking is critical. It allows one to refine one's message, refine one's ability to defend a position and answer questions, and it necessarily results in a smoother conversational product, which reaps dividends in more intimate venues, like the boardroom.

From a marketing standpoint, a good profile as a public speaker not only allows your name (and the name of your business) to be broadcast to audiences in large batches, it establishes you as an expert in your field. And if not an expert, then at least someone with sufficient expertise to be able to communicate the content.

I've been asked to give lectures on topics in which I do not have truly deep expertise, such as climate change, global hunger and even lunar mining! At first, I balked at such opportunities, arguing to myself that there exist people better qualified to do the job. But then I realized that the quality needed by an audience isn't so much content expertise --though a healthy and defensible familiarity with the content is mandatory! Rather, what is needed is the ability to marry sufficient expertise with style and fluidity of presentation. Thus, the world expert on a topic may not be the best equipped person to speak on that topic.

In essence, in the realm of public speaking, my skills as a storyteller are more marketable than any hard expertise I may have acquired in my various technical disciplines. A typical audience wishes first to be entertained, and then to be educated.

So if an opportunity to speak in front of a large group presents itself to you.... jump at it!

It was about 10pm last night when the fire alarm went off in my apartment building. I run my small business from my home, so a threat to my home is also a threat to my livelihood. No fear, however, since I exited the building in an orderly fashion, along with the scores of other occupants, to wait in the frigid Ottawa winter night for the arrival of blaring fire engines.

Now, I've lived in apartment buildings in many cities, and tend to travel to some fairly unstable regions. So I've endured many a hasty exit, due to fires, earthquakes, etc. I have the calculated exit down to a science. First, I put on generic adventuring clothes (denim or something equally as tough... this can be useful if fleeing a crumbling building in the Third World, just in case you have to sleep outdoors for a couple of days).

Second, I grab the important documents: passport, wallet, credit cards, ID, etc.

Third, I snatch my beloved smartphone, which, of course, is both a communication device and a data device. This way, no matter what happens to my home, I can call someone and have access to all my contacts and key personal data, including encrypted financial information and passwords, all of which I keep well protected within my PDA.

Fourth, I usually grab one of my laptops. I have a few lying about. You never know how long you'll be absent from your home, and it's useful to have a method of both entertaining yourself and getting some work done.

Fifth, and possibly most important from a business standpoint, I grab a backup medium. See, I learned the hard way to never trust my computers to hold data securely. Computers fail regularly; external media less frequently. I keep several backups of all my data on external hard drives. In more responsible days (i.e., grad school, when data represented one's entire thesis!) I would keep backups in the freezer, under the questionable assumption that should the house burn down, the safest place is also the coldest place.

I also keep backups of my most vital data on a 2 gigabyte USB flash drive key, which I encrypt and typically keep in my pocket. By "most vital data", I mean client-specific information for my business, and student-specific information for the classes I teach. This way, those data that most affect other people are the ones I keep best protected.

Sounds good, right? Problem is, my system broke down last night. Somehow I neglected to grab ANY of my backup media. I spent the night in the diner across the street, nervously waiting for the fire department to give the "all clear" sign before returning to my apartment to --thankfully!-- find all my data intact. A split second of oversight nearly caused me to lose all of my client files, the manuscripts of the books I am writing, studies and analyses yet incomplete --all the work I had done and was doing, all the records of everything I had created and worked on since the advent of the computer. It was a terrifying prospect.

The lesson? As anal as I am about backing up my data to a variety of physical media, I neglected to consider the possibility that all the media could be destroyed simultaneously together, as in a fire. There are many possible solutions: online backups to a website or to a third party provider, or simply walking a DVD over to a friend's place.

So if you haven't done so already, invest in an offsite backup solution. It will save you several sleepless nights, and might save your entire livelihood!

In an earlier post, I pondered the motivation for seeking a life of self-employment. I concluded that, for me, it was more about freedom than anything else.

I suspect, however, that for many, the primary lure is a payday that is potentially grander than would have otherwise been possible through traditional employment.

