the good and bad of grad school yearmark 2.2

I have to give a talk on Thursday at LBL on a project that I've been ignoring for a while, so this is naturally a really stressful prospect that fills me with great fear of utter public humiliation. In addition to the fear of public humiliation (which is real, because the people there are truly intelligent and awesome and I admire them enormously and I want their respect) there's also the fear that even if my talk is well-recieved, I'll still be a half-assed dilletante claiming things that I can't produce (or don't actually intend to produce, or something). I'd rather be honest, even if my honesty is underwhelming.

Anyway, but as a result of preparing for this talk, I've had to revisit some things and pull out some papers that I printed out three or four years ago as an undergrad. And the nice thing is that I guess I have grown as a scientist in grad school. I've learned more fundamental concepts, equations look more familiar to me, my vocabulary has expanded (which means an increase in the probability that I will have some idea of what a paper is about by looking at its title) and I'm able to be critical, sometimes, of what people are doing. This last thing is probably the most important, and in practice often boils down to just trusting myself. This also often backfires and makes me overconfident more likely to think that things are stupid when I don't understand them, but that's (mostly) okay.

So where am I at 2.2 years into grad school? I've learned a lot, but I haven't (yet) produced a lot. This is an okay thing to say so long as it changes, hopefully soon, but is stressful because there's no guarantee that things will work out for themselves.