I think one of the reasons why I'm in grad school right now is to deflate my pride quite a bit. Granted, a lot of grad school research is about making yourself look great in many different ways: GPA, publications, dissertation committees and conferences. But for me, it seems to have the opposite response.

I've got 2 one-page abstracts to turn in before Monday and I've been working on these things for about a week and a half. Earlier this week, I handed a rough draft to my professor to look over and it got handed back with so many red marks that you would have thought that the paper had been used to wipe up a ketchup stain. So anyways, I took that home with me and revised both abstracts so that they contained the corrections that my prof wanted. I turned those revisions in yesterday thinking, "well there's only so much that you can correct at this point".

I met back up with my prof today and as I receive my abstract back, once again it is filled with red marks... almost more than the last time. Now, honestly, this kinda thing is a hit to my pride. I like to think of myself as a fairly decent writer. Not in the sense that I can produce great works of literature, but that I can argue my way out of a scientific hypothesis. Anyways, so my first reaction was to get upset at having so many corrections, but then I realized, "hmm... there's probably a reason why he's the advisor and I'm the student". So I was pretty thankful for his help on this, and I realized that it was just my pride talking... cuz really, who likes being corrected right?. Either way, I don't think I would have liked to submit an abstract to a conference that wasn't that good.