As much as the lure is the potential for wealth, the terror of self-employment is the uncertainty of work: Will I make enough to pay the bills this week? The temptation is strong, therefore, to view each contract as merely an avenue of avoiding, for another month at least, starvation (and, worse yet, return to the employed life).

How to respond, then, when the receipt of payment brings with it an ethical thorn?

I have a client in the poor nation of Kenya, for whom I recently completed some scientific work. The client is a non-profit NGO committed to combating HIV/AIDS among the mostly rural poor of that besieged African nation. Knowing this, the fee schedule I presented to them was much denuded from my regular rates. Still, the total I would need to charge for my few weeks of work would exceed the yearly wages of many of that nation's workers.

How could I bring myself to extract so much wealth from an organization that would surely otherwise use those funds to effect much good at orders of magnitude greater than could be done in Canada?

Yes, the client had agreed upon my rates before I commenced the work. Yes, the work was completed satisfactorily, though a little beyond the agreed upon schedule. In terms of strict business ethics, I was perfectly within my rights to issue an invoice for the agreed upon sum.

Yet, to be completely candid, I don't need the money. Other (local) clients, whom I bill at much greater rates, more than make up for any cash shortfall represented by my lost fees through the Kenyan client. So, again, can I ethically accept this money, knowing that I would not miss it, and that it would otherwise be spent to great positive effect in Africa?

There is a greater ethical issue that speaks to the impact of globalization: the trend of moving foreign currency from developing nations, thus exacerbating the widening rift between rich nations and poor. Instead of employing a foreign "expert" to do the work, the Kenyans should have sought local expertise; surely it exists somewhere in that great nation. And instead of allowing them to employ me, perhaps it would have been more appropriate to have insisted that they find local expertise, and offered my support in a cheaper, supervisory capacity, thus effecting some knowledge transfer into that knowledge-hungry country.

These mental gymnastics were not furthering my search for a solution to my ethical question. So, in the end, I chose to issue an invoice... with a healthy 20% discount to assuage my liberal guilt. Is the best solution? Clearly not. But it will do for now.

I am currently enjoying a very rewarding consulting stint within an agency of the Canadian federal government, where pretty much everyone else is also a consultant. (Actually there are only two bona fide civil servants in our office; everyone else is a contractor). This is not atypical of a new agency that must rush to get its procedures, budgets and mandates in line before formal, permanent hires can take place.

I really enjoy contracting for the federal government... at this senior level, I mean. People are surprisingly committed to the work; and, if your agency is wealthy enough, sufficient resources can be thrown at a given issue to address it wholly and satisfyingly.

Being surrounded by so many other consultants, most of whom are former senior bureaucrats themselves, has afforded me a very unique opportunity... to compare business cards. Yes, literally, I've been examining the business cards of my colleagues (and perhaps future competitors) to see how our aesthetic and communicative tastes overlap and diverge.

Most are quite basic: black printing on white, with name, title, address written along the long axis of the card. A couple have a logo. One even has a motto italicized at the bottom. One thing they all have is a mention of their consulting services, for example:

• Joe Blow, MPA
  President, Blow Policy, Inc.
  Health Policy Analysis and Corporate Communications
  joe@joeblow.biz

You get the idea. Then I took a long, hard look at my own card. It's various shades of blue, with a giant, multicoloured human eye taking up most of the room. In one indiscreet corner is my name and email address. That's it. It's eyecatching and pretty, and useful for giving to tipsy women at cocktail parties, but otherwise not exactly a great advertising boon for my business. After all, anyone finding such a card might incorrectly conclude that I'm an optometrist or graphic artist.

So now the debate rages in my little monkey brain: do I go with boring and corporate, or do I embrace artistic and fun? And this is where I conclude that while I will probably always be comfortable, I will likely never be stinking rich; because, in this subtle, small way, for me, being interesting is more important than being businesslike.

