I was a pretty shy kid. This is not really weird to people who have known me a really, really long time, but eventually, I learned that you just have to go for things if you want people to take you seriously. However, I do tend to hold back until I feel confident enough to assert myself (this may take weeks or months depending on the situation). Usually, I start to feel confident when I am no longer the newbie on the squad (Science Bowl, past jobs, etc.), but in class, I won't ever not be the newbie, since we're all in the same class. The point of this whole thing is that I finally got the courage to say something in my grad class today (which has so far intimidated the heck out of me because...grad students!). And it was awesome.
I learned that first year grad students are only a year older than me, despite our differences in looks (some of them seem quite a bit older and some of them probably are quite a bit older) and know only a bit more than I do. They've taken Synthetic Methods already, and I haven't, but I've got a bit of intuition worth sharing, I think. The only thing I'm not well-versed in is the terminology. What's the opposite of cycloaddition? Uhhh, is it backwards cycloaddition? Or cyclosubtraction? (It's actually retrocycloaddition, or reverse cycloaddition, which is dubious to me because the term "addition" is in the word...) So I learned some of that today and had a grand old time.
~~
I also had a reunion dinner with people in my freshman year Chinese class. Adam, Alex, Frank, Jack, Juliana, Ray, and Liang LaoShi. The dinner conversation oscillated between slightly awkward and very informative and was great because many of us hadn't kept in touch for a while. It was also quite scary to realize that it had been four years since we had been in class together, had laughed together, had made movies together. We look the same, and we talk the same, but we've grown up.
~~
And then my suite watched Black Hawk Down. War movies. GAH.
~~
Oh yeah. THIS
I learned that first year grad students are only a year older than me, despite our differences in looks (some of them seem quite a bit older and some of them probably are quite a bit older) and know only a bit more than I do. They've taken Synthetic Methods already, and I haven't, but I've got a bit of intuition worth sharing, I think. The only thing I'm not well-versed in is the terminology. What's the opposite of cycloaddition? Uhhh, is it backwards cycloaddition? Or cyclosubtraction? (It's actually retrocycloaddition, or reverse cycloaddition, which is dubious to me because the term "addition" is in the word...) So I learned some of that today and had a grand old time.
~~
I also had a reunion dinner with people in my freshman year Chinese class. Adam, Alex, Frank, Jack, Juliana, Ray, and Liang LaoShi. The dinner conversation oscillated between slightly awkward and very informative and was great because many of us hadn't kept in touch for a while. It was also quite scary to realize that it had been four years since we had been in class together, had laughed together, had made movies together. We look the same, and we talk the same, but we've grown up.
~~
And then my suite watched Black Hawk Down. War movies. GAH.
~~
Oh yeah. THIS
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