21 May 2006

Career: Talk to people about your ideas

Talking to people about your ideas is not a new concept, but it's worth emphasizing. If you want to gain confidence and make progress with intellectual activity, you have to talk to other people about it.

I used to work in a lab with a postdoc. I was a master's student so I barely knew anything. Yet the postdoc would constantly bounce ideas off me. I quickly realized that he was just using me to talk about his ideas. Not that I minded; I was rather flattered.

Talking to other people is especially important for theoreticians since they get very little feedback, unlike experimentalists who have to work with the reality of nature. You can spend weeks fiddling with a model, but if your apparatus blows up, you know something's wrong right away.

Alternatively, if you're embarassed/shy about your ideas, you can start off by talking to yourself in a blog, like me.

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