I don't know why most entrepreneurs choose the path of self-employment. I can fathom some guesses: the potential for great wealth, the attractiveness of a flexible schedule, a distaste for authority, a thirst for risk, or the inability to direct one's career in a satisfying manner within the constraints of the employer-employee relationship.

For me, the transition was compelled by a single realization: that one of my nightmares in life is to look forward to the end of the day. You know what I'm talking about; we've all done it. At some point in our working lives, we've been in an office, factory or store praying for 5:00 or whenever our shift is over, trying to will the clock to move faster. Or we count the minutes, hours and days till the weekend and mourn the passing of Sunday into Monday. The term "hump day" for Wednesday is particularly troubling, as it implies that the progress of the week is a thing of laborious unpleasantness that must be endured, rather than celebrated.

That is my nightmare, to experience the totality of my working life within that paradigm. Our lives are short. As we age, time seems to go by even faster. In a couple of decades, I fear days will flit by like minutes. Time is the one resource in our personal ontogenies that is truly unrenewable; so it is a grave sin indeed to waste it wantonly. It seems to me, then, that to wish our days to pass quickly is nothing less than a tragedy.

Hence my attempts to create a work experience that prevents me from wishing the day to end, that instead causes me to relish each working minute --or, at the very least, to not cause me to dread those minutes.

Last week, I decided to travel to New York for a number of reasons, both personal and professional. On the way to Manhattan, I stopped by a relative's mountaintop upstate home to take in the fresh air and to watch the deer frolick on the front lawn. I had a conference call with a client in Kenya, which I took via voice-over-internet on my laptop, while sitting barefoot on the grass; and spent the rest of the time doing statistical analyses interspersed with long walks to the reservoir, accompanied by flocks of wild turkey and the occasional flash of an orange fox in my periphery.

That was a WORK day. I got the work done and simultaneously enjoyed every living moment of that day.

See, that's why I chose this path: to make work a subset of life, and not the other way around.

My approach to science entrepreneurship tends to be one of advocacy. If making money at all costs had been my goal, I certainly would not have chosen my circuitous path through the physical and biological sciences, conspicuously avoiding medical school and other avenues of more obvious pecuniary reward.

Instead, my path has been one of engagement, first through laboratory science, then through teaching, then through policy work, and now through business.

But despite the new commercial face of my career, the underlying ethic has remained the same: using science to enhance our society, while educating society about the powers and limitations of science. It's just that now I also need to print up business cards and dress marginally better than usual!

As part of my mission of engagement, I write newspaper articles and speak to community groups on issues in science. One of the more enjoyable aspects of this practice is the visiting of schools and youth organizations. While I still have in my possession a piece of paper licencing me to teach high school in Ontario, I nonetheless find public schools to be foreign and sometimes intimidating places. But there's no place better to have your message critiqued in the most honest and objective way possible.

An adult professional audience has become accustomed to bewilderment and to speakers trying to gloss over problematic portions of a presentation. Kids do not tolerate such chicanery. If something is unclear, they do not hesitate to point it out. I find that their viewpoint keeps me on my toes.

I'm fortunate to enjoy a long time association with an organization called "Let's Talk Science", which brings real scientists into contact with school kids in an effort to demystify science and to encourage a degree of excitement about science that textbooks and traditional lessons cannot confer. Through LTS, I've been able to re-examine projects that I've pursued solely for money, and to reconsider their scientific, social and educational value, sufficient for communication to public school kids. This represents an invaluable opportunity to grant even more emotional and social value to activities that often are mistakenly dismissed as the mere money-making scurryings of a profit-based business.

Occasionally, a science public outreach exercise will find me in strange circumstances indeed. There was a time when I suddenly found myself at a meeting of Brownies, holding hands with a dozen little girls and prancing about an imaginary mushroom. I'll take that over a boardroom encircled by stuffed suits any day.

When I first announced that I was going to try the dangerous (yet exciting and potentially lucrative) world of entrepreneurial self employment, a friend who had long tread this path gave me some sage advice: "Never say no," he told me.

