I feel like I don't deserve a job.

[turin]

I got my Ph.D. not too long ago. I was looking for a job in industry during the Summer, but didn't find anything that interested me with a compatible set of "mimimum requirements". Lately, I've been looking for postdocs, but even there, when I read the job requirements, I don't think that I measure up. I feel like I cheated my way through my Ph.D.. I'm pretty sure that's not true, but the feeling becomes stronger every day. I feel like I have no idea how to do anything useful, and that I don't understand even the basics, so why should even a university hire me as a postdoc.

How common is this feeling?

 

[Pengwuino]

Why do you think you cheated your way through your PHD??

 

[turin]

Just what I said. I don't understand anything. The concepts still confuse me (especially QM). And I know that when I don't use something for a while then I don't use it very well, but things like E&M and Stat. Mech. downright intimidate me now. One thing that I'm worried about is that I might actually get a job offer, and then during the interview I will make a fool out of myself because the interviewer will ask me a simple/basic physics question that I will not know how to answer.

 

[lisab]

I'm pretty sure an interviewer is going to assume that a PhD knows the basics and much more, and won't ask questions.

I browsed through some of your posts, and I think you explained physics concepts pretty well. So I'm going to make a leap here and suggest that there is something else bothering you...something else that is making you lose confidence in yourself. Could it be that you didn't expect it to be so hard getting a job? (Just a guess, sorry if I'm way off .)

 

[twofish-quant]

Just what I said. I don't understand anything. The concepts still confuse me (especially QM). And I know that when I don't use something for a while then I don't use it very well, but things like E&M and Stat. Mech. downright intimidate me now.

It's called the impostor syndrome. It's very common among academics. What I tell myself is that I got the Ph.D. I might have lied, cheated, bamboozled everyone into thinking that I'm smarter than I am, but that still counts.

One thing that I'm worried about is that I might actually get a job offer, and then during the interview I will make a fool out of myself because the interviewer will ask me a simple/basic physics question that I will not know how to answer.

One thing that you will have to be prepared for in a technical job interview is that you *will* be asked questions that you have no answer to. If you answer a question, you'll be given a harder one, until the interviewer finds one that you simply cannot answer. The reason for this is that in some jobs it doesn't matter how much you know, but how you react under pressure when you hit a question that you don't know.

Something that worked for me is to become desensitized to failure. I've bombed so many job interviews and missed so many easy questions, that it doesn't scare me to bomb an interview. One thing that helps me is "negative thinking." There is a 90% chance that you won't get the job, so the only way that you can get something is to get the door slammed in your face time after time.

 

[twofish-quant]

Also one thing that helped me was to figure out *why* I was scared to death of failure. Since age four, I leaved in a world in which my entire life was based on getting good grades and not failing, and it was quite jarring at in my 20's when that stopped working.

There is a scene from Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped when a person was told to go up a tower to get some treasure. It turns out that at the top of the tower there is no treasure. The stair case just ends, and if you keep walking you just fall to your doom. Academia is like that.

I should point out that this is what worries me about undergraduates focusing totally on career and thinking that humanities and anything not career related is useless. One thing that really helped me when I looked into the abyss was having studied a lot of philosophy and history. Critical theory was really useful because it talks about the subtle ways that power structures make you *feel* certain things, and knowing that I had been brainwashed was important to figuring out what to do with it.

History was also important. OK who brainwashed me into think that getting a physics Ph.D. was the most important thing in the world? My parents. OK, who brainwashed them and why? Ultimately I got the names of the philosophers and poets that were responsible for my predicament and I figured out what to do with it.

Liberal arts turned out to be important because eventually you are going to reach the end of the staircase and fall into the abyss. For some people at happens at the start of graduate school. For some it happens when they don't get tenure. Heck, I know of more than one person whose life seem to crumble after they won the Nobel prize.

 

[maverick_starstrider]

Heck, I know of more than one person whose life seem to crumble after they won the Nobel prize.

Just curious, Josephson. Name another.

 

[TMFKAN64]

Is John Schrieffer out of prison now? (OK, that's a pretty big gap between prize and crumble, so maybe it doesn't count.)

 

[maverick_starstrider]

Is John Schrieffer out of prison now? (OK, that's a pretty big gap between prize and crumble, so maybe it doesn't count.)

Um...Schrieffer went to prison because he fell asleep at the wheel and people were killed. Tragic yes. However, it's entirely unrelated to his career as a physicist or self-doubt in his work/potential.

 

[Dadface]

Just what I said. I don't understand anything. The concepts still confuse me (especially QM). And I know that when I don't use something for a while then I don't use it very well, but things like E&M and Stat. Mech. downright intimidate me now. One thing that I'm worried about is that I might actually get a job offer, and then during the interview I will make a fool out of myself because the interviewer will ask me a simple/basic physics question that I will not know how to answer.

I wonder if there is anybody who doesn't get confused by QM and other topics and I think it's perfectly natural to forget concepts that you don't use for a while.What's important is that if you need any of those concepts in your work then you refamiliarise yourself with them.It won't necessarily be easy,it is likely be time consuming but you will have the advantage of having studied them before and you will come out of it with a greater understanding.

 

[maverick_starstrider]

I've always wondered if you ambushed a new PhD (or a prof for that matter) with a GRE subject test or comps how they would do.

 

[lincs-b]

I personally have set my expectations to high and will probably be in your situation in the future. I naively thought that once I had a degree I would know allot about physics but the more I learn the more I realize that I have just scratched the surface. I know that I will always feel this way, I don't know if it is a lack of confidence or just a silly wish to know everything. When people talk to me about my studies I feel embrassed like they might find out that I am really quite thick. I constantly worry because I forget things I would like to remember even if I would never need to recall the information.

 

[twofish-quant]

However, it's entirely unrelated to his career as a physicist or self-doubt in his work/potential.

One thing about a lot of highly accomplished people is that they seem to have no self-doubt in their work/potential. The consequence of that is that they are pompous, arrogant jerks that everyone they meet ends up loathing, and their life crumbles because of that.

The interesting thing about meeting people that are highly accomplished, is that sometimes you think to yourself, "well, if this is who I will turn into after I get a Nobel, then I'd rather get the "not everyone hates me" award."

 

[twofish-quant]

I personally have set my expectations to high and will probably be in your situation in the future.

One thing that works for me is to set my own expectations so high that it is totally impossible to reach them. If you are constantly setting goals for yourself that you are failing at, then failure doesn't feel so bad. One difficulty that Ph.D.'s often have is that they've never really failed at anything, and so the thought of failing is terrifying. Something that probably was a good thing for me in the long run, was that I got rejected by all of the grad schools that I wanted to get into.

One other point is that people with Ph.D.'s tend to have do deal with a lot of mental issues. I have extremely strong moods, and from time to time, I just *feel* that I'm totally worthless, and part of the reason I do a lot of math is that it gets me into a "glass world" that is external to my feelings. 2+2=4 whether I feel lousy or not. It also works the other way in that I have these moments where I *feel* that I've just discovered the secret to the entire universe and the world should kneel before me. At that point I have to do some mental tricks to keep me from totally going off the deep end.

I naively thought that once I had a degree I would know allot about physics but the more I learn the more I realize that I have just scratched the surface.

Personally, I've gotten used to it, and I think it's cool. The more I know, the stupider I feel, so feeling stupid is a sign of progress. It doesn't bother me.

When people talk to me about my studies I feel embrassed like they might find out that I am really quite thick.

This doesn't bother me that much, because there is this one moment in my life when I was in front of about a hundred people, and I said something stunningly stupid and you had a room full of about a hundred people that were literally laughing at me. (And when I say literally laughing, I mean ha-ha laughing, and they weren't laughing with me, they were laughing at me.)

