This milestone seems pretty unreal but also worth mentioning. I never had any expectations that finishing my degree would translate into anything meaningful in my day to day life and it hasn't. Even in my daily life doing science. Compared to the last year or so of grad school, my first year as a postdoc has been more challenging intellectually and I've become more convinced than ever that I really know very, very little.
This isn't surprising given that I made a pretty big leap in subfield between grad school and postdoc. And I know that my degree gave the experiences and knowledge necessary to be able to forge ahead in these new areas.
But still, there is some sort of dark humor in that getting the phd establishes me as an expert of some sort in what I worked on but my postdoc requires that I become incredibly comfortable acknowledging my vast intellectual shortcomings in the new field.
At least it gave me a good excuse to cook a fancy dinner!
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