My Professor says I have no talent - should I persist?

[QuantumOne]

 

[Erebus]

A story which may or may not be relevant here:

In my sophmore year I went to a student advisor, I was doing averagely in my classes. He basically told me, in a subtle and friendly manner, that I had no chance of acheiving my dream of getting a PhD in mathematics. End of my junior year, I have topped two of my math classes. I was motivated to work harder, and I went from middle of the class to near the top.
Actually, I don't really care so much any more if I get my PhD or not but there you have it. HArd work gets you places, and I know from experience.

EDIT: btw, this same advisor strongly advised me to take a certain course, I did, and I hated the course.

Thank you! This is very encouraging. Yes, this is essentially what happened to me. Except that I am now at the beginning of my junior year, and have not reached the nice part of the story yet.
I suppose that advisors are not always necessarily right. I guess I took his comment to heart because my advisor is someone I really admire and have a lot of respect for. He is the most demanding teacher I have had thus far - I was excited by the prospect of the challenge he would provide. I have not yet developed the insensitivity to failure and rejection that I need to deal with my current issue, though. Hopefully, this will come with time.

 

[Gear300]

You know...I'd have to say that more than 90% of the people who take up on mathematics are not "talented" at it. The quality of the work they publish, and they probably also know this, is most likely not of "epic-scale" and is very much so comparable to the work of most others (though I didn't say it was "unimportant"). Looking at the subjectivity of words can be helpful.

 

[qspeechc]

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/10/30/8391794/index.htm"

The most important factor in determining success in some field is the amount of work you put in.
I was not trying to show off or be arrogant in my previous post. I'm not a bright guy. My parents aren't too bright either; my mother dropped out of high school in grade 10, my father is an engineer. I did pretty well in high school, and then average in the first two years at university. I have been in classes with some of the brightest undergrads at my university, people who did 10 times better than me in high school, being among the best in the country, and at university. I just decided in my junior year that I was going to start working hard. I had no social life, I just worked my butt off, and now I'm one of the top math students. I just want to tell you to persevere. If you have a passion for something, and you want to succeed in it, then just work hard at it. Ok, maybe you won't become a mathematician, so what? You did what you enjoyed, and now there's a whole exciting world of mathematics you can study by yourself in your own time.
I feel like I'm a bit preachy, anyway what have I done? I'm just another undergrad, an here I am trying to give advice

 

[twofish-quant]

Mathematics relies on hard work, dedication, and imagination. Now talent can aid your studies, but it isn't a requirement, in great contrast to what f95toli said. Please read the following http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/gowers/gowers_VIII_6.pdf" of some very good professional mathematicians.

Also talent is not a binary quantity. I do think that there is a range in innate mathematical ability. Some people just need more time and effort to grasp a concept, and in my situation, I've made up for the lack of ability with more effort. One reason I didn't become a mathematician was that inventing mathematics was for me painful work as opposed to using mathematics which is fun work.

The other thing is that people that *do* have innate mathematical talents have to be very, very careful especially during their undergraduate years, because talent can be a curse as much as a blessing. One thing that people have noticed about professional writers and it the really, really good ones have an extremely high incidence of bipolar disorder. Among theoretical physicists, there seems to be a very high incidence of close family members with schizophrenia.

 

[f95toli]

The problem is that we all have to pay the rent, and most us of also want to be able so support a family. Yes, there is nothing wrong with pursuing a goal but you also have to be realistic.
I can use myself as an example, I am not actually very good at physics in the sense that I always had to work very hard in order to get reasonable grades when I was an undergraduate and I was never very good at math. However, during my final year as an I did notice that I was actually doing pretty well in some courses and eventually I did decide to get a PhD. I completed my PhD 4 years ago and am now a research assistant. Over the years I have realized that I am actually a pretty good experimental physicist and I have published a few good papers.

However, I am working in a field (solid state/device physics) where there are a LOT of opportunities compared to a small field like pure math which means that it has been relatively easy for me to find work and get funding, if I had been working in a smaller field there is no way I would have been able to find a post-doc position based on my publication record as a PhD student; I am simply not that good and even my field is VERY competitive.