Mentally, I have found myself in that room a lot of times in my life, and I do remember what I was feeling. There was deep humilation, but there was also rage and anger, and the nice thing about being angry is that it gets you out of the bed in the morning and get you doing stuff.

 

[George Jones]

It's called the impostor syndrome. It's very common among academics.

I once talked to a young faculty member in the second year of tenure-track appointment at a small Canadian university who felt that somehow a mistake was made in granting him a Ph.D., and he said that he knew others who felt the same way about themselves.

He became Dean of Science.

 

[twofish-quant]

You deserve a decent job because you are a human being. One of the things that my parents taught be is that what really determines a person's worth is not how much they know, but whether they are honest and humane.

The idea that "you don't deserve anything if you aren't smart" is something that the system drills into you, and at some point you have to rebel against it. Something to remember is that in the twentieth century there have been two governments run by Ph.D. that believed that "you don't deserve anything if you aren't smart" and it turns out that those two governments were the most monstrous governments that ever existed. One government run by Ph.D.'s was the Khmer Rouge. The government run by Ph.D.'s was the Nazi Germany SS occupation government in Eastern Europe.

Both of them took "if you aren't smart, you don't deserve anything" to its logical conclusion.

 

[twofish-quant]

He became Dean of Science.

One problem with the "impostor syndrome" is that high levels of accomplishment usually makes things even worse. If you feel like a fake when they hand you the Ph.D., it's going to get even worse when they make you dean or president of a university. High levels of accomplishment do *not* fix the impostor syndrome since the more stuff you get, the deeper the hole you dig for yourself.

Also it is far, far harder for a dean or president of a university to get help for their issues, than it is far an incoming freshman, and there have been some cases where people in very high academic positions have totally imploded because of that.

 

[Moonbear]

I got my Ph.D. not too long ago. I was looking for a job in industry during the Summer, but didn't find anything that interested me with a compatible set of "mimimum requirements". Lately, I've been looking for postdocs, but even there, when I read the job requirements, I don't think that I measure up. I feel like I cheated my way through my Ph.D.. I'm pretty sure that's not true, but the feeling becomes stronger every day. I feel like I have no idea how to do anything useful, and that I don't understand even the basics, so why should even a university hire me as a postdoc.

How common is this feeling?

This is all the purpose of doing a post-doc. It's to transition from being a student to being a boss. It gives you time to develop the rest of the skills you need that you don't get from doing your Ph.D. When you get your Ph.D., you essentially know ONE way to do everything, that being the way your mentor has done it and taught it to you, or maybe someone on your committee. But, you don't know about other alternatives. That's why you expand your knowledge by working with someone else as a post-doc. Beyond that, you can spend more time developing your niche, no more distraction of classes and committee meetings, you just spend your time learning the things that are relevant to your interest area and doing those experiments. In addition, you begin to learn to supervise other people, which often you can have no experience in doing at all after obtaining a Ph.D., and can be daunting about industry jobs where you'd suddenly be responsible not only for your own work, but supervising the work of others. As a post-doc, you should be getting experience supervising a grad student or two, or some undergrads.

Nobody comes out of grad school knowing everything they need to know to be good at what they do. It's only the ones who don't realize this and think they don't need any more supervision who are dangerous and drive everyone nuts.

 

[Saladsamurai]

<snip>

Also it is far, far harder for a dean or president of a university to get help for their issues, than it is far an incoming freshman, and there have been some cases where people in very high academic positions have totally imploded because of that.

I offer 'Dean-of-Science tutoring' for a nominal fee. If anyone is interested, just shoot me a PM.

 

[twofish-quant]

This is all the purpose of doing a post-doc. It's to transition from being a student to being a boss.

Life is about becoming and not about being. Once you end up as non-tenured faculty, there are a dozen other skills that you need to know. Once you end up as tenured faculty, there are a dozen other skills that you need to know. Every step you move up, you end up being incompetent for a while until you learn new stuff, upon which you move to a higher level of incompetence.

And then you die :-) :-) :-)

Nobody comes out of grad school knowing everything they need to know to be good at what they do.

Nobody ever knows everything they need to know to be good at what they do. If you do then they push you to the next level where you end up incompetent again.

It's only the ones who don't realize this and think they don't need any more supervision who are dangerous and drive everyone nuts.

At some point you run into the problem of who supervises the supervisors. At some point, you just want the freedom to screw up on your own.

 

[maverick_starstrider]

One thing about a lot of highly accomplished people is that they seem to have no self-doubt in their work/potential. The consequence of that is that they are pompous, arrogant jerks that everyone they meet ends up loathing, and their life crumbles because of that.

The interesting thing about meeting people that are highly accomplished, is that sometimes you think to yourself, "well, if this is who I will turn into after I get a Nobel, then I'd rather get the "not everyone hates me" award."

Regardless, Schieffer is not an example of a Nobel Prize winner whose life crumbled because of some inward crisis of confidence and you haven't provided another example. My point here is that your arguments have an odour (for lack of a better phrase) of reverse rationalization and cognitive dissonance (as opposed to sound evidence). The advice you seem to be relating is that the road from grad school to "real world" is through categorically and systematically crushing ones self-esteem and dreams/goals to get yourself in the right "mindset". However, reading between the lines (and given the fact that your name has "quant" in it, though that may be unrelated) suggests that you might have had a bad go of post-grad life and cognitive dissonanced that that must be the only/normal way it can go (If I'm off base here, I apologize).

Now it very well may be true that a succession of crippling personal defeats ended up putting you in a position/mindset to achieve your own personal victory. However, I don't know if I'd sign off on it as "sound advice".

As for the OP, I had the same experience coming into grad school (I felt like I'd learned nothing in undergrad) so I've been trying to relearn and cement all of undergrad physics before I graduate (who knows whether I'll succeed). Furthermore, I've definately noticed that pretty much everyone in grad has forgotten most of what they learned in undergrad, though, as has been pointed out, often the purpose of undergrad is not to learn things for good but to be comfortable enough with them to look them up later when you need them.

 

[twofish-quant]

My point here is that your arguments have an odour (for lack of a better phrase) of reverse rationalization and cognitive dissonance (as opposed to sound evidence).

You say that as if that's a bad thing. OF COURSE, I'm reverse rationalizing and impacted by cognitive dissonance, and that's a bad thing because ? Well...

And I'm not arguing, I'm just telling stories.

My goal is to be productive. If I feel miserable about myself and can't get out of bed, that's not good for anyone. If I write a story in which I end up being the hero in my one's life story, and it get's me out of bed and *doing* stuff, then GREAT!

The advice you seem to be relating is that the road from grad school to "real world" is through categorically and systematically crushing ones self-esteem and dreams/goals to get yourself in the right "mindset".

That's not the advice that I'm giving at all. I'm not crushing my self-esteem. I look in the mirror and say "well there is a miserable, loser, and failure" and then I laugh because I've learned to not feel miserable about "failure."

Also you don't need me to crush your dreams, reality will do it. You have to realize that your fate is decided by *THE COMMITTEE* and one day *THE COMMITTEE* is going to reject your application.

The thing to do is to figure out what to do after your dreams get crushed. For me, it means picking up the pieces and dreaming new dreams. What you quickly find is that a lot of the problem is that you aren't dreaming your dreams, you are dreaming someone else's. It may be your parents or your professor, or your elementary school teacher. Part of how I got through this was to figure out where I got the idea that being a physicist was so important. I ended up in a room with Jesuit priests and a traitorous general standing on the Great Wall of China, with James Burke and Carl Sagan in the background.

