What's the latest thing the neighbors say

[austin_dern]

One more lingering bit from the Troy visit. On our way to the parking garage my advisor and I ran into one of the other professors from the department. He surprised me, as always, by specifically remembering me. (I was one of his TAs for one term of Freshman Calculus, but he had a half-dozen TAs for that class just that year, as well as the worst undergraduate grader I ever encountered, and that's against some stiff competition; my experience with undergraduate graders ranged from ``catastrophic'' to ``sufficient to cause Job to lose faith'', but this one was really bad.) But more, he mentioned that my advisor had talked about me, and my skills, and about how generally good I was.

Putting aside my modesty: I expected my advsior to talk up my abilities to the Army Guy we were hoping to impress. (During the meeting, he mentioned how he took very few graduate students because he wanted them all to be excellent ones.) Or to editors when we were putting forth book proposals. That's just strategically useful praise. But here ... this ... why on Earth would my advisor have mentioned me to anyone? And why mention me so positively unless ...

People who avoided grad school may not understand why it's so strange to think of hearing such praise, at least to my ears. There's probably a natural adversity to the advisor/grad student relationship, with the grad student having to do something much harder and not quite like anything he's ever done before and having to meet the advisor's standards. And, really, the harder the standards the better the ultimate thesis, even if it means the grad student goes through years of ego-crushing meetings where the flaws in the research and analysis and thought and writing are laid out in painful detail.

I'd got to feeling that I'm a worse mathematician than him, not just because he's more experienced, but also because of a fundamental difference in talent. And yes, we've worked together since my thesis, but I couldn't escape the feeling it was because I was conveniently available (and, for the textbooks, a better writer) rather than because I was particularly desireable. I even saw my becoming his grad student as a matter of luck rather than conscious choice on either of our parts.

The comment from this other professor, that my advisor was apparently impresed enough with me to say so to other people and recently enough that this was remembered ... well, it forces me to reevaluate a decade-plus-long relationship. I didn't realize my advisor saw anything in me. Or the other professor figures it's always safe on meeting reformed grad students to say their advisor was impressed with them, which has a certain compelling logic to it too.

It's always hard to know what to think.

Trivia: Orville Wright was known to his family as ``Bubbo''. Source: Taking Flight: Inventing The Aerial Age From Antiquity Through The First World War, Richard P Hallion. ``Bubbo''? Man, those Ohioans known how to have fun, I guess.

Currently Reading: Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics: the History of the Explosive that Changed The World, Jack Kelly.

Comments

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I hope this might make you feel more confident about asking for the letter of recommendation you'll need for job season. Which is coming up much faster than I think either of us would like. I need to start getting my recs solicited within a couple weeks.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It should make me feel better, yes, although I do feel like I'll be more confident asking once I get the basic draft of the code I'm to write functioning. I feel better asking for a recommendation in the wake of an accomplishment like that.

[orv.livejournal.com]

I've never been through grad school, but after watching other people do it I've come to think of it as a form of academic hazing.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

Actually, my relationship with my adviser was very amicable, and he always gave me every impression he thought I was brilliant, even though I thought he overestimated me. So my experience wasn't really like Austin's.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It might be a mathematics thing, or it may have just been the culture of my particular school. The other grad students I hung out with certainly felt that sense of ``my advisor is smarter enough than me he could incinerate me with a cross thought'', but I ... never thought to compare that to other departments or schools.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I don't know that 'hazing' is really the right term, but there are strong elements of it that are really a matter of endurance more than anything else. I think the rough outline of the system --- admission, qualifiers, prelims, committee selection, work-with-regular-review, defense --- is fairly sensible in its checking of a person's qualifications and progress; but, you can also see where its pieces date back to the medieval days when academic contests were spectator sports. And where a particularly sensitive person might be crushed by the personal interactions rather than pure skill.

[orv.livejournal.com]

It's a fairly reasonable structure, I suppose, but it means people who are still feeling out their skills get basically no positive reinforcement for years, while receiving a constant drumbeat of criticism. It's hard on the psyche and I've known a few people who really didn't handle it well.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

That just really wasn't my experience at either of my grad programs. I actually sometimes wonder if I came away from grad school with an inflated sense of my worth because of getting a lot of praise. I may have been done a disservice that way.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I wonder seriously now if it isn't more a matter of getting similar levels of praise and criticism and just hearing it differently. I don't mean to get all Two Cultures but it feels very easy for me, and my grad school friends, to hear the ``this is right'' part and dismiss it as of course it's right, that's what the objective was, therefore logically it must be right, while the ``this is wrong'' part is a series of little cuts bleeding us away.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It's not a matter of getting no positive feedback, though. Many of these steps, for example, are not fail-and-out but rather redo-until-you-pass, prelims particularly. The committee-based gate events, particularly the final defense, we don't even attempt until we know we're going to pass.

I concentrated on my shortcomings, certainly, and felt that more keenly than I did the positive reinforcement, but that's part of who I am. I suspect mathematics-and-science oriented people get a similar attitude possibly because for a lot of us this is the first time we hit an academic level where homework-study-exam doesn't apply, and we're geared towards that and didn't think about the parts where we had to write original work before since that was all in humanities classes and other ignoble occupations.