When You Snatch the Pebble from My Hand, You Can Leave

As a new masters student with an advisor who has funding and a lab, I have been allotted an office. I use that word loosely--it's a grotty, gritty, dank basement room that can house up to six students. I have the place to myself at the moment, and thus I have a choice of desks. I picked one by the windows. It has some ancient plastic cubicle walls around it so there is a bit of privacy. Still, it's a step up from the undergrad experience of elbowing out other undergrads for an open seat at a table in the library. Don't mistake this for complaining. I am quite pleased to have the space and I will certainly use it.

The grad school experience is not quite what it used to be. Of course, geological sciences and animal sciences are different fields of endeavor and the graduate programs are funded and conducted in rather different ways. Still, I'm surprised at the amount of what certainly appears to be remedial learning that is required of grad students these days.

For example, grad students in animal sciences have to sign up for a handful of seminar courses every term. In my day, a seminar course was a cut-throat affair. My advisor had a stable of students at the time. His solution to managing us was to hold weekly meetings in which one student would make a brief presentation on his or her current research and the other students would rip it to shreds. It wasn't personal--we would go at published papers with equal frenzy. I look back on those years with some fondness. I learned to think on my feet and I learned to think critically. Tough love but excellent training for the real world. Believe it or not, as a child I was paralyzed by shyness. Stop laughing! Those five years in the shark pit were quite formative.

Instead it seems that hand-holding is the modern theme. Today, I received an hour-long lecture on how to read a scientific paper. Next Monday, I will sit through a lecture on how to make a technical presentation, starting with the title slide.

I'd laugh but that would make me quite the asshole, wouldn't it?

When you consider what I've done for the past 20 years (supporting myself for over a decade in a soft-money position in which I had to sing for every dollar, writing thousands of pages of technical reports, creating and delivering week-long training courses), these seminar courses seem unnecessary.

But that raises the $64,000 question: are they really necessary for any of the students? As I look around at the farm boys and girls with fresh manure on their shoes, obligatory hoodies in place, I think that it would be a mistake to underestimate them and, more importantly, a mistake to think that I'm a special snowflake.

I could be the asshole and sit there with the eye-rolls and deep sighs, surfing the internet or doodling on a piece of paper instead of listening. I may have walked barefoot to school for five miles through hip-deep snow, uphill both ways, but that doesn't mean that I know everything there is to know about reading a paper or making a technical presentation. Or about anything, really.

One lesson that I did not learn in the shark pit, a lesson that I truly began to understand only 7 or 8 years ago, is that if you pay attention and allow yourself to be in the moment, you can learn something new from almost anybody.

And that is what I will do.