Good Advice

My first year of grad school is over a week from tomorrow. Of course, I am staying here and doing work (i.e. my research and other tasks to be announced next week by our director of graduate studies) over the summer, but I'll not have any classes. I am happy about this if for no other reason than I am feeling sick and tired (actually, that has been literally true for the last week but I mean it here figuratively) of the constant evaluation.

It's not just the exams and the papers and the presentations that are all graded, but the weekly evaluation of contributions to the discussions in my seminars that also counts toward my grade. I'm not saying that this isn't all quite appropriate given that my classmates and I are students, and that's how school works, but it's really starting to interfere with my interest in the material (and my internal motivation in general), so I need a break from it.

This afternoon, I am presenting results from my first year project (along with the rest of my cohort, though some are doing posters instead). I've been sort of dreading it on general principles - like, ugh, another thing to prepare for and then show up to perform in front of a group and be evaluated on. I am not concerned that I will actually do a poor job (because I do know my research and have practiced the presentation a bit) but it feels very much like just one more opportunity to either do well or to screw up, only this time with the potential of public humiliation in front of my entire department (faculty and students). And I just learned that we do get a grade (pass/fail) from our advisor and that we will also get a compilation of feedback from the members of the faculty who watch our presentation. So this whole "I'm going to be evaluated!" thing is not just my imagination.

But a couple days ago, when I was talking to my advisor about the presentation, he said that he liked my presentation style when I did an earlier version of this to our research group a few weeks ago - that I was very natural and seemed like myself, as opposed to the honors undergrads we recently watched who came across as though they were actors who had memorized scripts. (I was pretty poorly prepared for that previous presentation, but I guess having a lot of practice winging it in front of groups helped carry me through.) He said that the best advice he got when he started teaching was, "You'll be a better you than you will anybody else." (Apparently many people starting out want to emulate their own advisor or favorite professor and it doesn't work very well. He wasn't talking about borrowing good ideas from other people, but trying to mold your style to fit somebody else's.)

But perhaps most importantly, he said to me as I was leaving, "Have fun with it."

It was weird how thinking about that statement really changed my perspective on the whole thing. It was like, oh yeah, I like my research project. My findings are novel, counter-intuitive, and really interesting. I am working at the edge of what is known. I had to come up with a new term to describe a concept that is central to the work because it's not been studied before in this way. It's really cool stuff. And I thought, how would I feel about giving a presentation to a room full of people who aren't there to evaluate me but who are really curious about the content of my presentation? And I realized that I did that a gazillion times at my last job and it didn't make me nervous or grumpy - I enjoyed it most of the time. I also had a lot of fun presenting my research at the conference last summer. So why can't this presentation feel more like that - an opportunity to talk to people about my work - instead of like taking an exam? Even though there are constant reminders in grad school of the extent to which you as a student differ from the professors in terms of knowledge and expertise, I don't have to think of my presentation that way. I am the expert on my own work, and the only other person in the room who knows as much as I do (my advisor), I already know thinks it's awesome.

I am confident that I will be nervous for the first minute or so, but I also know from experience that that feeling subsides quickly. So instead, I'm going to look forward to the second through twelfth minute of my presentation. As for the Q/A period, of course somebody is going to ask some question I don't really know the answer to, but there's no way this can top other awkward questions I've been asked after presentations. The one that is most seared - seared - in my memory was my undergrad project for research methods where the professor did not ask any of my classmates questions about their presentations but challenged me with "So, is Wittgenstein wrong?" Anything will be easier than that one.

This being said, I'm also very much looking forward to the presentation being over. I still have three final exams to get through in the next week and I need to start focusing on them more than I have been with this presentation looming over me.