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Notes on keeping old ambitions visible when a career changes direction.
A portfolio usually shows finished things. Papers have titles and DOI links. Projects have outcomes. Talks have dates, venues, and presentation roles. Arranged together, they can make a career look cleaner than it felt while it was happening.
The older writing on this site resists that cleanliness. In veterinary school, I considered cardiac surgery, epidemiology, international organizations, and several kinds of clinical practice before choosing theriogenology. Later, I wrote about going directly into graduate school as part of a long plan built around reproductive research and teaching. The current record also includes admission to medical school in 2028. Read only from the present, these decisions can be edited into a neat progression from veterinary medicine to reproductive biotechnology to human medicine.
That progression is real, but the neatness is not. Each decision was made with the information available at the time. Keeping the dated versions matters because a career is not only a sequence of destinations. It is also a sequence of revisions.
When a plan changes, the easiest response is to rewrite the earlier story. A past ambition becomes a "phase." A detour becomes preparation. Uncertainty becomes foresight that had not yet found its name. This kind of editing is comforting because it makes the present look inevitable.
It also removes useful information.
My 2021 survey of clinical veterinary careers was written by a student still comparing small-animal practice, farm work, poultry medicine, equine practice, wildlife medicine, and international routes. The piece contains judgments tied to that stage of training. A later essay records the move into theriogenology. Still later, the portfolio describes porcine oocytes, embryo culture, semen cryopreservation, fluid therapy, and genome-edited animal models as a connected research program. The value of the sequence comes from the differences between those entries, not from pretending they all expressed the same intention.
An old plan records what a person could see from a particular position. It shows which questions were open, which constraints were active, and which options still seemed plausible. That makes it more than an embarrassing draft of the present. It is evidence about how judgment developed.
Research makes this easier to understand. A project rarely moves from question to answer in one clean line. The question changes after a control fails, an assay proves too thin, or a result supports a narrower claim than expected. A responsible paper does not hide every revision. Its methods, limitations, and discussion explain how far the evidence reaches.
A career record deserves similar care. The person making the decision is also changing, so later knowledge cannot be inserted into the earlier moment without distorting it. Saying that I was once drawn to cardiac surgery does not weaken the later choice of reproductive biotechnology. It shows that the choice followed comparison. Writing about medical school does not cancel veterinary training or the research built from it. It adds a new clinical direction to a record that already exists.
This is why dates matter. So do status labels. A live project, an archived project, a published article, and a manuscript under review occupy different positions. They should not be flattened into a single category of achievement. The same principle applies to intentions. A current plan and a completed decision are not interchangeable, and a portfolio should make the difference visible.
Preserving revision does not mean that a career has no continuity. It changes where I look for that continuity.
Job titles and disciplines can shift. Questions often persist. Across the record here, one question appears in several forms: how can specialized knowledge become useful without losing the living subject that gave the work meaning? In veterinary school, that question concerned what kind of veterinarian to become. In reproductive research, it became a question about whether cellular and animal models could support claims that travel beyond the laboratory. In public projects such as KVLE and VETFI, it concerns how veterinary knowledge is organized and explained. Medical training will ask the question from another side, closer to the human patient.
That thread is easier to trust because the surrounding plans were allowed to change. A claim of lifelong certainty would be less convincing. The recurring question had to survive contact with different fields, projects, and decisions. Its persistence is visible only because the record also shows what did not persist.
There is a practical consequence here for how I maintain this site. Older essays should not be silently updated until they agree with the newest biography. If factual information has aged, it can be marked or supplemented. If a judgment has changed, a new dated piece can explain the change. The archive then becomes a conversation between versions rather than a polished statement from a person who supposedly always knew where he was going.
Public uncertainty has limits. A portfolio is not a diary, and every abandoned idea does not deserve publication. The record still needs selection. But removing all uncertainty creates another kind of error: it presents decisions without the comparisons that made them meaningful.
For students and early researchers, that omission can be especially misleading. Finished careers are easy to mistake for planned careers. A list of outputs gives no sense of how often a useful direction begins as a provisional choice, or how much information comes from learning that another path does not fit.
I want this portfolio to show the work and the reasoning around it. That includes papers and projects, but it also includes dates, statuses, changes of direction, and the occasional plan that no longer describes the future. None of those elements needs an apology. Together, they make the record more accurate.
The point of preserving an old plan is not to remain loyal to it. The point is to remember what it taught before it changed. A career can move forward without erasing the earlier map.