Resilience (3 of 5): distinguishing between assumptions and reality
Dr Emily Troscianko & Dr Rachel Bray Expectations interfere with understanding – they cause us to misread, misdiagnose, or simply to miss what is really happening. That’s even more true when the expectations that you’re carrying around with you originated with others (your family, friends, peers, teachers, mentors…). Indeed, in a podcast series on ‘Overcoming a sense of academic failure’, this was one of the threads that ran most strongly through our contributors’ reflections on their own professional paths. It can happen so seamlessly: your teachers want you to get to a good university, your lecturers want you to get a good degree, your supervisor wants you to get your doctorate, your PI wants you to publish good papers. Each of these ambitions directly supports the next, and all of them make a good deal of sense within their own system. (Of course they do: most of the time they are put forward by the people who run the system – the academics who stayed and who ‘made it’.) B