On Nostalgia and Trusting Myself

This is a rare (where rare = completely unseen before) mid-week post, because I was having a moment and decided that writing about it would be more useful than just having the moment.  Also because all of my work is really boring for some reason and I’m an expert procrastinator.  But putting that aside, we’ll focus on the moment.

I’ve gotten several lectures from my grad student in the past week about trusting myself.  Part of this stems from last post’s monumental screw-up, but I think part of it is a genuine response to the way that I, as a person, live my life.  He’s completely right- I don’t trust myself.  Whether it’s with science, or writing a paper, or basic human interactions, I have a hard time trusting myself.  I’m not sure why, or what the impetus is that will allow me to decide that I actually occasionally don’t screw things up. 

An instance of me not trusting myself that stands out in my mind occurred freshman year of high school.  It was spring semester, and we were almost done with racing for the season, meaning that we were going to go from being novice rowers to being members of the experienced team.  Our coach sat each of us down for an individual meeting, to chat and see how we were doing, and what our perspectives on the team were.  During my meeting, she asked one question that has stuck with me ever since.  We were almost at the end of the meeting, and she asked me which of my teammates I thought were the most serious about rowing.  I named a few people, and she looked at me a little bit incredulously, because my list didn’t include myself.  She proceeded to inform me that she thought that, of the team, she thought that I was the most serious about it. 

I think part of the problem was that I correlated ‘good at’ with ‘serious about’, and I didn’t view myself as good at rowing.  Or, at least, I knew I wasn’t the best, and as a result I completely discounted myself as a rower.  That attitude is something that I’ve managed to carry throughout my life, despite the fact that my coach took that instance to point out to me how ridiculous it was.  For the past year, I’ve allowed my mistakes to color my understanding of myself as a scientist, which has lead to the past week of lectures about trusting myself. 

Part of the work I’m avoiding by writing this post is a paper proposing a set of experiments to learn more about a disease of our choice, preferably with a focus on treatment of that disease.  I’ve been putting this paper off since the beginning of the semester when it was assigned.  Today, when I actually sat down to do it (since the first part of it is due tomorrow... I told you I was an expert procrastinator :P ) I was able to look at the literature available on the topic and make a hypothesis about how a better treatment might be achieved.  I then designed a set of experiments to test that treatment, and they’re actually legitimate experiments, not some crazy off the wall idea.  Nine months ago, I would not have been able to do that.  Honestly, three months ago I might not have been able to do that.  This is the first time I’ve taken an idea from scratch, and been able to design experiments to test that idea.  Even in the project I’ve been working on in lab for the past six months, my grad student has been the one driving the ideas.  I’ve come up with experiments, but they’ve usually been things he’s already thought of, and that he’s told me to come up with experiments to test as more of an exercise than something for which we have an actual need.

The point of that last, long paragraph is to say that I had an, ‘Aha!’ moment when I realized that my grad student was completely correct in his assertion that I need to trust myself more.  I do have the skills necessary to pursue the things I want to pursue, regardless of the idiotic mistakes I might make along the way.   I’ve come a long way from freshman in high school Alycia, and from freshman in college Alycia, and from three-months-ago Alycia.

In full disclosure, I’m feeling incredibly nostalgic at the moment because there are a lot of end-of-the-year events happening in the next couple of weeks.  Last weekend was our campus preview weekend, so campus was temporarily teeming with excited high school seniors and their parents, coming to experience MIT for the first time.  Those students are the first class of MIT students that I won’t know.  The Boston Marathon was run on Monday, which is always an emotional event.  I watched (online) as the elite runners finished, and remembered how emotional crossing the finish line at the end of a long race is.  Last night, my floor held Rooming, meaning that the people living on my floor next year now know (at least approximately) where they’ll be living next year.  Tonight, the sophomores are getting their Brass Rats (our class rings), a symbol that they’ve reached the halfway point and are on their way towards graduation.  It’s hard to believe that I hit that point almost two years ago, before I started this blog.  At the same time, that feels like an incredibly long time ago, so I guess it’s not that hard to believe.

What is hard to believe is that I’ve started writing my final assignments for most of my classes.  I’ve picked topics, at the very least.  Upon successful completion of those assignments, and provided that I pass the rest of the classes that are attached to each of those assignments (knock on wood), I’ll be done with my undergraduate career.  I’ll sit through the interminable ceremony that is graduation, and I’ll listen to the speaker, and I’ll receive my diploma, and I’ll turn around that Brass Rat that I was so excited to receive two years ago, so that it’s sitting on the world rather than on me.  [Author’s note: Until graduation, Brass Rats are worn such that the beaver on the main bezel looks like it’s right-side-up to the wearer of the ring.  When the wearer graduates, the ring is worn such that the beaver is right-side-up for everyone else.]

In the next several weeks, I’ll probably have moments of self-doubt again.  It’s pretty much inevitable when you’re me and you’re so good at not trusting yourself. :P  The difference, this time, is that I’ll be able to look at this moment and realize that my grad student isn’t saying things just because he likes the sound of his own voice, but rather because he’s right.  I’ve never put a lot of stock in the argument that MIT breaks you down in order to build you back up.  To be fair, I still don’t really think that the breaking down portion of that process is necessary at all.  But at least this time I believe that the building up part is feasible, rather than something we tell ourselves for the heck of it.