However, reading between the lines (and given the fact that your name has "quant" in it, though that may be unrelated) suggests that you might have had a bad go of post-grad life and cognitive dissonanced that that must be the only/normal way it can go

Actually my bad go was at the start of grad school. I've done pretty well post-grad. There is no *normal* or *only* way to do things. I've done something that works great for me. It might work badly for you, but you need to find your own path. The only thing I can do is to tell you what I did. If you read what I write and say to yourself, "Wow! I don't want to do what this guy did!" then I'm glad to be useful.

I'm in some ways the *anti-impostor*. I don't have any formal title, but I *feel* like I'm a real college professor.

Now it very well may be true that a succession of crippling personal defeats ended up putting you in a position/mindset to achieve your own personal victory. However, I don't know if I'd sign off on it as "sound advice".

I've learned not to give advice (because most of the advice that I've been given has turned out to be bad). I tell stories. The reason my stories are important is that the odds are against you. Five in six people going into Ph.D.'s will "fail" to get a tenure track position, and the life of a junior faculty isn't that pleasant. If you keep telling yourself that you are special and you'll beat the odds, then that's fine. But statistically most people that think that they can beat the odds won't, so that explains why my experience might be useful.

 

[TMFKAN64]

Something to remember is that in the twentieth century there have been two governments run by Ph.D. that believed that "you don't deserve anything if you aren't smart" and it turns out that those two governments were the most monstrous governments that ever existed. One government run by Ph.D.'s was the Khmer Rouge.

Whoa, there... while the Khmer Rouge was undoubtably one of the most monsterous governments ever, I don't think you can accuse them of promoting rule by the educated elite. If anything, people with education were the first against the wall...

A more accurate assessment would be that they believed "you don't deserve anything if you aren't a member of the Khmer Rouge".

 

[TMFKAN64]

Um...Schrieffer went to prison because he fell asleep at the wheel and people were killed. Tragic yes. However, it's entirely unrelated to his career as a physicist or self-doubt in his work/potential.

True enough. I don't think there is a connection between winning the Nobel and his life going off the rails... but he is an example of someone whose life crumbled after winning it.

(Also, it was a bit more than just an accident, since he was driving with a suspended license. People don't usually go to prison for accidents.)

 

[twofish-quant]

Now it very well may be true that a succession of crippling personal defeats ended up putting you in a position/mindset to achieve your own personal victory. However, I don't know if I'd sign off on it as "sound advice".

If you look at the academic system, it's designed so that the vast majority of people are going to end up with crippling personal defeats at some point in their life. Even if you assume that winning the Nobel prize is "perfection" then you have to accept the fact that people don't get Nobel's.

(And as far as crazy dreams go. I'm out of the running for the Nobel prize in physics, but I'm still in the running for the prize in economics.)

 

[twofish-quant]

Whoa, there... while the Khmer Rouge was undoubtably one of the most monsterous governments ever, I don't think you can accuse them of promoting rule by the educated elite.

They were an educated elite. The thing about educated elites is that the most dangerous group of people which must be eliminated is another group of educated elites. One thing that both the KR and SS did was to systematically destroy educated people that were in their group.

Pretty much everyone in a position of authority in the Khmer Rouge had studied in France at the finest schools, and you have two Ph.D. holders in the leadership. Among the four leaders of the Einstazgruppen, three had Ph.D.'s.

Something about the Khmer Rouge and the SS is that they were unusual in that most regimes have to share power with the army and the merchants, neither of which are very educated. In Cambodia and Eastern Europe, the Ph.D.'s didn't have to compete for power with these groups, and so they could do what they wanted.

 

[TMFKAN64]

I'm not questioning their education... I'm questioning your assertion that they valued education.

You wrote that both the SS and the KR believed that "you don't deserve anything if you aren't smart". That's ludicrous, since as you point out, both groups targeted groups that were educated but not part of their faction in order to eliminate potential competition.

Evidently, they thought that you don't deserve anything if you are smart, either.

 

[twofish-quant]

I'm not questioning their education... I'm questioning your assertion that they valued education.

I'm not asserting that they valued education.

You wrote that both the SS and the KR believed that "you don't deserve anything if you aren't smart". That's ludicrous, since as you point out, both groups targeted groups that were educated but not part of their faction in order to eliminate potential competition.

Logic nitpicking time. But since this is a physics forum

you aren't smart -> you don't deserve anything

you are smart -> ? (I didn't say anything about that situation. In fact, if you are smart, and you are in the wrong group, you don't deserve anything)

Should I point out that people with physics backgrounds tend to make great lawyers and computer programmers since these sorts of things come up all the time when you are drafting and reading laws and contracts or computer code?

-------------
static void khmer_rouge(Person you) {
bool deserve_anything;

if (!smart(you)) {
deserve_anything = false;
}

if (!deserve_anything) {
eliminate(you);
}
}
-------------

is something very different from

--------------

static void khmer_rouge(Person you) {
bool deserve_anything = smart(you);

if (!deserve_anything) {
eliminate(you);
}
}
-------------


And yes you will be asked the difference on a job interview.

 

[TMFKAN64]

Regardless of how you draw the Venn diagram, I still think you are hard-pressed to argue that either the KR or the SS cared about anything beyond group membership. Their code was actually much more optimized than either of your fragments:

if (!group_member(you)) eliminate(you);

Thugs with Ph.D.s are still thugs.

Wow, have we gotten far enough off the topic yet?

 

[Saladsamurai]

You both forgot: Return 0

 

[TMFKAN64]

You both forgot: Return 0

No, his routine was declared void, and I was merely replacing the body of it. So we were both correct.

 

[Saladsamurai]

No, his routine was declared void, and I was merely replacing the body of it. So we were both correct.

My bizzle.

 

[turin]

Too many posts ... I'll try to hit all of them later.

One government run by Ph.D.'s was the Khmer Rouge. The government run by Ph.D.'s was the Nazi Germany SS occupation government in Eastern Europe.

Both of them took "if you aren't smart, you don't deserve anything" to its logical conclusion.

Doesn't Barak have a Ph.D.? Uh oh.

 

[turin]

I'm pretty sure an interviewer is going to assume that a PhD knows the basics and much more, and won't ask questions.

I wonder then, what is the purpose of the postdoc interview? Is it just a meet and greet? What can I expect?

When I graduated with my B.S. in engineering, I sat in many interviews in which the interviewers would ask me something like, "Describe what this circuit is supposed to do," and then show me a schematic that was pretty much a variation of a textbook schematic. Or, they would ask something like, "If you wanted to connect this processor to this peripheral chip, how would you route the PCB traces?" They certainly did not assume that I just knew things. So, you're saying that the interviewer mentality is quite different for a physics postdoc position?

Could it be that you didn't expect it to be so hard getting a job? (Just a guess, sorry if I'm way off .)

No, that's not it. In fact, I didn't expect to be hired for a postdoc until 2010 Fall, and I am guite happy to see that there are several interesting postdocs that might start as early as January.

First I tried to go into industry, because I am so tired of moving around and so didn't want to get a postdoc. I just didn't find anything in industry, so I got a kind of late start out of the gate for postdocs (I think that most Ph.D. students find their first postdoc before they graduate.) I am used to not getting a job offer; I have had that problem since I was 14. What is bugging me is that, if I were asked the physics Ph.D. graduate equivalent of the EE B.S. graduate question "What does this circuit do?", then I could easily look stupid.

It's called the impostor syndrome. It's very common among academics. What I tell myself is that I got the Ph.D. I might have lied, cheated, bamboozled everyone into thinking that I'm smarter than I am, but that still counts.

I love it!

One thing that you will have to be prepared for in a technical job interview is that you *will* be asked questions that you have no answer to.
...
The reason for this is that in some jobs it doesn't matter how much you know, but how you react under pressure ...

You DO give advice ... and it's great. I really never thought about it that way, but that is likely so true. Thank you. This will help me immensely.

