Boiled frog
We were gathered at a conference for women in science, the auditorium nearly full, waiting to hear a talk by a well-respected female professor, the first woman ever in her department to get tenure. She walked up to the podium and began, "There is a saying." She jabbed her index finger into the air. "If you put. A frog. Into boiling water." Her sentences were broken up by odd pauses in unlikely spots. "It will jump out. And save itself. (PAUSE) But if you put. A frog. Into water. And slowly turn the water temperature up. It will boil alive."
Apparently, she identified deeply with the boiled frog. "When I walk around campus," she continued, starting to pace back and forth around the podium and grimace, "I think to myself, I must not be the only frog. I look at people. I see how they look back at me. And I look for that secret sign of recognition. Frog? You? Me? Frog?"
Now her lecture took a different turn. "This is not the only question I ask. Here are some of the others. I ask these all the time. For example: If God were go come down from heaven, and tell me the answer to the problem I was working on, would I still work on it? If God told me I was going to die in a year, would I still work on this problem? What about if I was going to die in a day?"
"But most of all, I ask myself questions like this: am I smart enough to do science? Am I smart enough to work on the problems I am working on? Am I smart enough to find the answers? I have a female grad student, and she is very smart. She also doesn’t seem to ask herself questions like this. So one day I asked her– how do you know you are smart enough to do science?" (Ed. note: not a question most grad students want to hear from their advisor.) "She had an excellent reply. She said this: ‘the length of time it takes me to solve a problem never exceeds the length of time that I am interested in it.’ I thought that was a pretty good answer."
And that was the end of the talk.
