Friday, December 7, 2007

Aren't we smart enough

A previous TA of mine and a now colleague of my husband stayed the night at our house last night to attend a workshop where my husband works. My husband worked with TA (as I will now call him) as an undergrad, as such they have kept in contact. TA is now at an institution near to us where he does teaching 75% of the time, research 25% of the time, sits on committees and obtained tenure in less than 5 years (he said it's common at his university to do it in 6). He advises no graduate students but conducts research with a lot of undergrads. All of the data he writes as first author. The university has zero to few graduates.
Anyhow, now that you have a little back ground on him I wanted to mention that multiple times in our conversation last night he said "if i was smarter," "but I'm not smart enough"
WOW. I know he received a pretty distinguished post doc position and here is this man talking about if he was smarter. I say man because I've heard so much about women generally feeling this way.
In essence everything he said could have came from my mouth.
He said he's not very passionate about his research but loves to teach, if he was smart enough he would change disciplines. I tried to be pc and instead corrected him and said he wasn't determined enough to change disciplines. He said this is a reason he is glad not to advise graduate students because he doesn't feel smart enough to train the next generation in his discipline.
He talked about some research he does which is on the outskirts of his previous knowledge and again mentioned not being smart enough to yet figure it out.
Besides him not being smart enough, we had a great conversation about the process of applying for positions. He helped me convince my husband to apply for a certain position because it's a brand new department hiring 25 faculty members so I think there is chance both of us could get hired. He gave hints about writing the teaching statement. He also told me I should apply for positions even though I don't think I'm qualified since the process of applying only get easier as you go so your first application shouldn't be to your most desired job. Basically once you have a good template it's easier to go in and revise as papers get published or tailor it towards a different position.
He also said really nice things about my qualities as a faculty candidate that boost my ego some. Of course these compliments came from someone not very smart . . . j/k

3 comments:

ScienceGirl said...

I have a labmate like that - always minimizing his abilities, although in reality he does great. One day he admitted to me that by expecting to be disappointed, he can never be surprised if he fails.

Jennie said...

And I was later thinking that when one doesn't want to be some big time professor at a RI doing cutting edge research they tend to think they have settled. So they caulk it up to not being smart enough instead of having a desire to do something different.
TA has the job I want, mentoring young scientist, minimal stress of your own research and demand for funding.

EcoGeoFemme said...

Ecogeoman says the same kinds of things. This insecurity is definitely not restricted to women.