Like RedondoWriter, I have to “word let” before I can get going on my day.
Today I’m having sensations of incompetency. I don’t think this is uncommon for graduate students. One reason is that my advisor told me yesterday that I may not have enough time to complete a well-prepared presentation for an oceanography conference in February. She’s right, of course. I don’t have all my samples analyzed. I’m not even 25% done. Then I have to make some sense of them, write an introduction, methods, and discuss what I’ve found. February isn’t far enough away. Then she went on to say that if I wasn’t going into academia I shouldn’t torture myself with formal presentations, because they’re very difficult. Knowledgable audience members ask tough questions.
Right now I’m not sure I want to go into academia but I’m also not sure that I don’t want to. Like I wrote yesterday, sometimes I just want a government job back. I fit well into the organization, am a big-picture thinker, and I tend to like the mission of the big land-owning agencies. Academia is about investigating the details, the small part of a larger picture. When I first thought about going to graduate school, I wanted to know more about the details, the science behind the larger picture. Well, now I do and I’m not satisfied with that either. There has got to be middle ground somewhere. And I keep wondering how the answers to my questions are going to present themselves. I guess I’ll find out.