It’s important for me to distinguish what I learned in school from what I learned because of school. I hold them in equal esteem, but they do not cohabitate easily.
My learning in school arrived in the form of equations and theorems, but has been digested into a more general training to accept information. I have learned to learn, and do distinguish real understanding from superficial knowledge. It began at the physics seminar. I started attending the weekly talks in my freshman year, usually as the only student my age in the room. I considered it a good talk if I was completely lost fifteen minutes in, but my average was closer to ten. I went anyways because I didn’t think that my classes were teaching me science, rather they were teaching me a body of knowledge that would be useful one day when it was finally time to be a scientist. In retrospect, I think that I knew subconsciously that I was learning a very important skill: understanding where my understanding stops, and to try to push it further.
Now in my last year I understand all of the seminars, and my academic work deserves credit for that. Fourier analysis is often the key to a complicated plot, and my basic backgrounds in optics, quantum mechanics, and programming give me the tools and vocabulary to support more advanced ideas. I often hear words that I learned in my summer research in microelectronic fabrication, fluid dynamics, and electrochemistry. If I make a low-ball estimate and say that I attended 80 percent of seminars (accounting for illness and serendipity, and augmented by extra chemistry, bio, summer seminars, and conferences) I have gone to about 200 scientific talks. Some were well-presented, and some were laughably unclear, but now I can tell the difference and that is a valuable skill. It also means that even in the tiny field of adaptive optics, I’ve heard two independent research summaries. My education has given me access to a world of incredible learning, and a broad sense for how science advances and where it is going. I have trained myself to listen to something I don’t understand and gain as much as possible from the experience.
I learned harder lessons from school. It took almost as long for me to see why I felt rejected by science as it did for me to understand seminars. The sexism that I witnessed from peers, teachers, mentors, or even invited speakers was invisible to me for years, only gradually accumulating as unlocalized resentment.
Not too long ago, science and philosophy were the same field of study. I think that science should again turn a critical eye to its very form. I have watched sensitive, quiet thinkers consistently pushed to the outskirts because the harsh “you get it or you don’t” attitude that exists in every discussion, in every textbook, in every classroom. It is a luxury to sit quietly for four years on Wednesday afternoons, to have given myself this safe space to understand or to not understand, to recognize whether my knowledge was lacking or whether the presentation was flawed.
My education will enable me to listen and learn, critically, within the scientific community and outside of it. My eyes are open to the technical minutiae of thermodynamics, and the microaggressions of classroom dynamics. I look forward to rejoining the academic world in a few years to see what I can fix, where I can teach, and what I can learn.
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