What he meant, I assume, is that a private consultant or contractor cannot afford to plant any seeds of doubt within the minds of actual or potential clients. So when someone comes to me and says, "Do you know anything about so-and-so," and I really know very little about the topic, it behooves me to couch my response in such a way that I nonetheless project a degree of confidence or even some marginally related expertise. In short, I may not know the topic well, but I have the intelligence and capability to learn about it in a very short period of time.

It's important, though, never to lie or misrepresent oneself. It is possible to admit to shortcomings while nonetheless proceeding with the acquisition of relevant skills and expertise.

A couple of weeks ago, I agreed to give a lecture on bioterrorism in a political science class at the University of Florida. It's not the first time I've been asked to give authoritative input on this topic. I was living in Washington, DC, around the time of 9/11, after all, and media types were all in a flurry trying to find anyone who could spell anthrax correctly, let alone discuss its weaponizability with a degree of lucidity.

The problem is that I am not an expert on bioterrorism. I have never worked in the field, nor have I ever had anything to do with the military or national security, though I've written a couple of articles cursorily about the topic.

But a consultant who is flexible and creative can mine his own stores of experiences to find places where his true areas of expertise overlap with those of the topic in question. In my case, there was a clear common ground between bioterrorism and epidemiology; they both have to do with health risks to large populations!

As a result, I was able to both guide my media connections in Washington, DC, and the class in Florida fairly authoritative input into this complex and volatile topic. The lesson? Not so much that one should "never say no", but rather that we each have within us skills and expertise that may be more relevant to a client's need than we may at first suspect.

I am a fortunate man, indeed. I just returned from a month in Guyana, South America, where I was one of several consultants working on a Canadian-funded multimillion dollar public health project, focusing on HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases and Tuberculosis. I'm lucky not just because I spent the worst part of February in the tropics, but because the work I was doing is well beyond the magnitude of that typically given to epidemiologists of my relatively young career level.

It was, I believe, the fact of self-employment that garnered me this remarkable opportunity. I've been consulting on this project for five years already. But not till I severed all ties with the world of salaried employment a few months ago have I been able to afford the time and focus to apply all my skills and energies on foreign soil for such an extended period of time. Indeed, the act of consulting affords opportunities otherwise inaccessible to those who are traditionally employed.

Part of the project involves the creation of a national health information database. One of our programmer-consultants is fresh out of university. He commented that most of his peers are employed building small websites for grocery stores and such, while he has the honour of creating a national information system for a whole country, because he had the courage to accept the adventure. Similarly, I find myself in a leadership role in developing a national Tuberculosis surveillance system, a task that would have been given to a team of extremely senior individuals and organizations in a developed country like Canada or the USA.

Therein lies both the challenge and opportunity inherent in this kind of self-employment: by accepting the physical and emotional stresses of international consulting, coupled with its associated job insecurity, we are offered a world of professional opportunities and exposures that would have otherwise been held from us until after years or decades of traditional work. As a result, we are compelled to enhance our skills at an accelerated rate, and to add additional skills in project and time management, client relations and cultural sensitivity.

But this is not for the faint of heart. The terror of failure is palpable. With such greater professional challenges come higher stakes. In the case of international health consulting, the price of of failure or of doing a bad job is not just a poor review, but potentially the exacerbation of the poor health of the entire client nation. We are thus well motivated to succeed.

As my bio indicates, I’m not only a scientist but an author, as well. This is not as unusual as it may first appear. Think about it. Each one of us is a complicated whole being with many interests and skills and many -sometimes contradictory-dimensions to our personalities. It’s a function of society that we are so often constrained to define our identities by a single selected profession. After all, at any social event it’s guaranteed that someone is going ask, “So, what do you do?”

This forced constraint of identity is certainly unfair and maybe illogical, but it’s to be expected. Typically, our jobs are what we do for a third of our day. The rest of the time we are parents, spouses, siblings, friends… and sometimes writers, musicians, social convenors, webmasters, painters, sculptors and more. It’s a conscious decision to identify ourselves according to our paid professions rather than by our hobbies or personal pursuits.

