I felt dumb today. Yes it does even happen to me. Not like I said something stupid and just sorta faked it. This was a general sense of dumbness. Right now I’m taking my first of ten grad classes over at Iowa, and I didn’t think it’d be that tough, honestly. Like, after coming from Rose and working in Industry for over a year, how hard could reading a few papers and writing some reports. Anyway, I felt dumb because I just can’t seem to perform to the caliber I want. In the past I used to be able to read something, comprehend it, and that write something respectable about it. Now it’s like my brain is mush, when I try to do this. She wants analytical thinking, all I can seem to do is regurgitate. I gave a presentation last week. It was an hour long covering Merkel Hash Trees, I honestly understood the concept aside from extremely complex math, but when I presented, I felt I might as well have been a freshman in college. I was nervous, the audience looked bored, the teacher even recapped a few of my points the following week. Now I’m not sure if this was a jab at a lack of completeness or she just wanted to refresh the audience, either way it struck a note with me. Perhaps I feel she has higher expectations for me, she’s already noted how difficult Rose must’ve been, that fact that I had a class with one of her colleagues as an undergrad, and that I work in the security industry. These details about me may make her think I should be some sort of super star, where in truth I’m struggling.
Today we turned in our topic proposals. What I want to do is design a system of decentralized certificate authorities that can handle private key revocation. Of course when describing this to her, she said my proposal didn’t match this idea and that this isn’t really a problem people care about in security. Though she did say she did extensive research on the topic so perhaps she’ll be able to help me, either that or criticize the hell out of my project. Fortunately she is a really nice Prof, I just think mentally I am not performing up to my usual standards.