Also, the main reason I even decided to continue as a post-doc is that the work I do is actually quite applied. Meaning it is very likely that I would be able to find a reasonably good job in industry just based on my skills and the kind of experience I get working on my current project (and the fact that my MSc is in engineering also helps). When my current contract comes to an end in 2 years I will need to find a permanent position OR leave physics and go work in R&D in industry.
Hence, no matter what happens I can be reasonably sure that I will be able to cope, and although I would prefer to continue working in academia I wouldn't consider leaving to be a disaster. But had I instead been working in an "exotic" I would be in trouble by now.

 

[twofish-quant]

The problem is that we all have to pay the rent, and most us of also want to be able so support a family.

True, but if you look at jobs in general, studying physics and mathematics is pretty much guaranteed to get you something that you can use to pay the rent and support a family. It's only when you confine yourselves with traditional academic jobs, that things look totally awful.

Studying pure math doesn't *disqualify* you from taking any sort of job that you could have gotten without studying math. You can study math and then drive taxis, wait tables, or own laundry mats.

Yes, there is nothing wrong with pursuing a goal but you also have to be realistic.

The reality is that no one entering the academy should expect to get a job as a traditional research professor. Those jobs are too few to go around. However, I think that once people acknowledge that, then it actually opens up a whole lot of possibilities. If you want to study algebraic topology, then study algebraic topology, you might also get an MBA at the same time.

I think a big part of the problem happened when people starting thinking of of an "academic" is a "career." Once you think of being an intellectual as a "profession" then you run into huge economic problems.

 

[f95toli]

The reality is that no one entering the academy should expect to get a job as a traditional research professor.

Indeed, which is why it is important to have a backup plan.
However, I'd say pure math is quite different from what e.g I am doing in that I can write a CV where I list skills that are relevant to quite a few jobs in R&D in the private sector. Meaning I will benefit from having a PhD even if I leave academia.
I can only think of a few jobs outside academia where a PhD in pure math would a plus, the most obvious being a career as a math teacher.

 

[Raghnar]

If you really love it, you are better off if you try than if you give up. We don't have millions of professional athletes, astronauts (or tenured physics professors), but my experience has been if you have large numbers of people trying to be really, really good, than you'll end up better off than giving up.

This is a good point IMHO. Wanting badly something doesn't mean you can actually do it (In Italy we say "Volere è Potere"), in fact it is if you want something mediocre ("I want badly become the boss of a RadioShack" can be you can become it.) but not for something for what there are few places in the whole world ("I want to be an 8-gold winner in Olympics" is almost impossible, no matter how badly you want it).

If you really love something is better doing it then doing nothing (or something you regret to do) dreaming about trying to do the thing you like.
Train to be a Swimmer is better then watching Swim on the TV dreaming about becoming a swimmer, maybe there will be a hell of a blow when you realize you will never going to be a professional, but later you will be satisfied of your work, even if haven't realized your dream.

Anyway what your professor say can't be ignored. He is a man, with experience, and if he is honest you better listen him wisely. You can deny his advice but you got to understand why he told that and why he is wrong.
You cannot be inept to do EVERYTHING that can be done in pure math, Pure math is a HUGE field, you can be a hell of a topologist and a completely dumb analyst, there MUST BE something that can fit you.
He must have said it for another reason, that you must extrapolate from the context or ask him more precisly: maybe he inteded that you have no talent for Analysis, or maybe that you have a great talent for Applied Calculus or Physics.
Anyway Maybe he just speaks without knowing things so well, we can't tell...

 

[Phyisab****]

There is no obvious choice in a situation like that. He has a small point in that pure math is a field that probably has somewhat less application in industry. On the other hand, if you know that pure math is what you want to do, f*** em. I bet that if you want it bad enough, if that is the first thing you think of when you wake up in the morning, that will take you pretty far.

 

[twofish-quant]

I can only think of a few jobs outside academia where a PhD in pure math would a plus, the most obvious being a career as a math teacher.

If you have *only* a Ph.D. math and nothing else, then it's not going to do you much good. If you have a Ph.D. in pure math, and you have minimal computer skills or some basic knowledge in applied math (particularly statistics), then there are lots of jobs in finance.

 

[twofish-quant]

I might have a different interpretation of what the professor was saying.

I can think of people that are stellar pure mathematicians and decent physicists, and I can think of people that are stellar physicists and decent pure mathematicians, and lots of people that are decent physicists and decent mathematicians. I can't think of anyone that has been *both* a stellar physicist and a stellar pure mathematician.

