Old Drafts

I don't blog often about my work or my time as a graduate student, though it's certainly a huge part of my life. Graduate school, especially, is a hard experience to characterize if you haven't been there. And if you have been, then you know. Recently though, blogging about some of my experiences has been on my mind.

More and more, a lot of my work has been focused on students. I've been helping both undergraduates and graduates to develop their research ideas into projects, presentations, and papers. Well, hopefully I've been helping.

There's a seemingly universal experience that I had as a student and that I now see in the faces of my own students. It's the look of disappointment, maybe mixed with a little incredulity, that students have when their edited work is handed back to them. I remember it well and it's discomfiting to see on the faces of my own students. It's the look you give when you are sure you put your absolute best work into something and it comes back dripping with corrections.

As a grad student, I usually handled the disappointment by reading the corrections and then not looking at them for a few days. They never looked as bad as I thought after I gave them some time. Now, seeing that look directed at me, I am often tempted to rush in and start apologizing and reassuring. I'm sorry. It's not that bad. You did good work. It just needs a little polishing.

I have to remind myself that those types of silly reassurances aren't necessary. Review is very much part of the scientific process and learning to handle criticism is crucial. Learning how to do this part, the editing, revising, and growing of research, is at least as important as anything you will learn in a class and, I would argue, possibly more so. So I'm learning to bite my tongue, set a deadline, and invite students to bring me their questions if they have any. Maybe someday I'll stop feeling bad about it too but I doubt that day will be anytime soon.

In the meantime, I look back at my Old Drafts file, the folder of previous drafts I keep for each paper I write. I only start a new draft for major changes, not minor corrections, and each paper has somewhere between 30 and 50 old drafts behind it. I feel a little bit less of an impulse to apologize after that because I know that I've never had a paper revision that didn't make it better.