But the more time I spent as a student of public health, the more my worries of impracticality gave way to a funny feeling of being left out. Our professors were trained as statisticians, economists, and sociologists; what was I being trained as? Was public health a discipline? An area of expertise? An employment category? After years of being a quantitative researcher, I still hesitate to call myself a statistician or an econometrician; I suspect those who work in qualitative methods have similar identity crises with respect to anthropology and ethnography. My courses still adhered to conventions of being observers, not practitioners; but my training was intentionally discipline agnostic. As a result I never quite feel at home; too dispassionate to be a practitioner, too invested to be an academic.
Yours truly writing for the Brooklyn Quarterly.
Link: Digging Into Data