Trust your instruments: what flight training taught me about grad school
Animals have sensory systems that allow them to take in and make sense of information present in the environment. Some animals (like me) fly airplanes and go to grad school, and their nervous systems are used frequently for knowing which way is up and worrying that they might not be in the right place.
When you're an instrument pilot in training, you spend a lot of time learning to trust your instruments during flight in the clouds because sometimes, when you fly in featureless grey, the part of your brain that integrates information from your visual and vestibular systems gets really confused. This confusion can cause your brain to have very definite opinions about which way is up -- and these opinions frequently do not coincide with any kind of reality. Spatial disorientation can be very dangerous when you consider that the airplane is traveling at some relatively rapid rate near an object (the Earth) of much, much, much greater mass. The solution to this disorientation problem in airplanes is to trust your instruments. This turns out to be pretty difficult, because the instruments in your head that you normally use to interpret information are lying to you, but are more familiar than the ones mounted on the dash.
The spatial disorientation of graduate school is called impostor syndrome. The featureless grey is the way that everyone around you seems to be the smartest person you've ever met -- and way, way more capable than you are, or hope to be. The confusion is mostly about how no one -- teachers, funding agencies, your major professor -- has yet managed to detect that you are not one of them, despite your increasingly crippling certainty that you cannot succeed.
The solution to impostor syndrome is still trusting your instruments. In this case, your instruments are all those metrics by which you are succeeding, however unbelievably. That your fellow students, instructors, major professor, and funding agencies continue to believe that you have your shit together is a reliable indicator of success. And hey, man, staying aloft in the featureless grey sounds way better than spiraling into the ground, anyway.
Here's to feeling better tomorrow.
When you're an instrument pilot in training, you spend a lot of time learning to trust your instruments during flight in the clouds because sometimes, when you fly in featureless grey, the part of your brain that integrates information from your visual and vestibular systems gets really confused. This confusion can cause your brain to have very definite opinions about which way is up -- and these opinions frequently do not coincide with any kind of reality. Spatial disorientation can be very dangerous when you consider that the airplane is traveling at some relatively rapid rate near an object (the Earth) of much, much, much greater mass. The solution to this disorientation problem in airplanes is to trust your instruments. This turns out to be pretty difficult, because the instruments in your head that you normally use to interpret information are lying to you, but are more familiar than the ones mounted on the dash.
The spatial disorientation of graduate school is called impostor syndrome. The featureless grey is the way that everyone around you seems to be the smartest person you've ever met -- and way, way more capable than you are, or hope to be. The confusion is mostly about how no one -- teachers, funding agencies, your major professor -- has yet managed to detect that you are not one of them, despite your increasingly crippling certainty that you cannot succeed.
The solution to impostor syndrome is still trusting your instruments. In this case, your instruments are all those metrics by which you are succeeding, however unbelievably. That your fellow students, instructors, major professor, and funding agencies continue to believe that you have your shit together is a reliable indicator of success. And hey, man, staying aloft in the featureless grey sounds way better than spiraling into the ground, anyway.
Here's to feeling better tomorrow.
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