There is a 90% chance that you won't get the job, so the only way that you can get something is to get the door slammed in your face time after time.

I'm not trying to play the "poor me" card, but I'm pretty sure that would be more like 99%. That's just based on past experience.

I wonder if there is anybody who doesn't get confused by QM and other topics and I think it's perfectly natural to forget concepts that you don't use for a while.What's important is that if you need any of those concepts in your work then you refamiliarise yourself with them.It won't necessarily be easy,it is likely be time consuming but you will have the advantage of having studied them before and you will come out of it with a greater understanding.

So, let's say the interviewer asks me a QM question. Then, I say, "I have no idea," or, "I don't remember," or (worst of all) I answer incorrectly (because I actually think I understand but I am wrong). Is the research group going to say to themselves, "No problem; he'll just refresh his memory at the critical moment when he needs it."? I guess, maybe, I don't understand how the postdoc job works. I am used to an engineering job in which there is often not very much time to "refresh your memory". Are you saying that the postdoc jobstyle is laid back enough that I can just leisurely learn and relearn whatever I need?

I've always wondered if you ambushed a new PhD (or a prof for that matter) with a GRE subject test or comps how they would do.

That's actually another worry that I have (but now I'm just worried to get the job first). So, what if I get the postdoc and then one of the graduate students there who I supervise discovers that I can't pass the GRE physics (well, obviously I did at one time, but now I probably couldn't), or more generally can't answer some basic physics questions? Would that lead to a total collapse of the chain of command? Again, I may be misunderstanding the "corporate structure".

I remember having to explain to one of my "postdoc supervisors" about how to find eigenvalues of a matrix, or something really basic like that. Of course, I didn't deride him or anything and made a good-faith attempt to explain it respectfully, but I was shocked when he asked me to explain, and I probably showed it, because he seemed to get a bit upset and embarrased. I guess what goes around comes around and cosmic justice will be served ...

I personally have set my expectations to high and will probably be in your situation in the future. I naively thought that once I had a degree I would know allot about physics but the more I learn the more I realize that I have just scratched the surface. I know that I will always feel this way, I don't know if it is a lack of confidence or just a silly wish to know everything. When people talk to me about my studies I feel embrassed like they might find out that I am really quite thick. I constantly worry because I forget things I would like to remember even if I would never need to recall the information.

You just described my sentiments exactly, except for the part where you admit to yourself that it will always be that way. I am not ready to concede. I still want to get to a point where I think I have a pretty good handle on my field of interest. I don't believe that I can ever know everything, but I do believe in the existence of experts and authorities, for whatever they're worth, and I want to be among them some day.

One difficulty that Ph.D.'s often have is that they've never really failed at anything, and so the thought of failing is terrifying.

What kind of a magical Ph.D. program are you talking about? By the end, I started to think of failure (especially running into dead-ends, and worse, "getting scooped") as the number-one most important lesson to learn from my Ph.D..

Personally, I've gotten used to it, and I think it's cool. The more I know, the stupider I feel, so feeling stupid is a sign of progress. It doesn't bother me.

I cannot resolve the basic logic of this statement. But at least it doesn't bother you. I would say that my problem is that I simply know less now than I knew 4 years ago. I wonder if that's a sign of another kind of mental issue.

I once talked to a young faculty member in the second year of tenure-track appointment at a small Canadian university who felt that somehow a mistake was made in granting him a Ph.D., and he said that he knew others who felt the same way about themselves.

George, you get the most-direct-answer-to-my-OP award. And, it is affirming to boot. Thank you.

You deserve a decent job because you are a human being.

Hmm... I disagree. I am not one of those people who believes that all men (and women) are created equal. In the words of Michael Bolton, "... there would be no janitors, because no one would clean up $#!^ if they had a [decent job]." (No offense intended toward janitors.)

... what really determines a person's worth is not how much they know, but whether they are honest and humane.

As far as I know, honest and humane do not help to put a roof over my family's head and food in their belly, but information and knowledge can. In other words, worth to whom? How much are my honesty and humanity worth to my hungry family?

One problem with the "impostor syndrome" is that high levels of accomplishment usually makes things even worse. If you feel like a fake when they hand you the Ph.D., it's going to get even worse when they make you dean or president of a university. High levels of accomplishment do *not* fix the impostor syndrome since the more stuff you get, the deeper the hole you dig for yourself.

Also it is far, far harder for a dean or president of a university to get help for their issues, than it is far an incoming freshman, and there have been some cases where people in very high academic positions have totally imploded because of that.

This definitely bothers me. Do you have a suggested solution? Try not to go high up?

When you get your Ph.D., you essentially know ONE way to do everything, that being the way your mentor has done it and taught it to you, or maybe someone on your committee.
...
That's why you expand your knowledge by working with someone else as a post-doc.
...
you just spend your time learning the things that are relevant to your interest area and doing those experiments.

Wow, that sounds like a blast! Now I really hope to get in.

As a post-doc, you should be getting experience supervising a grad student or two, or some undergrads.

Nobody comes out of grad school knowing everything they need to know to be good at what they do. It's only the ones who don't realize this and think they don't need any more supervision who are dangerous and drive everyone nuts.

So, as a postdoc, I will still have a mentor? That would be comforting. I thought that me wanting to have a mentor would just be annoying to the group, like, "Why do we need to babysit this Ph.D.?" It would be nice to have someone to go to for advice, both physics and non-physics.

Life is about becoming and not about being.

Perhaps to some. Anyway, as you admit:

And then you die :-) :-) :-)

Every step you move up, you end up being incompetent for a while until you learn new stuff, upon which you move to a higher level of incompetence.

What bothers me is, what happens when you are still incompetent in the previous step, nevermind the next step.

Nobody ever knows everything they need to know to be good at what they do. If you do then they push you to the next level where you end up incompetent again.

I find that hard to believe. Who are "they", BTW? If I were "they", then I would not move John from Job A that he does well into Job B in which he is incompetent just because he mastered Job A. That makes no sense to me. The only reason that I would put John on Job B is if Job B was essential and vacant, and everyone else would also be incompetent at Job B.

At some point, you just want the freedom to screw up on your own.

And take the company down with you, Amen.

As for the OP, I had the same experience coming into grad school (I felt like I'd learned nothing in undergrad) so I've been trying to relearn and cement all of undergrad physics before I graduate (who knows whether I'll succeed). Furthermore, I've definately noticed that pretty much everyone in grad has forgotten most of what they learned in undergrad, though, as has been pointed out, often the purpose of undergrad is not to learn things for good but to be comfortable enough with them to look them up later when you need them.

Well, I knew almost nothing about physics coming from undergrad EE. I would not have a problem if it were just a matter of looking things up. My problem is that I don't understand things. Most of the physics that I (thought I had) learned in grad school makes no sense to me now. Could that be due to my lack of an undergrad in physics? I doubt it, but I suppose it's possible.



Another problem that I had as a grad student was the complete absence of lab classes. We were all just expected to read texts and papers, and take other peoples' word for it. I mean, I went to Fremilab for a Summer School, but that was actually just a subtle, clever distraction from the fact that we were still just sitting the a lecture room listening to people talk about it, and for all I know, it could have been just some crazy architect's idea of what a science lab might look like. I would not be able to tell you the difference. But that's another thread ...

 

[kote]

Doesn't Barak have a Ph.D.? Uh oh.

No. Barack Obama has a JD.

 

[TMFKAN64]

This definitely bothers me. Do you have a suggested solution? Try not to go high up?

No, try not to let it bother you. :-) As twofish-quant said, even if you lied, cheated, and bamboozled everyone into thinking that you are smarter than you are, that still counts.

