4 ms·
It's funny how grad school is designed to bring out the impostor in you, kind of like a negative image of the different kinds of "impostor" listed. Obviously ea
by munin 8y ago
It's funny how grad school is designed to bring out the impostor in you, kind of like a negative image of the different kinds of "impostor" listed. Obviously each of these is false in their own way, but these are messages that you will be given / experience during your PhD, so it's no wonder how people come out the other end thinking like this:
1. "The Expert": your advisor/other professors/students will make fun of you or berate you if you don't know "everything" i.e. if asked to list relevant sources you list twelve and forget the thirteenth.
2. "The Perfectionist": your advisor will never say that a work is "good" and there are always ways to improve everything, the good parts will go unmentioned while the warts will be called out for repair until eventually you run out of time and ship it.
3. "The Superperson": everyone else is always working, so why aren't you?
4. "The Natural Genius": these are the words that your advisor and other professors will use to describe "successful" students: genius, insightful, gifted. Words your advisor will never use to describe someone positively: hard-working. Hard-working is assumed. Everyone is hard-working. Everyone puts in a lot of effort. Get over it.
5. "The Rugged Individualist": Only work that you and you alone did "counts" for your PhD, and credit is zero-sum. Debate carefully the authors you add to your paper because they will take some of the "success" from your work.
- gowld 8y agoIt sounds like you attended a toxic grad school. Was your program in Chemistry?
- ent 8y agoIs this a joke about toxicity/chemistry or is the field of chemistry known to be socially more toxic than other fields?
- gowld 8y agoChemistry has a reputation https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/21/us/after-suicide-harvard-alters-policies-on-graduate-students.html https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/21/us/after-suicide-harvard-... > Eight graduate students have committed suicide at Harvard since 1980, officials said -- not an unusual rate for a university. > Of those, three have been in the laboratory of Mr. Altom's adviser, Elias J. Corey, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist. > But Dr. Long asserted today that by all indications, the first two deaths, one last year and one in 1987, had nothing to do with the students' work in chemistry. > One student, he noted, had been very successful in his work, and the other had barely begun.
- selimthegrim 8y agoThis sounds not dissimilar to physics as well
- vinchuco 8y agoIt sounds like you lucked out.