= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
lmm comments on What false beliefs have you held and why were you wrong? - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (364)
I am interested in this -- what exactly happened? Feel free to reply in private if you wish. Was it the case of:
(a) Morale breaking (this is not meant to be judgmental, this happens very often in graduate school, and certainly happened to me). Morale management is really hard.
(b) You felt lots of people in your program were much faster/smarter than you? (Also very common..)
(c) You felt you could learn [topic], but it would take unreasonably long (e.g. not 4-6 years it takes to get a thesis out)?
(d) You felt that literally you just could not get something, regardless of time investment? Could you give an example of such a topic?
I hit c) for the category theory course in my masters. I managed the first half, more or less, but it felt like it was ramping up exponentially; there were too many new layers of concepts all of which were defined in terms of the previous one, and every new layer meant a percentage slowdown in my ability to work with that concept.
During undergrad I'd been at about the 30th percentile, but only the best half of undergrads go on to do a masters (at least at that particular institution). In retrospect it shouldn't have been a surprise that I was towards the bottom of the class, but it was.