I find that hard to believe. Who are "they", BTW? If I were "they", then I would not move John from Job A that he does well into Job B in which he is incompetent just because he mastered Job A. That makes no sense to me.

"They" are management. A long, long time ago, this was called the Peter Principle. Job A and Job B are not usually equivalent positions... Job B is a promotion. The general idea is that just because you are a competent engineer/physicist/whatever, this doesn't mean that you'll make a good manager. And even if you *are* a good manager, this doesn't mean you'll make a good CEO. There is an upwards pressure... and eventually (so the theory goes) everyone arrives at their level of incompetence.

 

[twofish-quant]

What is bugging me is that, if I were asked the physics Ph.D. graduate equivalent of the EE B.S. graduate question "What does this circuit do?", then I could easily look stupid.

I don't people will think you stupid. The typical reaction for Ph.D.'s missing simple questions is "absented minded genius."

Would that lead to a total collapse of the chain of command? Again, I may be misunderstanding the "corporate structure".

I think you are. Managers are like orchestra conductors. Just because you are conducting the orchestra doesn't mean that you can play an instrument well or even at all. So just because the conductor is telling the tuba players what to do doesn't mean that they know how to play a tuba.

I don't believe that I can ever know everything, but I do believe in the existence of experts and authorities, for whatever they're worth, and I want to be among them some day.

You are an expert and an authority. You just have to get used to that fact. What's really scary is that once you realize how little you really know, and then you realize that people that you see as experts and authorities are probably the same way.

I am not one of those people who believes that all men (and women) are created equal.

I do. It's pretty easy not think much of janitors if you think you aren't going to be one. But at some point you realize that you are going to end up being some sort of janitor, at which point you develop a lot more sympathy for them.

In the words of Michael Bolton, "... there would be no janitors, because no one would clean up $#!^ if they had a [decent job]." (No offense intended toward janitors.)

But you run into an interesting problem. Most of what needs to be done in the world is janitorial work. You don't *need* to pay someone that loves physics very much to do physics. You *do* need to pay people to do the crap work that needs to be done. Me? I'm basically a high-tech janitor, and I get paid a lot more than post-docs, because what I do is something that a lot of people think is crap-work, but it's work that needs to be done.

As far as I know, honest and humane do not help to put a roof over my family's head and food in their belly, but information and knowledge can. In other words, worth to whom? How much are my honesty and humanity worth to my hungry family?

Honesty and humanity are really important in finance. Once you work in finance or in any corporate environment, you ability to lie increases immensely. Pretty much anyone in finance, law, politics, or business develops a good ability to be able to lie and deceive. A really skilled lawyer or marketing professional can convince you black is white, good is evil, and up is down. If you spend a lot of your time around people with "mind control" powers, you develop them too.

So why would you give your money to someone that has the ability to cheat you blind. Well just because someone can cheat you blind doesn't mean that they will. If you have someone that is honest and humane, they will use their mind control skills for good not evil, (but then you get into the deep problem of what is good and what is evil).

So people will pay $$$$$$ for honest and humane bankers and lawyers.

And let's face it, you aren't going to starve in the US.

If it was a choice between lying and literally starving to death, then of course I'll lie. But that is not a choice that anyone reading this board faces, because people throw out tons of food. Now if someone wants you to lie for them, they'll try to make you think that you *will* die if you don't, but it's all part of the mind control game.

Me: Nobody ever knows everything they need to know to be good at what they do. If you do then they push you to the next level where you end up incompetent again.

I find that hard to believe. Who are "they", BTW? If I were "they", then I would not move John from Job A that he does well into Job B in which he is incompetent just because he mastered Job A. That makes no sense to me. The only reason that I would put John on Job B is if Job B was essential and vacant, and everyone else would also be incompetent at Job B.

They are people higher up in management. You often have to move people around because people grow old and retire. The CEO wants to retire and move to Florida, so you have to find someone to be CEO. Also, you often don't have a choice. If you keep someone at the same job for year after year, and they are good at it, someone else will hire them.

There are a lot of other people that can do my job better than I can, but they are busy doing something else or will ask for more money. So I guess if you want janitorial work done, you are stuck with me.

So you might be rather incompetent, but slightly less incompetent than anyone else that they can get.

 

[turin]

Just because you are conducting the orchestra doesn't mean that you can play an instrument well or even at all.

I don't want to conduct an orchestra. I know, I know: it's an analogy. Perhaps you mean that I don't need to know how to produce the actual research to manage a group of researchers? I guess, then, now I'm disappointed. I got into physics because I wanted to do research, not manage. If I wanted to manage, I would have made my life a lot easier by just going into business school or something. So, to go back to your analogy, I will fail, personally, unless the interviewer sees me as a tuba player. But, I guess being the conductor is better than being unemployed.

You are an expert and an authority. You just have to get used to that fact. What's really scary is that once you realize how little you really know, and then you realize that people that you see as experts and authorities are probably the same way.

Yikes. I don't believe that either.

... at some point you realize that you are going to end up being some sort of janitor, at which point you develop a lot more sympathy for them.
...
Most of what needs to be done in the world is janitorial work. You don't *need* to pay someone that loves physics very much to do physics. You *do* need to pay people to do the crap work that needs to be done. Me? I'm basically a high-tech janitor, and I get paid a lot more than post-docs, because what I do is something that a lot of people think is crap-work, but it's work that needs to be done.

Again, I don't want to be a Ph.D.'ed janitor, figurative or otherwise. And again, I suppose that is the kind of disappointment that you suggest I should be ready for. I suppose that if I decide to go into this quant thing, that is what I should expect. Hey, making tons of money does have its perks.

A really skilled lawyer or marketing professional can convince you black is white, good is evil, and up is down.

No, that is not true. Perhaps you mean that they could convince me that that is what other people believe, or that is what they believe? But they can not convince me that it is true.

So why would you give your money to someone that has the ability to cheat you blind.

I wouldn't.

Well just because someone can cheat you blind doesn't mean that they will.

Sure it doesn't.

So people will pay $$$$$$ for honest and humane bankers and lawyers.

Who will? Customers, sure. But companies? I'm still too cynical to believe that. We bought a new car recently, so I did a lot of research. One theme that I read over and over was how car dealers operate. Both what motivates them and how they are considered for their position as a car salesman. It was not a pleasant thought, and I think that, if I hate anyone it is them. To me, bankers and lawyers are in the same genre.

... you aren't going to starve in the US.
... because people throw out tons of food.

Starvation was a hyperbole, but I agree that it was in bad taste (no pun intended ... oops, there it is again). I should keep in mind that this forum includes people from all around the world, and we do have a high standard of living over here.

They are people higher up in management. You often have to move people around because people grow old and retire. The CEO wants to retire and move to Florida, so you have to find someone to be CEO.

Surely that is the exception, not the rule.

If you keep someone at the same job for year after year, and they are good at it, someone else will hire them.

Not if they want to stay where they are. I worked with someone in just such a situation, a tech. He was the best tech in our lab, a "battle-field surgeon" as our director called him. When the supervisor found out, he simply made a counter offer of $10k/yr raise, and the tech stayed, with no (apparent) change in his position otherwise. The company did not promote him to engineer, where he would have been rather incompetent. The company kept him as a tech, where he was quite phenomenal.

So you might be rather incompetent, but slightly less incompetent than anyone else that they can get.

Well, that is, again, precisely my worry: I suspect to be one of the most incompetent ones in my position.

 

[twofish-quant]

I don't want to conduct an orchestra. I know, I know: it's an analogy. Perhaps you mean that I don't need to know how to produce the actual research to manage a group of researchers?

It' helps, but it's not essential. When you get into the really senior levels in academia, you find that most of your time is spent basically asking people for money.

