(no subject)
My scientific endeavours are going well at the moment, though I've hit a bit of a pause. Paper #1 just came out (in the #2 high impact journal in my area), Paper #2 was accepted (in the #1 high impact journal in my area) with minor optional revisions that took fifteen minutes to complete, and I'm second author on a paper currently making its way to the editors of Nature (#1 OMG SCIENCE journal.) Hooray! \o/!
But my actual work is kind of stalled -- Project 1 is waiting on a delivery of an object from Point A (a thousand miles away from me) to Point B (also a thousand miles away), Project 2 is waiting on a broken piece of equipment, Projects 3 and 4 are fighting for time on some equipment with a coworker, and Project 5 is boring and I just don't want to do it. :P Plus Advisor is out of town until July...which is when I go out of town. Yeah, I'm motivated...
But! I did read this, which I thought was very interesting: The importance of stupidity in scientific research.
I liked the article, a lot, if only because it perfectly describes a big part of my grad school experience. A big challenge for a lot of students is the culture shock of moving from a scholastic environment where there are right answers to the research environment where there are only more questions. And for me, going from top-of-my-class confidence in my intelligence to a shattering awareness of my own complete ignorance. What makes this worse is that, in science, that ignorance is universally felt and universally denied. I've talked to a lot of grad students, many of whom express a feeling that they're "phonies" or somehow cheating, that they don't deserve to be there, and that they're not as smart as everyone else. It isn't real, *everyone* feels like that in grad school, but because we don't talk about it, it gets mistaken for genuine inadequacy. I'm just grateful I figured it out before I quit in frustration. I wonder how many people *did* quit, like the person in the story, because academia puts so much peer-pressure on everyone to be (or at least appear) brilliant and dedicated and completely unfazed.
But my actual work is kind of stalled -- Project 1 is waiting on a delivery of an object from Point A (a thousand miles away from me) to Point B (also a thousand miles away), Project 2 is waiting on a broken piece of equipment, Projects 3 and 4 are fighting for time on some equipment with a coworker, and Project 5 is boring and I just don't want to do it. :P Plus Advisor is out of town until July...which is when I go out of town. Yeah, I'm motivated...
But! I did read this, which I thought was very interesting: The importance of stupidity in scientific research.
I liked the article, a lot, if only because it perfectly describes a big part of my grad school experience. A big challenge for a lot of students is the culture shock of moving from a scholastic environment where there are right answers to the research environment where there are only more questions. And for me, going from top-of-my-class confidence in my intelligence to a shattering awareness of my own complete ignorance. What makes this worse is that, in science, that ignorance is universally felt and universally denied. I've talked to a lot of grad students, many of whom express a feeling that they're "phonies" or somehow cheating, that they don't deserve to be there, and that they're not as smart as everyone else. It isn't real, *everyone* feels like that in grad school, but because we don't talk about it, it gets mistaken for genuine inadequacy. I'm just grateful I figured it out before I quit in frustration. I wonder how many people *did* quit, like the person in the story, because academia puts so much peer-pressure on everyone to be (or at least appear) brilliant and dedicated and completely unfazed.