Pressure & PhD Geeks
It's about time I felt the pressure and urgency. It's just the beginning of PhD life, only the start of the second semester, not even a year. I keep feeling that everything I do, I'm still too slow. Working under an MIT grad boss is really intimidating. Look, MIT is my dream school, I'll probably never get to study/teach there ever. All the famously smart people are there and everyone there knows all the other famously smart people. It's already hard enough finding people who speak my geek lingo outside of my lab, imagine speaking to extremely geeky people and I don't get what they're talking about. I also aspire to be extremely geeky. At least geekiness implies intelligence.

The thing about being a PhD student is that you have to be smarter than the already smart people, because you have to write a thesis on something improved and hopefully new, that the older/current generation of geeks haven't published. It's no longer about how much information you can pick up, but how much new information you can churn out using old knowledge.

I wonder what people REALLY think of PhD students. Are we losers who only love books and computers? (But how can we be losers when we are the inventors of cool technology like Google and gadgets like mobile phones with cameras and GPS?) Or are we intimidating because of our apparently unreachable smartness? Or do people think, "OMG Y R DEY SUCH UGLY PPL HU DUN DRESS UP? YUX."

I used to think PhD students are people who cannot bear to tear away from their books and live "real life" like the adults who work in offices. But after seeing how these people think and work, my opinion changed totally. They think a lot, they analyse every single detail and they are very precise when they turn on their geek mode and speak. I'm still training to be like them, and think like them; be smarter each day.

So much work. :| Time, I need time. Deadlines piling up. Tired!!!