I knew that, at some point during my graduate career, I would be called on to write my dissertation. In fact, I’m reasonably sure that this will happen near the end of it. So I’ve read a few guides on how to get it done, and they all say the same things. I feel confident that I can churn out a 120 page document discussing research that I’ve done. I should hope that in four years of graduate school, I’ll have done enough to fill that in. But I can’t help but feel a little nervous about the process.

Realistically, this will probably be one of the longer combined works that I will have to write in my career. It will have to be all original, encompassing four years or more of work, and it will have to fit in with the University’s requirements of style, formatting, and other various tedium.

I think what intimidates me the most, though, is the fact that, at some point, I will have to defend it. After working on this thing for years, I’ll get up in front of five professors, including my advisor, and start talking about what I’ve done, why it’s interesting, and then field questions that could come completely out of left field. If I get through that ordeal, I’ll no longer be a student and they professors; we’ll be colleagues. That will be the end of that for school, and then I’ll actually have to go out into the real world, in so far as a physicist lives in the real world.

This final judgement on my worthiness as a physicist is more than slightly intimidating. I’m reasonably sure that every physicist goes through at least one phase in which they’re worried that they’ll get “found out” as being a fraud or some such thing. I’m certain that it’s a silly thing to worry about, but I can’t help thinking it, which is a bad thing to do at this point in my life.

A good friend of mine made an excellent comment that I’ve been using for confidence that I can make it through since he said it to me:

“Stephen, think about the number of people that get a PhD. They all had to go through the same thing you did, and they came out of it. Do you really think that every single one of them is better than you?”

Hopefully he’s right.