[A minipost from my reply to Pip Coburn on his recent piece on student-mindedness]
The lesson came as I prepared for my thesis defense. The Stony Brook physics department has three examiners: two physicists - a theorist and an experimentalist (one is your advisor) - and someone external to the department who is outside your field. How I found mine is a long story, but the choice made a huge difference. He was a surgery professor and an accomplished violinist, which seemed reasonably remote from the semileptonic decay mode of charmed particles. The committee members get a draft of the thesis a few months before the defense. Ideally that's when major issues generally uncovered. I thought the surgeon wouldn’t have much to say, but he *really* wanted to understand what it was about. He was a serious and intensely curious student, with a range far beyond medicine. His particle physics was about on par with my surgical skills, so I had to describe my work to extremely bright student who had a very different background. Spread over two months we spent at least twenty hours together. His "dumb" (the label he chose) questions gifted me with a deeper insight into what I'd done. There was so much I hadn’t thought deeply enough about.
Over a good meal one night he said he used to be intimidated by experts outside his field until he discovered they were often intimidated by him. If you feel intimidated it’s a sign there's something to learn and perhaps you can learn something. Over those two months I learned a bit about surgery and Bach violin sonatas, but the real learning was to to welcome and appreciate the imposter syndrome (I didn’t know to term until much later). Also I learned something about communication. What I didn’t learn was how to effectively communicate the work to high school students - but that’s another story.
Since then I’ve been on a number of defense committees. Only one was physics. The rest have been all over the place and have been fantastic opportunities to learn and get a bit of insight from a developing expert. Hopefully some of my dumb questions help them as much as my surgeon friend's dumb questions helped me.
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