Are you ready for the job?

One might expect that, as you get on in years, most situations become regular and self-confidence keeps growing to a point where insecurity is not a problem anymore. Yet, the moment you step out of your everyday environment, you can readily find new opportunities to feel ill-prepared and queasy. Today I have been in one of these situations, with the additional problem that the uncertainty will not be resolved in weeks.

As I enrolled the PhD program a few months ago the professor pointed out that we should all join one of the seminars, where a number of topics were available to be directed by different advisors. I did not know most of the names, but I recognized one of the most senior PhD students so I assumed that third-year student were advising more junior one, so I went ahead and wrote to him to ask if he was available. It turns out that the idea is that the Masters students take the seminar, while PhD students impart the seminar.

Photo: alegri / 4freephotos.com

Aside from the embarrassment of admitting that I had understood the instructions wrong, that put me in the difficult position of deciding which kind of project I could prepare for the students. The professor openly said that we should ask the students to do whatever helped us in our thesis work, because the idea was to exposed them to "real-life work", not just academic problems. On the other hand, I have spent most of the last months reading and getting up to speed with the state of the art, I did not have much work that I could "outsource" to a student. Luckily, I read an article that would fit pretty well in my intended line of work so, after a brief discussion with the professor, we agreed that it would be interesting to replicate the results and then extend it to analyze my own data.

So now the only two questions are: will anyone pick my topic to work on? and if they do, will I be up to the job of leading their effort? I have had no problem so far leading co-workers over the course of 20 years in the workforce, but this environment is unknown... Have a nice evening.