So at some point you have to choose what you want to focus on. Either focus on "pure math" or focus on "physics". You can try to get the gold medal in swimming or the gold medal in boxing, and if you are a world class swimmer, you might end up being an o.k. boxer. If you try to get the olympic gold medal in *both* swimming and boxing, you probably aren't going to be that great at either.

If you end up wanting to do pure math, go for it. You just need to realize that if you end up being a world-class pure mathematician, then you are looking at being a "merely good" physicist.

 

[Shackleford]

Also talent is not a binary quantity. I do think that there is a range in innate mathematical ability. Some people just need more time and effort to grasp a concept, and in my situation, I've made up for the lack of ability with more effort. One reason I didn't become a mathematician was that inventing mathematics was for me painful work as opposed to using mathematics which is fun work.

The other thing is that people that *do* have innate mathematical talents have to be very, very careful especially during their undergraduate years, because talent can be a curse as much as a blessing. One thing that people have noticed about professional writers and it the really, really good ones have an extremely high incidence of bipolar disorder. Among theoretical physicists, there seems to be a very high incidence of close family members with schizophrenia.

I'm a physics major. My aunt has schizophrenia. As a pipe dream, I'd like to do theoretical physics, but I never will. I'll definitely do something else.

 

[Erebus]

I'm a physics major. My aunt has schizophrenia. As a pipe dream, I'd like to do theoretical physics, but I never will. I'll definitely do something else.

I'm sorry about your aunt :( My family, similarly, has a history of bipolar disorder (which I have unfortunately inhereted). It can be tough.
Is there are reason why you think you will never do theoretical physics? Is this something you would like to do but don't think you can, or do you prefer something else?

 

[Shackleford]

I'm sorry about your aunt :( My family, similarly, has a history of bipolar disorder (which I have unfortunately inhereted). It can be tough.
Is there are reason why you think you will never do theoretical physics? Is this something you would like to do but don't think you can, or do you prefer something else?

Thanks for you sympathies. She's a smart lady, went to the University of Texas at Austin, but life can be tough for her at times.

Quite frankly, I don't feel I'm smart enough to do theoretical physics. I'm intelligent but not exceptionally so. It seems to me that truly the exceptionally bright tackle it. I'm decent at math and physics and ideally I'd like to get an MS in Physics. I have two more years in physics undergrad, and I'm taking it one step at a time.

 

[AsianSensationK]

I know I'm in the wrong place to be saying this, but I can't see why people would dream about studying pure mathematics.

Anyway, I'd just pick one thing and settle for nothing less than the best possible grades. It's because if you can't do that and show that to people now (either recruiters or grad schools), you won't have a whole lot of chances to do so later.

Some good advice I did get from a professor is that if you're going to be making an application to grad school, you better be building a convincing, compelling story to tell the people reading those applications. Take your professor's advice with the idea in mind that he may be reading an application you make at some point, or you may be asking him for a rec down the road.

 

[noblegas]

I think you should re-read what I wrote. What I wrote was that in pure math (as opposed to applied math or for example physics) "natural talent" is often considered to be important. Whether that is true of not is actually not that important if the people who will decide if they will accept you as a PhD student believe it to be.
I don't know enough about the "politics" of math to say for sure, but it seems quite a few of the people who end up working in pure math showed some ability at a relatively early age by for example participating in the math Olympics and so on. This does not seem to be the case with applied math (I went to university with a couple of guys who ended up in applied math).

The main point is that pure math is a small field, few people get accepted as PhD students and only a small percentage of those are then able to actually able to work as mathematicians at a university. In order to be one of those you will obviously have to work hard (but that is true of all fields) but not even hard work can -despite what some people would like to think- ever guarantee that you will succeed. If for example the politicians decides to cut funding to your particular area just when you need to find a new position you are almost certainly out of options, regardless of how good you are or how hard you have worked.
Hence, luck certainly plays a role which is why you should always have a backup plan.

I don't think that there is a person on the planet "born" with a natural talent in math or in any other field. People are not born knowing math, they need to learn math. Some learn faster and earlier than a lot of people, hence they may seem advanced in a particular area than the average person who learned the same subject matter. many people see michael jordan as having a natural talent for basketball, but he practiced at his game everyday and never liked to lose in the sports that he was competiting in. I think it was said that einstein worked on a problem for hours and hours and inbetween breaks ,had 4 hours of sleep.

