Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Be Assertive in grad school

In grad school, or for that matter anywhere some of us dismiss our findings as trivial, and watch others use it to their advantage. I had such an experience just yesterday. I located an error in the code handed to us by our professor. I ran a few tests and knew he was way off the mark. In my naivety I went ahead and shared this information with a fellow grad student. The smart cookie approached the professor with the error, got applauded for it and may have scored extra credit points as well.

Lesson learned : 
1. If you have tested an idea, share it with the world in such a way that you are the owner of your idea. You should benefit from the hours and hard work that went into the process.
2. Do not dismiss your findings as trivial. You make risk looking like a fool if you are wrong, but the taste of sucess if you are right is worth the risk.
3. If you do make this error, just remember you were smart once, you are more likely than the person stealing your idea to be smart once again !!!

2 comments:

  1. This is valuable for me Sona. Taking ownership of what we do is important or we will end up watching others take the credit. Fingers crossed that you will have that opportunity to show your skills soon!

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  2. Thx ... It is bigger struggle to unlearn passiveness than to learn my graduate coursework !

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