There is a sentiment when entering the college world that your learning is solely up to you.

It is true to an extent, although I have really taken it to heart: no one cares more about my learning than I do. This internalization of the learning process enforces the idea that it’s your responsibility to learn. It also leads to the idea that if you don’t understand something, then you’re not really trying. This attitude only worsens during the transition to to more advanced courses and research. It is no coincidence that being surrounded by high achieving peers commonly found in the university setting leads to imposter syndrome: the persistent fear of being exposed as a “fraud”.  As you get closer to the limits of a field of knowledge, it’s harder to seek the answers to the increasingly specific and focused questions that characterize cutting edge research. As Martin Schwartz puts it, “Science involves confronting our ‘absolute stupidity’”. In research, there is no such thing as stupid questions, because no one knows the best way to confront the question until the answer is found, if it is ever found. Everyone is similarly in the dark, undergraduates think their graduate student TA’s are smarter than them. Graduate students think their advisors are smarter than them. The only difference between these groups is experience. Those who have waded through the darkness longer have simply grown accustomed to and learned to navigate the sea of ignorance they must face in order to expand their knowledge.

So let’s embrace our ignorance. Instead of growing discouraged, let’s seek inspiration in the fact that creating new knowledge is hard and that there is always something to learn, even if we get it wrong the first time. We should take our intellectual pleasures where we find them.