So, how much do you really understand about (cool) topic X? (also, it's not you who's dumb, find the right source/teacher)

Working in academia can be quite stressful. Handling the uncertainty of where you'll be in the next few years, and whether you're competent enough at all (impostor syndrome) are questions that're always hanging around. Even once you think you've understood something, five minutes later another thing'll come up to show that the mental model you had was actually rather wrong. It can be very frustrating to put in a lot of effort, think of it as progress, and then back to square one. Now after five years of doing this, I've come to accept this as a daily part of a researcher's life: grappling with new topics, themes and approaches all the time. Even within your own narrow academic field, there's always something new that's being presented in a conference talk or paper. And let's face it, learning new concepts is hard, especially when it's thrown at you for the first time in the form of a few pages in a paper or even worse, over a few minutes in a talk.

Even though I may have the curiosity to pursue a subject or topic after hearing/reading about it somewhere, I often find strong historical and disciplinary barriers to my entry. For instance, while working on a Python package to quantify bat echolocation calls, I realised (again) the main way I was trying to separate two types of sound would work 75% of the time (method X), but would fail horribly the other 25% of the time. Method X is a somewhat 'standard' line of thinking approach that my supervisor and I somehow converged upon relatively quickly. However, it didn't work as well. Luckily, it wasn't so hard to find an alternative method (let's call it method Y) because signal processing is a vast field with applications in all kinds of situations. Excited, I started downloading seemingly relevant papers, and books to try and figure out whether this method could be applied at all onto the bat calls or not. The first barrier is disciplinary. Opening up a book filled with proofs of convergence or homology, or such things doesn't quite help. As an earlier grad student I may have felt underconfident about not understanding the equations in the page, but now, with a few years on the job experience (and being able to acknowledge my limitations quicker :P) I'm able to skim through the whole text without worrying about the details in the equations. If I missed something important, it'll probably be there in another text too! The second barrier is historical. Especially since method Y was mainly applied in the signal processing and some fields of physics, there were few non-mathematically driven explanations. I'm happy to handle math when it's presented with more context around it, but independently it's quite a struggle. Despite the abundance of nice equation-loaded LaTex pdfs and slideshows,there are always crumbs of information to be picked up on the go. Even without getting into the nitty-gritties of the actual equations I learnt that the method's useful, but can be hard to interpret, and was the basis for a bunch of newer methods used in the analysis of very short signals. Now, that's not bad huh?

So what do you do when you're trying to understand a niche topic filled with foreign terms and steeped in its own historical context? Honestly speaking, all fields of science are like this, and I guess the only thing to do is to shop around pdfs, talks and presentations until you find the one that 'speaks' to you, whether it's a Youtube video, a MOOC lecture, or a conversation with a colleague. The fact is, when you're new to a field or trying to get into it, blaming yourself for not understanding is counter-productive. If I'm arrive in a foreign country and someone starts talking to me in the language of the land, I do not feel stupid about not understanding, but am quick to realise it. It's not you who's dumb, there's a right source/teacher waiting for you at the level you are at right now - find it!