One reason that I got out of academia and into industry, is that academia is more "up and out" than industry is. I know brilliant computer programmers that are at the very bottom of the corporate totem pole, but like it there because they make enough money so there is no pressure to rise (and it's common in some places for computer programmers to make more money than their managers).

By contrast, academia just won't let you be a teaching and research assistant for the rest of your life. In order to make a middle class salary, you have to be an assistant professor, and even then you have to get tenure or leave.

I *could* do what I'm doing for the rest of my life, or if I'm crazy and bored, I can go after the big bucks, but I don't have to. Also the nice thing about industry is that failure is an option. If I got after the really big bucks, I don't like it, then I end up back at a comfortable nice job.

If I wanted to manage, I would have made my life a lot easier by just going into business school or something.

Management is like driving. It's a general skill that's really important in an industrial/post-industrial society. Also, one thing that I think universities should do is to make it easy for people to get an MBA while they are getting their physics/humanities/social science Ph.D.

But, I guess being the conductor is better than being unemployed.

I don't want to sound too rude about this, but you aren't going to be unemployed. You might not get the job you want, but it's really unlikely that you'll be unemployed.

Again, I don't want to be a Ph.D.'ed janitor, figurative or otherwise.

I've been looking pretty closely at being a janitor (literally). At some point, I'll have enough money in the bank to retired and do astrophysics and having a low stress/low income job dramatically reduces the amount of money I have to have to do that. The nice thing about being a janitor is that the hours are good for being an academic, and its really a low stress/low hour job. I know of a few people that had jobs as janitors while going through grad school.

Hey, making tons of money does have its perks.

"Tons of money" is relative. From the point of view of 90% of the people on the planet, I do make tons of money, but so do you. I make enough money to be part of the lower upper class, but I don't feel very rich, because I come into contact with people that make a lot, lot more money that I do. If you want to feel rich, Wall Street is a *bad* place to be.

Having "decent income" has it's perks. One thing that seriously annoyed me in graduate school is when the car broke down and I had to scramble to get money to do repairs. Something that makes me feel good is when the car break down now, the repair bill is annoyance. There are also lots of other perks. I can buy whatever books I want on Amazon, I have the money to attend conferences. A lot of little things.

No, that is not true. Perhaps you mean that they could convince me that that is what other people believe, or that is what they believe? But they can not convince me that it is true.

No. No. No. No. People in academia have this weird idea that they are smarter than other people and hence are immune to marketing and other forms of mind control. It's not true, and in some ways academics are more vulnerable to it. Here's how. If you have a bunch of really super-smart Ph.D. mathematicians show you equations that you barely understand saying "up is down" are you going to contradict them and say "no" up is *not* down. But that's what the equations say! And since you don't really understand the equations, you are pretty stuck. You are not an expert. How dare you contradict an expert! Do you want to look like a fool when you do contradict an expert what you are wrong!

Or "why are you so closed minded? Aren't you willing to look at the *evidence* that black is white? At which point he shows you a elegantly researched, footnoted, detailed description written by an expert in the field that black is white. If you are in a room in which someone controls the evidence that you see, then it's not hard to point out that black is white.

And "up is down". What is up in Europe is down in Asia. Or maybe. "Adolf Hitler says white is white" and you don't want to agree with Hitler do you? Also it's just not this one thing. A good lawyer can wear you down, and over a period of months convince you of pretty much anything. This is why in an trial we have opposing lawyers, so that you two very good lawyers trying to convince you of the opposite things.

There are a million tricks. I've learned some of them because they've been used (successful) on me.

I'm still too cynical to believe that. We bought a new car recently, so I did a lot of research. One theme that I read over and over was how car dealers operate. Both what motivates them and how they are considered for their position as a car salesman. It was not a pleasant thought, and I think that, if I hate anyone it is them. To me, bankers and lawyers are in the same genre.

They aren't, because you only buy a car once in a while. You don't buy a car every day, and if you did, you'd quickly figure out who was honest, who wasn't and you'd stop doing business with the dishonest one's. Also car purchases aren't that much money. If you were talking about trusting someone with $2 billion dollars, then yes you do want someone that is honest.

I don't think you aren't too cynical. I think you aren't cynical enough. Something that you have to realize is that the academic system is squeezing more money and value out of you than any banker, lawyer, or used car salesman ever did. What's cool is that you end up with a system in which people end up with the benefits of your exploitation without having to take any moral responsibility for it.

As far as starvation... You really have to avoid hyperbole to think clearly. If it was a choice of lying or dying, then lie. If you have to lie and cheat money from me to keep from dying, then I'm not going to be too angry at you. But no one in the United States is likely to face this sort of moral choice, and it's important when making moral decisions to clarify what exactly is the choice. If I had to lie in order to avoid starvation, I'd do it, and I wouldn't feel guilty about it. Now if I had to choose between lying to get $10M/year, or telling the truth and getting $200K/year, then no way am I going to lie, and even then it's not usually a real choice because if someone tells me to lie to get $10M/year, they why should I believe them?

The real hard moral choice that people *do* face is that someone offers you a bunch of money to do something. They don't tell you whether what you are doing is good or bad. How much of an effort do you spend thinking about the moral consequences of what you are doing, because if you don't think, you can just collect them money without guilt, but if you *do* think, you might figure out that there is a problem.

Thinking too hard will get make you feel miserable pretty quickly. One thing that I've figured out is that I don't deserve the money that I make, and I feel seriously guilty that I live in a rich post-industrial country in which I end up making 10x the amount of money for a tenth the effort than people in any other part of the world. Now then the question is what to do about it, which leads to more thinking and more bad feelings.

It's Satan offering you the apple in the garden of Eden. He'll tell you how the world really works, but do you really want to know since you'll have to leave the garden once you find out.

Me: They are people higher up in management. You often have to move people around because people grow old and retire. The CEO wants to retire and move to Florida, so you have to find someone to be CEO.

Surely that is the exception, not the rule

People get old. People want to do different things. If a manager resigns, then you have find someone else to to their job, and you take what you get. Maybe the CEO doesn't retire because it wants to move to Florida, but he is bored now that his small startup has become this huge corporation, and he wants to start another startup.

This is another reason I like industry more than academia. In academia, there are so many people at the top, you don't have this flow of people.

I suspect to be one of the most incompetent ones in my position.

Unfortunately for you, it doesn't matter.

 

[DR13]

Turin, i just want to point something out that should give you confidence in your ability to answer physics related questions at an interview (especially the "basic" kind). You are a certified "Homework Helper" on this site, that means that you do have the ability to answer questions and that you have done it over and over again. You know deep down that you do have the ability and when you are able to believe in this ability you will be fine.

One thing that may help build your confidence would be to go to a tutor center at your university and sign up to help undergrad students. This will give you a forum to (a) brush up on your basic skills and (b) get confidence in your ability to solve problems. I am sure that tutoring a student will bring you some sort of anxiety (based on what i read on this thread earlier) due to the fact you will have to know how to do random and basic physics problems on the spot. But this anxiety will mimic an interview situation and doing this tutoring regularly will help you be not as nervouse in an interview

 

[OmCheeto]

I once talked to a young faculty member in the second year of tenure-track appointment at a small Canadian university who felt that somehow a mistake was made in granting him a Ph.D., and he said that he knew others who felt the same way about themselves.

He became Dean of Science.

Best summed up by this old dude:

ἓν οἶδα ὅτι οὐδὲν οἶδα hen oída hoti oudén oída

I know. I know. Speaken zie English... Just google "ἓν οἶδα ὅτι οὐδὲν οἶδα hen oída hoti oudén oída" and it pops right up. Jeez...

ps. reference to Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure pre-edit-deleted...

 

[Zubin]

You deserve a decent job because you are a human being. One of the things that my parents taught be is that what really determines a person's worth is not how much they know, but whether they are honest and humane.

