The cult of genius

On the comeuppance grad school gives you – that you’re really not as smart as you think – and on how people handle it …

 

During high school or college, many aspiring physicists latch onto Feynman or Einstein or Hawking as representing all they hope to become. The problem is, the vast majority of us are just not that smart. Oh sure, we’re plenty clever, and are whizzes at figuring out the tip when the check comes due, but we’re not Feynman-Einstein-Hawking smart. We go through a phase where we hope that we are, and then reality sets in, and we either (1) deal, (2) spend the rest of our career trying to hide the fact that we’re not, or (3) drop out.

 

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2007/02/25/the-cult-of-genius/