"What do you do?"

"What do you do?"

We all ask it and we all have had and will continue to have to answer it. I know I have to answer it ALOT, and I still seem to lack the ability to answer the question both accurately and concisely. First you have to gauge what the person is asking: do they want to know what you do for work, fun, etc... And while what we all do for fun is probably more interesting than work (see exhibit below):

Fun

Work

Note the rainbow jacket in the Fun picture!! And the beer!! And Brian dressed as a pink rhinoceros!! Versus the fake smile in the Work picture.. And the messy hair.. I know the Powerpuff mug in the Work picture could skew things, but focus on all those papers and that awful simulation running in the background. Yep I think I've rightly convinced you that Fun is more fun than Work, right?

But, most of the time the question for me entails what I do for work. So, then you have to decide whether they really want to know what you do, or if they are being polite and don't really care. That certainly affects the way in which I should structure my answer. Then you have to decide how much detail 1) they want to know and/or 2) they would understand.

 So, I find myself dreading the question and taking a deep breath before I have to answer it. Perhaps it is a symptom of being in graduate school. Technically, 'what I do' has to be proposed in a 15-20 page paper to my committee, so maybe there is no one sentence that could properly capture what I do. The shortest answer I can give is, "I am getting a PhD in Transportation Engineering," (although it's really civil engineering, but I don't want people to think that I am a civil engineer because I'm not. So, I stretch the truth a bit to more accurately reflect my course of study; and, my friend Jenny tells me it would be unethical to sell myself as a Civil Engineer to which I agree wholeheartedly). Here's Jenny working,

I felt I needed to add that because 1) she's probably the hardest worker in our office and 2) she seems to have mastered the art of telling people what she does; I've seen it in action; don't deny it, Jenny!

Most people have no idea what transportation engineering means. And rightly so. There are so many facets of transportation engineering and transportation studies that it would be impossible to even know all of them that exist. If the person happens to be an engineer themselves and happens to have taken transportation classes during their undergraduate course of study they might think I design the geometric aspects of roadways or do signal timing (and then sometimes I get asked when I'm going to fix certain freeway exits or intersection light timings, which has already been covered by xkcd: http://xkcd.com/277/).

So I try to explain that transportation studies have become more interdisciplinary and that we (and 'I' in particular) try to model human behavior by using census data and travel surveys/diaries in order to better predict traffic patterns in order to make the best policy decisions when considering new infrastructure or modifying existing infrastructure (aka construction). It's a bit like social science meets mathematical modeling meets engineering.
 And while I wish everyone were this excited at this point in my explanation:

Bethany

Although now that I look more closely at the picture above it might be terror rather than excitement. Either way, it's still a reaction. And instead the general response more closely resembles: 

Confusion?/Boredom?

And as if the above mentioned weren't enough disciplines, I also am trying to model wireless communications (computer science) and incorporate measures of risk and uncertainty in designing such networks. So, most people (and felines) are now:

and I'm starting the miss the two years of my life where I could just say, "I teach highschool math." Because that was easy (not the teaching part, just the talking about it part). So sometimes I just find myself saying, "I do math."