Items of Note

Last weekend I went to the Smokys to go backpacking. Each time we've gone, we've had a better time than the last, and this time was mostly OK. The weather was Smoky-esque, but we knew how to stay dry. The hiking was pleasant, although we arrived late Friday afternoon and ended up hiking the last mile in the dark. (not dusk, but full on dark.) The only reason hiking at night in a huge forest known for its population of bears didn't give us the heebie-jeebies is that this was the third time we've done it, and we've got the drill down. When you start tripping over roots and rocks because you can't see, you break out the headlamps and hope you make it to your campsite before the batteries go dead. I think the stumbling followed by cursing is enough to inform any nearby bears that we are probably too stupid to taste good. (That's a joke -- black bears don't eat smart people either.)

Along the way I started reminiscing about my first year of grad school. During that first semester I felt like I was going to be washed away in the torrent of new material. To keep up I would wake up at 5:30 or 6:00 go to my desk and, while the wife slept, read over the material I thought would be presented in class. At 7:20 I would crawl back into bed and spend some impossibly short amount of time talking with my wife. Then I'd get up again and start another overwhelming day. My wife said that she traded in her husband for a roommate during year between the start of classes and passing the prelims. 

The feeling I remember most is that I was hugely inadequate to accomplish the task at hand, but that I really, really didn't like failing. I have since come to learn that this sense of inadequacy follows a lot of academics around. Certainly I don't feel like I will ever be at a point where I can sit down with an open problem and tick it off in an afternoon. Of course no one expects that I will ever be at that point, and the joy of research mathematics is that if one has two publishable results a year, one is doing remarkably well. 

In the years since the start of grad school my brain has stretched and deformed in the process of absorbing so many new ideas. On the other hand I feel far more emotionally inflexible. Who was that lunatic who got up at 5:30 in the morning? There is no way I would do that now. I feel like, "This is who I am. If that isn't sufficient to succeed at this, I'll do something else."  Put another way: I've got stress fatigue. Four years ago I responded to stressful work situations by working harder, now I take all the signs of impending career doom with a grain of salt and pretty much work the same rate all the time. Stress levels feel more akin to stock prices -- they go up and down, and you shouldn't really worry about the high-frequency stuff. 

Better still, I'm beginning to form a queue of research projects I'm interested in, and, more importantly, I think I could make progress on. This to me feels like a crucial step in grad school and one that I suspect a lot of students don't make. 

In any case the trip ended with the wife and I hiking the last five miles in sandals. They were remarkably comfortable and airy compared to my hiking boots which needed new insoles.