Welcome to Impostor Syndrome

I have a month to finish my undergraduate honors thesis so I can graduate, which makes this is a good time to begin blogging for real, I think. I have bedsheets in the dryer, a Cooking Light dinner waiting to be made to sustain me this upcoming week, and a to-do list on a whiteboard, half marked out. One item is

Get back to your F***ING TO-DO LISTS

I always underestimate the power of to-do lists to minimize the overwhelming vague despair of I have so much to do down to I have fourteen tasks to accomplish today. Even better if five of those take thirty seconds and can be marked off promptly. Best if one is write to-do list. You’ve already accomplished something.

The dinner only makes two servings, as it turns out. I have to choose another for the rest of the week. Hopefully something using blue cheese and butternut squash, since I already had to buy those for previous recipes.

Here are some things I know:
–I will be beginning my PhD program this fall
–I will be studying solar cells
–I will get a dog
–Five weeks is not a lot of time to finish a thesis

Here are some things I do not know:
–Where I will be beginning my PhD program this fall
–If silicon will still be the most important commercial solar cell material in fifteen years
–If I want to spend possibly the most influential 4+ years of my life studying silicon
–When I will have the money to get a dog
–When I will get the lab work for my thesis completed
–Most of the information for my next cosmology exam

The lists I can write of things I know are always shorter than the lists I can write of things I do not know. That’s important for a graduate student, though, I think. Learn enough so that you can recognize what you don’t know. Then learn that.

It’s hard to condense the overwhelming vague despair of things I do not know into one fourteen-task to-do list, though. And it’s hard to convince yourself that’s okay.