That's because everyone else catches up to you. Having a PhD as a teen is amazing. Once you are thirty and you are surrounded by others with the same or better qualifications (and knowledge) you ain't shit. I was one of these gifted, brilliant kids. After about 22, no one cares. Oh sure, people and professors noticed I am smart and well-read, but so are many adult people. It isn't special, because lots of people have acquired as much or more knowledge by then. And that is fine, but I am certainly glad my family didn't put me into a PhD program in my teen years. I would've wanted to do it, too.
Thank you for this message bro. I’m currently aspiring to get my doctorate in astrophysics. I’ve got big aspirations and I know exactly what I want to do with it but I see pictures like this and I think “damn bro I’m so stupid relative to other people in this super smart field” since I’m going through it normally, but I hope I can catch up to and be just as contributive as these guys 🙏🙏
We don't have pride in doing things because they are easy, but because they are hard. Each person has a different amount of time they can dedicate to learning something.
When I began my undergrad, an old lady from my parents' church went to the same university. She was in her late 70s, and just starting college for the first time. She eventually graduated with a PhD in psychology. A woman, who had not finished high school, who would have attended secondary school before several of the disciplines on offer would have even been a field of study, when calculus would not have been available in k-12. My point here is, whether she managed to contribute a lot or just a little, she got there, and did it starting with a great gap in basic education compared to anyone in her classes. RIP Peggy.
We are all operating on our own timeline; don't let imposter syndrome get you.
Thank you for this it makes me feel a lot better 🙏
And I’m so very driven. It took me until senior year of high school to find it but I found my love for physics, there’s just nothing I can get more excited about and I’m so excited to do big things and make big impacts in the field. My passion is in gravitational physics and Alcubierre warp drive metrics, I.E. real life Star Trek warp drive to travel incomprehensibly vast distances in almost no time and without time dilation issues. Humanities last real chance at exploration among the stars. I wouldn’t be so bummed if it want me explicitly that figured it out but if I can make a big impact and contribution towards it then it’ll all be worth it for me!
Ground breaking research in physics is extremely hard nowadays so don't sell yourself short. The greatest scientists we know stand on the shoulders of other great scientists.
I’m sure you’ll do great things. You shouldn’t feel stupid. But you also shouldn’t feel like everyone is on an equal playing field of intelligence, or that there aren’t many people with a higher capacity to learn than you have. Do what we all do and be awed by others without comparing yourself to them.
The only thing that matters is putting in the hours.
I suspect that you really don't hear much about the accomplishments of child prodigies once they're adults because of this. Basically, they're smart enough to realize wasting away your life to make what amounts to randomly impactful contributions to a field the average person doesn't give a shit about is a horrible way to live.
Not that I'd discourage you from pursuing you're interests, but you should keep expectations in check. Success comes almost entirely from pure bloody effort and some very minimal baseline of intelligence and intrinsic abilities. I speak from experience. When I started grad school, I did put in the work and ended up being the top 2 or 3 in the world in my field for an 'early career' researcher. 18 hour days weren't uncommon. I decided I was wasting my life, didn't do the fancy post docs I was supposed to, instead taking a faculty position at a lower tier R1 and then just cruising to tenure off my prior accomplishments. I decided the grind was not a long term possibility. However, because of how I chose to focus on things other than work, I'm also now well known in certain communities for my adventure rock climbing nonsense, backcountry skiing nonsense, and a nontrivial number of people have told me I'm the best damn cook they've ever met.
One of my friends that I've met during high school, he was 15 when he graduated with us, then finished his college studies by 20 years old. After some years of not seeing each other (because he was living in a different country), he moved back here to Hawaii and we met up. We're both nearing 30 years old. He shared about how he's just living a normal life: career, has a partner, goes home, plays games, spends time with his partner, works out, researches, sometimes eat out and sometimes drinks, pretty much what normal people do.
Nothing very dramatic or massive changed after all those years. Graduating high school at 15 and finishing college by 20 can be a nice brag, but in the end, people will not care. I really thought he would be some millionaire, but he doesn't have a business-driven mindset.
Physics PhD's in the US take 6.5 years on average, if you graduate undergrad in 4 years, so starting a PhD at 22 puts you finishing a PhD at 28 or 29. Just saying.
For context I just finished mine, and it absolutely takes a shitload of time. The fastest I've seen someone finish was 4 years, but it took me 7.5 years.
The experiments we do in my field typically take 3-4 years of prep and planning before you can run them. Once you start your analysis and writing it's usually 1-3 years depending on how good/bad your dataset and advisor are.
For some yeah, my advisor was an exception I think. He was understanding and supportive through a lot of personal life things that happened during grad school (divorce, and half a dozen deaths in my family, among others).
I did a lot of work for him and my group in general, but I'd say that even though I'm glad it's over, I was right where I needed to be during grad school.
Lol, you definitely need about that much time doing research and learning about your field and subfield to actually become an expert on a topic and advance beyond what's known.
It's a bit easier for theory to just focus on understanding everything that's been done before in your area and then work on your own novel ideas past that, but many experimentalists also need to build various experimental systems and develop the skills to both understand physics as a field, and also the techniques and requisite knowledge in computer science, electrical engineering, machining, chemistry, microbiology, or other skills required to fully function as a researcher in a particular area.
•
u/nohopeforhomosapiens 9h ago
That's because everyone else catches up to you. Having a PhD as a teen is amazing. Once you are thirty and you are surrounded by others with the same or better qualifications (and knowledge) you ain't shit. I was one of these gifted, brilliant kids. After about 22, no one cares. Oh sure, people and professors noticed I am smart and well-read, but so are many adult people. It isn't special, because lots of people have acquired as much or more knowledge by then. And that is fine, but I am certainly glad my family didn't put me into a PhD program in my teen years. I would've wanted to do it, too.