Where do people find confidence these days? If you are in academia, or even worse in academia and looking for a job, it is all about rejection. Papers gets rejected, job applications go to waste, conference presentations fail to impress. It often seems that this whole hoop-la is only about balancing with oneself. One would think that we would know how to do that since we've gone through a PhD process, a process that (according to my wise friend D) puts you opposite your own mediocrity. We're all mediocre yet when we apply for something we need to persuade people that we are the best. And that exactly is the drama of academics: we know we are mediocre but we have to persuade ourselves and others that we are the next best thing since sliced bread (is this an awesome expression or what?)
The question is where do we find the confidence to do that? From the mirror? - News on that front are not always uplifting.
From the job itself? - As I said failure is an everyday thing.
From teaching? - Well, yes, because sometimes, my students are all I have to get some strength. With their funny little fake-tanned faces looking up at me, nodding along to what I say. Making them understand the crazy things I work on is sometimes what I have to make myself feel better. Is that a bad thing? Am I putting this whole thing down?
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That is a great thing. If you succeed with students, then you're succeeding, full stop. It's just a shame that sometimes academia is more interested in how many papers one publishes each year than in how good one is as a teacher and how much students learn with him or her. I really think that being a good teacher is a very, very hard thing to accomplish. Being a good academic is hard too, and it is valuable, but academia is so full of strange people that do so little and cannot even handle a class that you can't help but wonder what exactly is it that they do.
I guess being in academia means you have to be made of steel because you are either rejected or criticised permanently for things which are sometimes futile, and such criticism sometimes come from people you should be able to respect but you can't. However, when you're a teacher and when students improve because you've helped them and you did your job right and they come to you and thank you and acknowledge your work, then that's it, then you know you're good at your job. So, I think you should feel better as much as you want because you have reasons for that.
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