Risky Business

At this point in my life, I don't have many people I need to impress. I'm not in school yet so there are no teachers to suck up to and most of the docs I work for have a good sense of how smart/dumb I am. That is, except for the occasional important people in the division who I don't interact with much, but whose approval I need to make or break their recommendations for me. Like our Big Vice Chief.

Yesterday, the RAs were lucky enough to have him walk through the methodology of one of his papers with us. It saddens me to say that it was actually near thrilling talking about how to evaluate policies and trying to keep up with his rapid questions, albeit incredibly nerve wracking. But not as nerve wracking as his opening. He heard a couple of us were taking classes and asked who it was. Jen and I hesitantly raised our hands. "So what is the differences between a risk and rate ratio?"

Even as we were hemming and hawing (especially embarrasing as we'd just given a presentation on it to the rest of the RAs yesterday), he started writing on the board, "well?" "One is unit-less? (muttering: this is so not cool)" "That's technically right, but what are their denominators?" Teacher Mode Vice Chief was not what I was expecting first thing Friday morning, before I'd had time to study for my midterm and when we all thought we were going to discuss his paper, but the questions came flying out of him along with lots of equations and explanations. Teacher Mode Vice Chief didn't have time for vague answers and backtracking. He said, "No," instead of "You're close." And he conducted his pop-quiz review session in front of all the other RAs and our two supervisors. People like that make me afraid to ever say that I know something without fully knowing it. Make me want to be good enough for their questions. And make me want to work hard to do well enough to impress them.