Anyone on here by any chance read Michael gladwell's book , outliers? In his book, he writes that people who are deemed talented in one particular subject area show a strong correlation between the talent of the individual in his given field and the number of hours that person studying in their field of interest. In one chapter for instance , he focuses on a select group of violinists who attended the Jilliard school of music. He noted that Violinists who went on to become music teachers spent a total of 2000 hours practicing the violin. The violinists who went onto become not professional violinists, but amatuer violinists have spent a total number of 4000 hours playing the violin. Finally, those that went on to become professional and talented violinists spent a total number of 6000 hours or more practicing the violin.

 

[Shackleford]

Einstein probably should have slept more. Sleep deprivation certainly has an adverse effect on your faculties.

Is that hours per degree?

 

[Sankaku]

I know I'm in the wrong place to be saying this, but I can't see why people would dream about studying pure mathematics.

That is ok. I can't see why people like watching team sports, drink blended whiskey, smoke, listen to country & western music, watch soap operas, believe Fox news, are interested in Paris Hilton, want to drive cars that cost as much as a small house, or go to war over religion.

Strange, eh?

 

[Klockan3]

I don't think that there is a person on the planet "born" with a natural talent in math or in any other field.

Quote from wiki about outliers:
"Outliers asserts that success depends on the idiosyncrasies of the selection process used to identify talent just as much as it does on the athletes' natural abilities."
He do not deny that talent exists, just that talent alone do not get you anywhere. The book is not to be taken as a scientific paper, but as a thought provoking text challenging the the common view of what a genius is.

But for example I believe that a large part to who can do maths and who can't is how well you can preserve your memories. Humans usually alters memories to fit the current situation, but if that process gets in the way of maths you will never be able to advance that high since your brain is then full of logical fallacies and you would create more of them constantly. So people who are bad at altering the memories would be better at maths, but at a cost since altering memories is a very important process required to tackle psychological issues such as depression.

 

[noblegas]

Quote from wiki about outliers:
"Outliers asserts that success depends on the idiosyncrasies of the selection process used to identify talent just as much as it does on the athletes' natural abilities."
He do not deny that talent exists, just that talent alone do not get you anywhere. The book is not to be taken as a scientific paper, but as a thought provoking text challenging the the common view of what a genius is.

But for example I believe that a large part to who can do maths and who can't is how well you can preserve your memories. Humans usually alters memories to fit the current situation, but if that process gets in the way of maths you will never be able to advance that high since your brain is then full of logical fallacies and you would create more of them constantly. So people who are bad at altering the memories would be better at maths, but at a cost since altering memories is a very important process required to tackle psychological issues such as depression.

Yes. Thats true but you are missing the point. Those who were deemed as talented in their field practiced developing their skill most of the time. Because the author of Outliers have said that both chris langan and robert oppenheimer both have equal intelligence but Oppenheimer became a successful scientist because of the environment he grew up in, where his parents encouraged his interest in science and Langan's parents were either apathetic towards his talents or they were unsupportive of furthering his talents. The author says that Bill gates love and talent for computers would not have developed if he did not go to a school that had a large computer, a rarity in schools in the sixties and he would not have spent much of his spare time on the computer at his school compared to his fellow students. Same case for the beatles.

Your environment can influence your performance in a certain field and can deter you from recognizing your own talents or potential in a certain field. The author gives an example that students at a school performed poorly in math , but when they went to a school that were more attentive to the students needs, their performance in math improved greatly. Jaime escalante improved

 

[Raghnar]

Quite frankly, I don't feel I'm smart enough to do theoretical physics.

I also had this doubt and my Professor (in this way we remain in topic) said to me
"I don't know if you are the smartest guy I've had teached. I mean, you're surely not stupid but the point is not simply about smartness. Is a combination of intelligence, persistency and most of all: foolness. The point is not than if you're intelligence enough, the point is that if you are crazy enough to follow an idea and say something brilliant evenif the world is going to treat you like a fool."

 

[Klockan3]

Yes. Thats true but you are missing the point.

I don't think so, read what I wrote:

talent alone do not get you anywhere.

Which was basically the point of your post. Talent still matters, but you need other things too. That is the point. You can't measure talent in current proficiency unless it is world class, but that doesn't mean that talent isn't there. The point is that two equally talented people can develop extremely differently depending on social factors. But none of this contests that talent is important.

