23/07/2019
One of the first things said to me during my first week:
"You don't have as much experience as I would have thought…"
I was taken aback: already a bad thought was planted. Imposter syndrome setting in. It didn't help that there was no place for me to work for the first month so I sat alone in the quiet room: no proper desk or no one to ask questions. I read papers, did some tutorials (infamous Pizza for ontologies). I was given a dataset to play around with.
I decided to try and prove the person wrong and spent the first 9 months trying my best to impress but it always felt like nothing I did was good enough. I would read that method they told me about, but they would say I'm wasting too much time reading - yet I would present results and if I didn't know the smallest detail I would be berated and told I didn't know enough.
I cried. More than a few times. Sometimes I couldn't get out of bed and refused to go to work. My first year progress review was approaching, so I met with my supervisor about the work I would present and things changed...
"I'm very impressed!"
And there it was - I was a little teary. I finally felt like I knew what I was doing: I was making my ontology correctly, I was making my clinical pipeline correctly. I wasn't doing a bad job and in fact I was doing OK.
It felt like I was spending a long time doing a single task, only to go back a step because I "must have done something wrong". But after the first year, the ontology was almost completed, it was created in a novel way, and we plan to write it up.
The main point of this small blog post is showing that I overcame some issues with a little reassurance. Something I believe I should have been recieving throughout, even if I made minor mistakes, or was a little slow. It's important. The beginning was such a struggle, I almost quit. There are days I still feel like a burden to people, maybe I'll get over that one day.
What else have I been up to?
New Year's Resolution doing something new each week
Chester Zoo for my 23rd birthday
Masters Graduation almost a year after submitting