I don’t know

Ygritte knows what’s up.

The first time I really learned about qualifying exams, I was an undergrad in a class on comparative endocrinology at Berkeley. My professor was Tyrone Hayes. Every exam was a booklet of open ended questions, including one question where the answer was always simply “I don’t know.” If you want to drive a room of overachieving pre-meds crazy, this is a pretty good way to do it.

One class, shortly after an exam, Professor Hayes announced that one of our TAs had passed his qualifying exam with flying colors. More important than what the grad student knew, Professor Hayes said, was his willingness to admit what he didn’t know.

This was a lesson that was reinforced when I became a grad student and it was my turn to take a qualifying exam. It’s a hard lesson to learn. Especially because most classes aren’t set up like my comparative endocrinology class, so it’s a lesson that is rarely reinforced until relatively late in our academic lives.

It’s a lesson that I was reminded of when I heard this story on NPR today, about a man who has made it his goal to be rejected each day. By doing so, he put himself through a form of exposure therapy for rejection. I’m sure that scientists across the country heard this story while drinking their morning cup of coffee, and thought about all their past and impending rejections. I know I did.

But it also struck me that fear of rejection comes from the same place as the aversion to saying “I don’t know”. And like my professor tried to teach his endocrinology class, we are indeed better scientists – and probably better off as people – when we make our peace with these uncomfortable feelings.

2 comments on this post:

  1. Andrew on said:

    Quite seriously, I do think I am a better human being for being rejected at various critically important junctures in my life.

    But I think the peace that comes with knowing that takes some time to set in. The key rejection that was good for me came at the end of my PhD. It taught me that I had to take my chances in the world too. That I was not especially gifted, despite what everyone said (not least in reference letters). For me as a person, that was a REALLY important thing to learn.

    And age helps. Over the last Christmas/New Year period, Science and then Nature both rejected a paper of mine without bothering to get it reviewed. Both decisions obviously ludicrously stupid. Once I would have been in a rage or gone to bed for a week. Now…well, their loss. I was astounded to realize that when my partner asked about my day, I forgot – forgot!! – to mention that I’d had a paper rejected by Nature that very morning.

    Age is also really good for the ‘I don’t know’ problem. I realize I don’t know a lot of stuff – but I can increasingly see I am not alone in that. The vast ignorance of humanity becomes clearer and clearer with age. Humanity knows squat.

  2. Nina on said:

    Here, here Eleanore. On the first day of classes, last week, I told my undergraduate class that it took me twenty years to learn to say ‘I don’t know’ and that it is an incredibly freeing lesson. Indeed, the longer I’ve been in graduate school, the less I think I (and everybody else) knows. There was a point in my comps that I looked around at the professors on my committee and realized that they had know idea what the answer to the question they’d just asked me was. That was pretty exciting. We were all in the same ignorant boat, despite years of education separating us.

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