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rocketship anxiety
Aug. 26th, 2013 12:27 amSo, tomorrow is my first day at Google, and I am scared.
I defended my dissertation 17 days ago, officially earned a PhD 7 days ago, and moved to Mountain View yesterday. The situation is beginning to feel more real, but it is still ephemeral and beyond my ability to fully process.
My experience of impostor syndrome has been strong for years, but has been especially strong lately; it seems as though I just barely graduated, and maybe that I don't even deserve my PhD, even after being in school for 9 years.
And now I am walking into a situation with high-powered people who very much have their shit together, whereas I haven't written a line of code in probably a year now, most likely got hired simply by virtue of having the magical (but now a decade stale) CMU-BS-CS incantation on my resume, and have for years had profound difficulty doing more than one hour of anything useful most days.
Also I will probably soon be signing a one year lease that equates to a ~$25k financial obligation (on top of the $125k in debt). So if I cannot keep my shit together then things will go poorly. Literally.
I am now strapped into a rocket fueled by expectation and necessity, and this rocket is about to go very quickly to a place that is very far from my comfort zone.
Eep.
I defended my dissertation 17 days ago, officially earned a PhD 7 days ago, and moved to Mountain View yesterday. The situation is beginning to feel more real, but it is still ephemeral and beyond my ability to fully process.
My experience of impostor syndrome has been strong for years, but has been especially strong lately; it seems as though I just barely graduated, and maybe that I don't even deserve my PhD, even after being in school for 9 years.
And now I am walking into a situation with high-powered people who very much have their shit together, whereas I haven't written a line of code in probably a year now, most likely got hired simply by virtue of having the magical (but now a decade stale) CMU-BS-CS incantation on my resume, and have for years had profound difficulty doing more than one hour of anything useful most days.
Also I will probably soon be signing a one year lease that equates to a ~$25k financial obligation (on top of the $125k in debt). So if I cannot keep my shit together then things will go poorly. Literally.
I am now strapped into a rocket fueled by expectation and necessity, and this rocket is about to go very quickly to a place that is very far from my comfort zone.
Eep.