You have a PH.D in physics, clearly you're far more capable than you think you are. I have a friend who works with mentally disabled people and he believes "You're as smart as you train yourself to be." With every situation you must first analyze what's available(ie your knowledge, skillset, etc.) and create a plan of action such as building on what's available. In the information age where so much knowledge is highly accessible there's no reason to be worried about not knowing or understanding something fully.

 

[UseAsDirected]

Also one thing that helped me was to figure out *why* I was scared to death of failure. Since age four, I leaved in a world in which my entire life was based on getting good grades and not failing, and it was quite jarring at in my 20's when that stopped working.

There is a scene from Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped when a person was told to go up a tower to get some treasure. It turns out that at the top of the tower there is no treasure. The stair case just ends, and if you keep walking you just fall to your doom. Academia is like that.

I should point out that this is what worries me about undergraduates focusing totally on career and thinking that humanities and anything not career related is useless. One thing that really helped me when I looked into the abyss was having studied a lot of philosophy and history. Critical theory was really useful because it talks about the subtle ways that power structures make you *feel* certain things, and knowing that I had been brainwashed was important to figuring out what to do with it.

History was also important. OK who brainwashed me into think that getting a physics Ph.D. was the most important thing in the world? My parents. OK, who brainwashed them and why? Ultimately I got the names of the philosophers and poets that were responsible for my predicament and I figured out what to do with it.

Liberal arts turned out to be important because eventually you are going to reach the end of the staircase and fall into the abyss. For some people at happens at the start of graduate school. For some it happens when they don't get tenure. Heck, I know of more than one person whose life seem to crumble after they won the Nobel prize.

Two fish-quack I have read some of your posts on this thread and am really impressed with them. I nodded my head to at least a few, thank you!

Five months ago I was a physics Ph.D. student doing good research but transitioned into Ph.D. education (science/physics education) amidst the "boos" from some pompous asses in my physics department for reasons indirectly highlighted elsewhere along the thread-line. (I am indebted to my physics adviser for his support and his wife whose physics education group I joined).

Interestingly, the principal investigator of our group gave a physics assessment survey of some physics material which was a modified AP/honors physics exam veiled in a concept test (mind you a rather penetrating concept test) among a few physics professors as a litmus test (e.g. she was not singling out the faculty) and their combined average was stunningly not 100 percent. No, it was not! It was 71 percent! Even big-name professors are impervious to error.

 

[vanesch]

It's called the impostor syndrome. It's very common among academics.

Indeed, I wanted to write this too and saw you wrote it earlier. My wife had been suffering of it, until she realized it by reading up over it.

 

[BigFairy]

Tantalizing...

 

[turin]

Many of these comments are drifting far off topic. I will try to remember to make this my last off-topic response.

If I got after the really big bucks, I don't like it, then I end up back at a comfortable nice job.

Are you saying this hypothetically, or you have actually done this at least once?

Management is like driving. It's a general skill that's really important in an industrial/post-industrial society.

Maybe to some people. I still don't want a job that emphasizes personell management over research.

I don't want to sound too rude about this, but you aren't going to be unemployed. You might not get the job you want, but it's really unlikely that you'll be unemployed.

That's interesting. I have been unemployed since May, and still no prospects. So, I wonder what you mean. I admit that I've not applied for a common job, such as retail or fast-food, and now I might just do that for kicks to see how many of those kinds of places would even call me for an interview.

From the point of view of 90% of the people on the planet, I do make tons of money, but so do you.

Again, interesting. I make zero dollars per month (or hour, if you prefer). Please explain to me why you refer to this amount as tons of money. Sure, I have some money, but that is quickly (frighteningly) diminishing day-by-day; it is not sustainable, probably not even through Spring semester.

If you have a bunch of really super-smart Ph.D. mathematicians show you equations that you barely understand saying "up is down" are you going to contradict them and say "no" up is *not* down.

Actually, people who know me would snicker if they knew someone had asked me this question. One thing that I was probably notorious for in my department (a few of my fellow graduate students even told me this) was my stubborn refusal to accept so-called mathematical arguments. But, at this point in my life, I would ignore such mathematicians rather than argue with them. Anyway, I don't have to argue with them; they are the ones who have to argue with me to convince me.

And since you don't really understand the equations, you are pretty stuck. You are not an expert. How dare you contradict an expert!

I'm confused. You told me in a previous thread that I am an expert (and authority). Now, you're telling me that I'm not.

Or "why are you so closed minded?

Because I'm not a child anymore. I get to decide what occupies my mind.

Aren't you willing to look at the *evidence* that black is white? At which point he shows you a elegantly researched, footnoted, detailed description written by an expert in the field that black is white.
...
Also it's just not this one thing. A good lawyer can wear you down, and over a period of months convince you of pretty much anything.

This is getting ridiculous. You're just being hypothetical. I would be a moron to just concede to your point. The bottom line is that neither you, nor anyone else, has yet convinced me that black is white, and the burden of proof is on you, since you are the one who claims that this can be done.

Please keep in mind that I tried to make this impersonal, suggesting that most people could be convinced. You are the one who is making this personal.

And "up is down". What is up in Europe is down in Asia.

My simple response here is two-fold. Either up and down are local concepts, or up and down are global concepts. If they are global, then your statement makes no sense to me (because then there would be no such thing as up in somewhere or down in somewhere), and therefore I am not convinced. If they are local, then the solution is simple: refer up and down to the same local situation and they are different, and therefore I am not convinced.

"Adolf Hitler says white is white" and you don't want to agree with Hitler do you?

The issue of whether I agree with Hitler is completely unrelated to the issue of convincing me that white is not white, which is in turn completely unrelated to the issue of convincing me that black is white. Please review a list of common logical fallacies.

Anyway, desire and conviction are different.

BTW, please start a new thread if you are trying to convince someone that black is white, up is down, or Hitler is wrong. You can link to it in this thread so that anyone who is interested can take a look. If you're just saying these things to make a point, then it is becoming quite uninteresting to me. This thread regards a recent physics Ph.D. graduate's feeling of being unprepared for (and undeserving of) a post-doc position.

They aren't, because you only buy a car once in a while. You don't buy a car every day, and if you did, you'd quickly figure out who was honest, who wasn't and you'd stop doing business with the dishonest one's.

I don't believe that many people are like me, who would refuse to do business with someone based on moral principle. When I look around, I see (the result of) people making business decisions that are apparently based on maximizing the difference between revenue and expenditure. The lack of regard for honesty is most apparent to me in advertising (I consider fine-print as a form of dishonesty), especially in the pharmaceutical business (I consider vacuous monologue as a form of dishonesty). I combine this with my view of car salesmen, so obviously (to me), companines hire dishonest people in lieu of honest people.

Also car purchases aren't that much money.

Car purchases are that much money. My car is the most expensive single object that I've ever purchased. You sound like the investment officer with whom I spoke at my bank. I wanted to start a mutual fund. I said that I wanted to put a lot of money into it. She told me that I don't have a lot of money.

It is also interesting that you refer to zero dollars as tons of money, and ~$10k as not that much money.

Something that you have to realize is that the academic system is squeezing more money and value out of you than any banker, lawyer, or used car salesman ever did.

Only because I don't do business with lawyers, and I keep my business with bankers to a minimum. BTW, I never said "used" car salesman, and I don't understand why people make the distinction. Most of the car salesmen that I dealt with were responsible for selling both new and used.

People get old. People want to do different things. If a manager resigns, then you have find someone else to to their job, and you take what you get.

The exception to which I referred was not what happens to the manager, but what happens to the people (directly) under the manager. They don't all get promoted to the single vacant position.