For an entrepreneur, the manner of self-identification can be a little more complicated. On the one hand, we wish to present ourselves in a concise and pithy manner: “What do you do?” “I’m self-employed.”

On the other hand, we wish to be accurate and inclusive. Every social event, after all, is also an opportunity to advertise our services: “What do you do?” “Well, I’m a lawyer who also does specialized writing, contract research, policy advisement and some kinds of program evaluation, blah blah blah…” Clearly, this can get tiresome and unattractive.

We need to be selective about which aspects of our complicated personas to communicate as being truly and immediately representative of both our identities and our services. It is useful to distinguish between our “soft skills” and “hard skills”. By soft skill, I mean the ones that have required and benefited from the lesser amount of formal training. In my case, clearly, science constitutes a hard skill, while writing represents the soft skill.

By packaging together my major skills sets -the science and the writing-I’ve learned one important lesson: often it is the soft skill that garners the most attention and thus the most business. It’s almost a truism now that the number of people trained in doing complex calculations, technical appraisals and other scientific tasks is inadequate for our societal needs, but nevertheless relatively high. But the number of people capable of communicating the details of the aforementioned tasks is vanishingly small. Therein lays my access to a truly specialized market niche.

“I’m a scientist” gets some attention at a party and probably some good conversation. “I’m a writer” gets different kinds of attention. But “I’m a scientist who is also a writer” garners the kind of attention that increases business opportunity by effectively transmitting those aspects of my personality and skills set that speaks to a needed societal niche.

Whenever someone asks me what I do for a living, I have to take a deep breath and whisper, almost fearfully, "I'm an epidemiologist." Then I wait for the inevitable response: "So you study skin?"

"No," I have to then explain. "Epidemiology is not dermatology. It's the study of the determinants of health..." Blah blah blah, yadda yadda. It's such a common occurrence that I have the response pretty much memorized and parsed, much like a favourite speech. In fact, my new non-fiction book about epidemiology is tentatively titled, "Nothing To Do With Skin", in recognition of this most common public misconception.

Therein lies one of the challenges of being, not just a scientist, but an obscure scientist: most people have a skewed idea of what my profession does, if they've heard of it at all. For most epidemiologists, this is not too much of an annoyance. They deal with it in a number of ways, everything from politely explaining the 200 year history of the science --and its root word, "epidemic"-- to deftly and rudely avoiding or ignoring the question altogether.

My sister, a political scientist, has a similar problem. Many non-academics assume her profession means that she intends to run for office. The same holds true for friends pursuing doctorates in English literature-- the world assumes they all want to be writers. Such is the lot of those who have lingered too long in the halls of academia: to be burdened with both student debt and a public misunderstanding of one's occupation and purpose. This hardly seems fair, since no one assumes, for example, that a lawyer aspires to a life of crime. But I digress.

As a self-employed epidemiologist, I really don't have the option of ducking the question or of giving it short shrift, no matter how tiring the perplexed response becomes. See, for a small businessperson, every conversation about one's profession is a marketing opportunity. This is especially true for a scientist, since --if we can think creatively enough-- our skills set can be useful to a range of clients outside of the scientific community. Thus, explaining what we do, even to someone who appears to be completely outside our sectors of interest, can generate dividends.

I am fond of explaining, for example, that an epidemiologist is typically an expert in designing and analyzing surveys and others kinds of data collection instruments. Indeed, we are the masters of population research. And pretty much everyone everywhere in every type of commercial environment will eventually have need of new data. I have since helped such non-scientific clients as mortgage companies and insurance agents with their customer survey designs and evaluation strategies.

What a scientist offers is objective, structured thinking, a specific organizational approach, creativity with respect to procedural problem solving and an unparalleled deftness with data. For those of us who have ventured into this lush land of entrepreneurialism, it serves us well to remember these general skills when we interact with the non-scientific world. By communicating who we are and what we do, we not only educate the lay person about our little niche, but can very often serve to pry open a new market.