Embarrassment.

At Gravity and Levity, before he gets into the meat of the post, there is a short memoir of his embarrassing first day as a graduate student.  He concludes:

The following month proceeded something like this: I would go to his office in the morning and he would give me a problem to work on.   I would spend the afternoon and evening reading through my old textbooks and lecture notes and trying to piece together a reasonable solution, usually using the direct and formal mechanisms I had learned as an undergraduate.  The next morning I would bring my big solution to his office and present my result (the usual evaluation: you’re kind of right, but not completely right).  Then he would show me how to solve the problem with one diagram and three lines of algebra, give me another problem to work on, and the cycle would repeat.

If I have any “intuition” in physics, it was only developed through a painful and somewhat embarrassing process like this one.  Sometimes I think that to be a scientist is to live in constant fear of embarrassing yourself.

I totally related to this post and wish I'd read some of it before I started grad school so long ago.  I had many days in graduate school that felt very much like that.  Fortunately, I didn't have the embarrassing moment of first encountering my adviser in the men's room.  If I had, that would have been even MORE embarrassing.

Comments

[Christy P.]

I tell my grad students now that I one of the most important things I learned in grad school was when to keep my mouth shut. If only I had learned it earlier I would have saved some embarrassment!