You are a certified "Homework Helper" on this site, that means that you do have the ability to answer questions and that you have done it over and over again. You know deep down that you do have the ability and when you are able to believe in this ability you will be fine.

Yes, I do believe that i have the ability to answer American freshman physics and international high school physics questions. Are you suggesting that this is enough for a post-doc interview?

One thing that may help build your confidence would be to go to a tutor center at your university and sign up to help undergrad students.

I must not have been clear. I am over 1000 miles away from my university since April (I graduated); that would be one heck of a commute. I did go to the university here where I now live for exactly the purpose of tutoring. But they told me that they only use their own students for tutoring, and that they would not let me even post flyers to advertise my own private tutoring. I have posted a flyer in the public library here, but my spirit was somewhat crushed after my dealings with the university (who told me, among other things, that I should try to join the military), so I haven't posted any flyers anywhere else.

Im sure that tutoring a student will bring you some sort of anxiety (based on what i read on this thread earlier) due to the fact you will have to know how to do random and basic physics problems on the spot. But this anxiety will mimic an interview situation and doing this tutoring regularly will help you be not as nervouse in an interview

Not likely. I do not have a problem helping students with basic, low-level textbook physics. In such case, I can just look it up in the textbook if I get stumped. That's easy. I might have a problem with low-level physics without a textbook, for example finding the magnetic field due to some wire at some point. That's a GRE type problem, if I remember correctly. More importantly, I have a problem understanding the higher level stuff, like why I should think of a directional derivative as a (tangent) vector (to a manifold), or renormalization in general, or how we can be confident that a clutter of tracks and calorimeter excitations is evidence of a particular signature of final-state particles. In my defense, my dissertation was in phenomenology, which turned out to be neither theory nor experiment, but I still think that I should know these things (and more), and I want to get out of phenomenology anyway.

Please don't take the following as derisive; it is a genuine question:

Should I take a backpack full of books (Peskin&Schroeder, Jackson, Arfken, etc.) and notes with me to the post-doc interviews? I thought that would be ridiculous, and make me look unprepared, but that is how I would make sure to know something in practice. I find myself flipping through my textbooks and summer school notes daily, for example to understand some paper that I'm reading.


Zubin, UseAsDirected, vanesch:
Thank you for the affirmations. Sorry to lump y'all together like that. I'm getting tired of these long posts.

 

[twofish-quant]

Just to clarify, *I* probably wouldn't be able to convince you that black is white. I'm just not that good at convincing people. But I've met people out there who are. What they end up doing is to find some psychological vulnerability (such as your fear that you are not an expert) and gradually use it to convince you of whatever they want to convince you of.

I've found that the best defense against this sort of vulnerability is to just admit that I am human and I'm subject to emotional appeals. I had one situation in which I was involved with a conversation with someone that was trying to convince me to do something I intellectually *knew* was not in my self-interest, but emotionally I could feel my mind going, and I also knew that if I kept talking to him, that eventually he would end up convincing me to do what he wanted. So I stopped talking to him.

It took me about six months to figure out what he was doing, and what was fun and scary was the realization that this salesman understood my psychology better than I did. Also this sort of brainwashing takes place all of the time, the entire political and financial system is based on persuasion, and some people are frighteningly good at it.

Also just because a person has the gift of persuasion, doesn't mean they are a bad person. Obama has this ability.

 

[twofish-quant]

Me: If I got after the really big bucks, I don't like it, then I end up back at a comfortable nice job.

Are you saying this hypothetically, or you have actually done this at least once?

I know more or less what I need to do in order to climb the corporate ladder. I've seen people that have done it, and they don't have any skills that I don't have or couldn't get, so it's possible. Whether or not I want to go after the really big bucks depends on a lot of things, but it's nice to know that the option is there.

That's interesting. I have been unemployed since May, and still no prospects. So, I wonder what you mean. I admit that I've not applied for a common job, such as retail or fast-food, and now I might just do that for kicks to see how many of those kinds of places would even call me for an interview.

One thing that is the case in the job market is that you have to be very, very active to get a job. To get my current position, I send out probably 100-150 resumes, got phone screens for about 15, and then face-to-face interviews for about 7, and serious offers from 4, and that was two years ago when the market was better. If you want a job, even a menial one, you have to work at it.

Yes, there is this little voice in my head that says well maybe I'm not good enough, but to get anything at all, I have to scream at the little voice, and tell it to shut up, because if I don't tell that voice to shut up, I'm not going to go out there and get doors slammed in my face day after day until I get something. I've learned to actually enjoy and be proud of failing, because going out and fighting and getting the door slammed in my face means that I'm fighting.

And I'll get something. If it turns out that the best I can get is a job as a janitor, then I'm going to thank they person that gave me the chance, and be the best damned janitor that they've ever seen.

I don't believe that many people are like me, who would refuse to do business with someone based on moral principle. When I look around, I see (the result of) people making business decisions that are apparently based on maximizing the difference between revenue and expenditure.

It's not moral principle but pure self-interest. You aren't going to hand over your money to a banker that you don't trust, because if you don't trust them, then there is a good chance that you aren't getting the money back. Same for lawyers, if you have a bad experience with a law firm, you aren't going to use them again. When you are talking about billion dollar transactions, you are looking at a lot of lawyers and bankers.

I combine this with my view of car salesmen, so obviously (to me), companines hire dishonest people in lieu of honest people.

Depends on the line of work. The big trouble with a company hiring dishonest people is that you have no idea if the person is stealing from the company or not. I hate working around dishonest people because I don't know if they are stealing from me or not.

The exception to which I referred was not what happens to the manager, but what happens to the people (directly) under the manager. They don't all get promoted to the single vacant position.

True but what tends to happen in business is that once you realize that you aren't going to get promoted, you and a few of your friends leave and start your own company. So what tends to happen every so often is that X get promoted. The five or six other people were candidates to get promoted leave to do other things (and in a lot of cases they are pushed with a golden parachute so that X has a clean team), and then everyone below moves up.

 

[turin]

twofish-quant,
Thanks for all of your patience and entertaining stories.

 

[twofish-quant]

Five months ago I was a physics Ph.D. student doing good research but transitioned into Ph.D. education (science/physics education) amidst the "boos" from some pompous asses in my physics department for reasons indirectly highlighted elsewhere along the thread-line. (I am indebted to my physics adviser for his support and his wife whose physics education group I joined).

I just don't understand this. Given that it's obvious that there are too many Ph.D.'s for too few professorships, there is no rational reason I can think of why physics departments don't *encourage* Ph.D. students do what you did. It would be wonderful if physics departments made it easy for students to get joint Ph.D./Master of Education or Ph.D./MBA's. The physics departments don't even have to actively support this, just not discourage it.

The only reason why I can think that departments do this is psychological. People have to go through enormous pain and agony to get tenure and it's only the insanely committed and driven people that get it. If you question whether or not a professorship is the only path, then this questions the decisions and sacrifices they made.

It's also amazing how dismissive people in the sciences are of education departments. Education would be a lot easier if we had infinite money, time, and people, but we don't, and once you face the reality that you don't have this, then all of a sudden things get a lot harder.

One of my important experiences was teaching at the University of Phoenix. My mid-class reviews for the first class that I taught were *scathing* (and justifiably so). Once I knew what the problems were, its wasn't incredibly difficult to improve, but teaching is very hard work, and it's very important work.

No, it was not! It was 71 percent! Even big-name professors are impervious to error.

And the reason for this is that AP/honors physics tests are horrible ways of measuring physics competence. The only reason that they are used is because the good ways of measuring physics competence are extremely labor intensive to grade and can be quite subjective.

One other thing about assessment is that assessment is intensely political and ideological. If you try to rate people, then you get into deep and very controversial questions about how people should be rated, and who decides.