inthegarden, in a field like your acquaintance’s, traveling to present several times a year isn’t unusual, especially if you’re remote. It’s very difficult, also expensive, to sustain longterm. It’s a sign that she’s trying to stay alive in her field.
sbjdorlo, the issue is to do with who else is around, who there is to work and play with. The company founders have their own reasons, no doubt good ones, for going where they’ve gone. But if your son’s extremely talented, then yeah, he’s likely to chafe away from the centers, where things are cooking and there are lots of other extremely talented people around to start something up with.
Academia really isn’t like industry in that you don’t find all the universities clustered in a few areas. But unfortunately if you’re physically far removed from centers for your field, then yeah, the energy will be lower where you are, and it’s unlikely you’ll sustain that level of energy on your own. There’s just a lot less going on where it’s just you and maybe one or two colleagues.
I know people who’ve taken jobs far from the centers of their fields in academia, and yeah, they travel like maniacs. And then either they move to the centers or they cut back on the pace, because the amount of energy they have to put out just to get into ordinary conversations with faraway colleagues and stay in those conversations is unsustainable. Or they lose funding and along with it their travel money. The colleagues, remember, also have to put out energy to stay involved, and they have much less motivation to do it: they’ve got colleagues down the hall, or a subway stop away, or in a nearby city. It’s very easy to forget the colleague who’s five hundred miles away when you’re in the center, especially if the colleague’s grant didn’t get renewed and/or the college has cut back on travel funding.
If your work is not collegial work – if it’s a thing you do on your own – then this matters somewhat less. But not much work is that authorial.
People get defensive about these things because they believe that they’re being told they’re nothing if they’re not where the action is, or if the kids aren’t where the action is. And it’s not that they’re nothing. But there are good reasons why so much of the powerful work goes on where there are large concentrations of top people in the same fields. It’s not just that there are more of them; it’s the interactions that are possible without making a herculean effort just to have the interactions.
Then you get the people who take offense because they think you’re saying it’s the only way to live and that everything else is garbage. That is not what’s being said here. We’re talking about extremely talented people, and if you have that kind of talent, it’s nothing less than a hardship to be unable to use it fully.