Adam Becker: How To Save Your PhD Supervisor
The Story Collider
Story Collider, Inc.
4.4 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 6 March 2015
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When Adam Becker realizes a visiting film crew is made up of geocentrists, he has to prevent them from exploiting his adviser's work. Adam Becker is a cosmologist, a journalist, a programmer, and a science publishing troublemaker. He hails from a tiny town in northern New Jersey, and he has a PhD in physics from the University of Michigan. He strongly believes that scientific research should be open, that the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is nonsense, and that David Tennant was the best Doctor. He lives in Oakland, California, with his fiancee, Elisabeth, who is a writer, and their pet rabbit Copernicus, who is not.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A science story, huh? |
| 0:04.0 | Is NYU scientist the... |
| 0:06.0 | I felt... |
| 0:07.0 | I was so... |
| 0:09.0 | And I just thought, well... |
| 0:10.0 | It was that golden moment. |
| 0:13.0 | Because science was on my side. |
| 0:15.0 | Hi, Hi everyone, I'm Ben Lilly, and welcome to The Story Collider, where we bring you true personal stories about science. |
| 0:30.5 | We have shows coming up in New York City, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Boston, and London. |
| 0:35.0 | Go to Storycolletter.org for more info. |
| 0:38.0 | This week's story is from Adam Becker. |
| 0:39.6 | It was recorded in February 2015 at Littlefield in Brooklyn. |
| 0:47.9 | So it turns out that graduate school in astrophysics can really mess with your head. |
| 0:58.1 | One of the ways that it messes with your head, aside from the intentional messing with your head of dumping knowledge into it, |
| 1:04.7 | is you can develop this thing called imposter syndrome. |
| 1:09.0 | An imposter syndrome is when you think that everybody else belongs |
| 1:14.9 | where you are because they're clearly talented and intelligent and you don't. You're some |
| 1:20.5 | sort of faker. You slipped in while no one was looking and fooled people into thinking that you belong |
| 1:24.5 | there. Because I mean after, look at everybody else there. |
| 1:27.5 | Everybody else is super smart and super accomplished. |
| 1:30.8 | They've done these amazing things. |
| 1:32.3 | Every time they open their mouths, they sound really, really smart. |
... |
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