Teaching Myself to Unlearn What I’ve Taught Myself
By: Will Bowers
Tags: Mental Health, Health, Ideas, Self Improvement, Education

Initial Nerves

Here’s I hit you with my resumé off the bat. A couple of months ago, I started a daunting PhD in a burgeoning new field with no set career path. These last few weeks, as I’ve been starting out, I’ve taken on tasks and reading material focused on my emerging project. I’ve networked with many important connections within and outside of the institute. The problem is, I’d never felt like I needed those academic connections before. I mostly worked alone, in-silo, banging my head against walls as I had done before.

I felt like I needed to prove myself from the go; to wow my supervisors, and to show they hadn’t made a mistake by recruiting me.

But there was a problem. I was still feeling my way through, like I’d always felt I’d had to in the past. I was defensive when questioned, and not as honest with myself as I should have been. I stayed up late trying to find answers for myself to my problems and the gaps in my understanding, leaving me drained by morning.

I approached my first monthly review meeting with both of my supervisors with a deep feeling of dread. I had done most of what they’d asked, but I had made a few glaring errors here and there, and I hadn’t retained about half of the base material. I used this opportunity to test the waters and ask a few leading questions to see how human my supervisors could be.

I’m working with them for the next four years; a month in seemed as good a time as any. I purposefully backed myself into a corner, where the only way out was to say “I’m trying to show you I’m capable of working by myself, and I’m afraid of looking incompetent to you both.”

I braced myself for the barrage of disappointed retorts to berate me, to cut me down and make me want to work harder for their approval. But it never came. Instead, what I got was friendly laughter and a wide grin. The room felt much warmer all of a sudden.

“We took you on because you impressed us in the interview and we saw a lot of potential,” my main supervisor reassured, “we don’t expect you to be churning out world-class research from day 1, and we don’t expect to be impressed in your work from the very start. Let’s get the basics down, then you can begin on the impressive stuff.”

And like that, a weight was lifted. In that moment, I knew I could be more honest with them, and I opened up about what I knew, where I may have misunderstood, and what I definitely didn’t know.

My veneer had been smashed and I felt exposed, but they were kind. They acknowledged that everything up to then had been self-taught. They had seen it before again and again, and knew it well. They want to bring me up to clinical, academic, and industrial standard within a well-established framework adopted by the institute. What would be the point in crushing a new student before they’ve had a chance?

When that sunk in, I didn’t feel so useless and inept. I’m still so used to researching alone; in reading and searching and trying to find answers by myself. But that’s changing fast. By actively undoing the habits I’ve taught myself, in a pressured yet positive environment, I will be able to more effectively learn and communicate.