I don't think that there is any scientific study that shows that talent doesn't exist. To me this just looks like an internet myth that have spread way too much.

 

[Erebus]

I know I'm in the wrong place to be saying this, but I can't see why people would dream about studying pure mathematics.

LOL Neither can a lot of people I've talked to. I guess I'm just an odd duck that way. Math, like music, is an art form, in my opinion :)

 

[turin]

The only way to interpret what your advisor told you is, "Find a different adviosr; stop bothering me." I doubt that it has anything to do with your actual aptitude. Find a different advisor.

 

[chiro]

Don't let some snotty nose ******* tell you that you're not good enough. If you want to be a pure mathematician at any cost you will more than likely exceed at it even if it takes you a little longer than expected. If everyone listened to idiots like that we would probably still be in the stone age.

 

[lubuntu]

Indeed, I don't know what the appeal is of being a pure mathematician but if it is your dream you should through caution to the wind and pursue it at all costs.

 

[Martin_G]

This is an interesting and important post. It touches on some very important issues, personal and global. I'm in the same boat, minus the comment from the advisor. Here's how I'm going to decide what to do with myself: for the next 10 months or so, I'll be studying by a** off, both physics and math. I'm already in a graduate program in math, so I'll have to make extra effort to study physics by myself in my spare time. In October and November 2010, I'll be taking the GRE subjects tests in both math and physics. The results in those will decide, to large degree, whether I'm going for a PhD in physics, math, or not at all. This is far from a perfect way to cut the knot, but at least it's straightforward and simple. You might want to consider something along these lines.
Standardized test have their detractors and disadvantages, but like it or not, they are the only way you have to compare yourself in a standardized, objective, controlled manner with other potential grad students/mathematicians/physicists from all across the world.

 

[Erebus]

This is an interesting and important post. It touches on some very important issues, personal and global. I'm in the same boat, minus the comment from the advisor. Here's how I'm going to decide what to do with myself: for the next 10 months or so, I'll be studying by a** off, both physics and math. I'm already in a graduate program in math, so I'll have to make extra effort to study physics by myself in my spare time. In October and November 2010, I'll be taking the GRE subjects tests in both math and physics. The results in those will decide, to large degree, whether I'm going for a PhD in physics, math, or not at all. This is far from a perfect way to cut the knot, but at least it's straightforward and simple. You might want to consider something along these lines.
Standardized test have their detractors and disadvantages, but like it or not, they are the only way you have to compare yourself in a standardized, objective, controlled manner with other potential grad students/mathematicians/physicists from all across the world.

That sounds like a solid (very scientific) approch, but what you love most should have an influence on your decision too. If you love them equally, why not do both? (Except for the fact that you'll be, like, eighty by the time you finish lol).
I've decided that talent comes from love. If you love something enough, and work at it enough, it becomes a part of you, and you learn to approach it a natural, almost intuitive way. Love matters more than initial skill.
Ha! I appear to have answered my own question :)

 

[mordechai9]

I just want to add a little point here that may not have been mentioned. People don't have a good understanding of what it takes to do math, and what it means to be a high level mathematician. That's not because people are stupid, it's just that math is a bit of a complicated subject and it takes a long time to start to get a feel for what it's really all about.

To make a long story short, mathematics in many ways is just like a mental athletic contest, where instead of muscles, you have memory and reasoning competence. IMO, the difficulty of some subjects like abstract algebra is due mainly to the fact that you just have to concatenate (and remember) such long chains of reasoning. In general, mathematics relies on skills of working within a lot of formal modes -- being able to work well with LOTS of highly specified definitions. This is constrasted to say, physics, where experimentalists work with few strict, formal definitions, and the reasoning process is more blended with intuition and statistical inference. In other words, it's much more "user friendly". Now, I don't mean to imply that people who are bad at math are stupid. Some people just have a lot more difficulty interacting with the "maximally formalized" subject that is mathematics. People's brains just don't work the same way, I figure.

So being good at mathematics is a rather strange skill and talent plays a big part. I wouldn't let the professor's comments discourage you too much, but I think you should perceive that the situation is rather strange in mathematics and in particular, the required skills are much stranger than the average physicist skills or just general scientific skills. It is good to keep persisting in the subject, but at some point you have to decide for yourself if you feel you are actually well suited for the peculiarities of the discipline.