Three things I've learned in grad school

1. I don't want to be an academic.
I came into grad school 100% certain that academia was where I belonged and where I would find myself throughout my scientific career. Only within the past couple of months have I realized that a career in academia won't help me accomplish the scientific and personal goals that I've developed.

So what is it that I do want to do? As of yet unsure, but oddly enough I've discovered that figuring out what I don't want has helped me learn more about what I do want later on. So we'll see where this goes!

2. There's a fine line between being ambitious and foolish.
While first developing my project ideas, I wanted to entirely change the field of biomarkers in ecotoxicology. Without any real expertise or direction, I thought that I could figure out what it could take someone with a Ph.D. and a brilliant mind their whole career to accomplish.

As the year progressed, however, I realized that my ideas not only had real-world limitations but also conceptual limitations. I had no real hypothesis, plan of action, or the knowledge to see everything through. Any project I design (something I'm also currently working on...) will be much simpler and obviously less impactful to the field, but at the same time will allow me to answer the questions I desire to answer more clearly and will give me the knowledge and experience to engage in more enterprising projects in the future.

3. I may not be intelligent, but I am smart (and yes, there is a difference).
I always thought I was intelligent, gifted with some inate ability to retain and learn complex ideas like molecular mechanisms and organic chemistry. Then I got to graduate school and found the real intellectuals, people who knew so much that you had no idea how their brains could fit in their heads. I realized that my abilities would always pale in comparison to these types of people, and tried in vain to figure out why-even with my "natural" intelligence-I could never reach their levels.

Then I figured it out: I'm not intelligent, I'm smart. Smart in the way that I know how to study to retain information. Smart in the way that I can figure things out given the information I need, even if I'm not intelligent enough to know about all the minutiae. Perhaps even smart in the way that I know that I'm not intelligent.

So with these and other lessons in hand, I begin to prepare myself for the next year of graduate life. I have no idea what's in store for me. And perhaps that's the best way to approach it :)