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.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-23 11:22 am (UTC)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.