Happy 15th birthday Punk Rock Operations Research!

It’s hard to believe that I started this blog fifteen years ago on April 2, 2007. Here are some milestones in the life of the blog:

• I published 762 posts.
• I started 105 drafts of blog posts that I never finished. Most of those drafts are a quick idea I saved to finish later, but inspiration for finishing the post never came.
• I updated the blog theme at some point, but I do not remember when. It is perhaps due for another update.
• The blog was nine years old when I introduced its logo, which I absolutely love.

Over the years, I am frequently asked why I started a blog. I started the blog. Here is the history.

In October 2006, Mike Trick gave the keynote at the INFORMS combined colloquium dinner at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh, where he encouraged everyone in the room—which was almost entirely filled with PhD students—to start an operations research (OR) blog.  I toyed with the idea of starting an OR blog since starting my first tenure track position that began two months earlier, but I was hesitant about starting a blog at the same time as my tenure clock. However, I was drawn to blogging and decided to give it a try a few months later.

My motivation for starting a blog was to use it as a platform to somewhat selfishly evangelize students about operations research. I found it difficult to find students inclined to study OR in my department. At the time, I was an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in the department of Statistics and Operations Research in a college of humanities. The number of undergraduate OR majors in the department was generally in the single digits, and the department did not have a PhD program at the time.  I naively thought that if I started a blog, students at my university would read it and want to perform research with me and pursue an MS in operations research. That did not exactly happen.

What are the benefits of being an operations research blogger?

I didn’t fail in my quest to draw more people into operations research. In the past 15 years, some of my posts have reached students outside of and adjacent to operations research at universities and high schools throughout the world. I love meeting people who tell me how they were introduced to operations research by a fellow student or professor sent them to Punk Rock Operations Research to encourage them to consider operations research. For some, this nudge apparently worked. It’s an honor to play a small role in someone’s professional journey. It’s one of the best compliments someone can give me, and I’m blushing as I type this. It seems like my original goal of evangelizing students about operations research was realized. Blogging has been a very rewarding journey 🙂

Blogging has been extremely rewarding for my academic career, although not in a way that I had once imagined. Blogging has also helped me broaden my professional network, and it has led to opportunities to give research talks to a broad audience.

How do you find time to blog?

Blogging takes time. I do not consider blogging to be wasted time, although it takes a certain amount of skill to identify how to blog in an efficient manner.  I try to limit blogging to the evenings or to time when I need a mental break, so that blogging does not take away from productive time. This works because for me blogging doesn’t seem like a chore. Sometimes blogging can be a chore, like I when I feel the time pressure to write a post about something in the news before the 24 hour news cycle loses interest and switches to another topic. Once micro-blogging became popular, I found less need to blog when I can post a quick tweet about a topic. Writing blog posts has indirectly made me a better teacher and grant proposal writer, and in this way, it is synergistic with other professional activities. I have blogged less as I have taken on administrative positions and need to balance a larger number of professional duties.

Why are you still blogging like it’s 2007?

Starting a blog in 2007 was the most 2007 thing one could do. ABC News named Bloggers the 2004 People of the Year, and in 2022 I find science blogging to be relevant and important. Blogs provides content that cannot be conveyed in a 280 character tweet (and definitely more than the old limit of 140 characters) or short LinkedIn or FaceBook post. Blogs continue to be a good medium for an operations researcher like myself to convey information in different formats that can be accessed in the same place. I have been on several scientific blogging and social networking panels, and they have all confirmed the importance of blogs.

OR blogs are often—but not always—read by our OR colleagues. People stumble across OR blogs for many reasons, and often they stick around. Reaching out to these readers is a tremendous opportunity to improve scientific literacy in the general public and to bring new people into the field. I am often disheartened by the state of scientific literacy in the US. I even blogged about this recently. We need to continue to tell our operations research stories educate the world about the benefits from applying advanced analytics to making decisions. While I’m just one blogger in a large sea, over the years many journalists have reached out to me for my operations research expertise based on blog posts they’ve discovered. Together we can broadcast our message to the world.