The most genius I’ve ever felt was when I was working in the physics lab. We had installed a camera at a pressure chamber window so we could watch a laser do pulse ablation on a metal plate. However, we had a problem no one could figure out; the laser would phase in and out on our live feed from the camera. The team was freaking out about the possibility of this 30k laser being defective and they were about to take apart the vacuum chamber when I was like “uh… guys? We’re firing the laser at 23 pulses per second.”
Mind you, I’m a sophomore at this point, working with 3 grad students and a professor. I’m at a point in my career where I can barely explain the math behind what research I’m actually doing.
The professor is like “…. Yeah? What about it?” And I explain: “Most cameras film at 24 frames per second. The laser looks like it’s phasing in and out because it’s out of phase with the camera” so we adjusted the pulse per second a bit until it was in phase and shockingly! It worked perfectly. The prof and the grad students just looked.. dumbfounded? And I guess camera fps rates aren’t common knowledge, at least to them. They treated me like I was the smartest person in the room even though the only reason I knew that information was from making gifsets of Pacific Rim when I was in high school
Look. You are smart. Applying random bits of knowledge gained in unrelated activities is smart. You learned something and retained it, and it was later useful.
This sort of thing happens all the time to me at work, only I usually end up lying about how I knew it, you know, to the other engineers, because it’s always like “I hyperfixated on nerf gun manufacturing once,” or “I looked it up because something in a fanfiction struck me as scientifically wrong but it turned out to be right,” or “I literally learned this watching fursuiting tutorials in preparation for making a protogen headpiece.”
It made me feel like an imposter for a while. But here’s the thing: I actually knew that stuff. I wasn’t faking the knowledge. It didn’t matter that I learned it on a late-night YouTube binge started by searching a one-off line from a webcomic, or wherever else. I really know the stuff. I am smart.
You are smart too.
yeah.
There is this thing about having a huge variety of interests– and being able to notice connections between them, and apply them across fields– that can make you look like you know an enormous amount, but also make you feel as if other people know a shockingly small amount.
To the point that it is hard to convince yourself that it’s actually possible they know so little.
Which can have its own pitfalls, in more than one direction.
I’ve had times when I was almost certain I knew the answer… but I stayed quiet, because the other, more experienced people were not bringing it up… and so (I figured) there must be some reason why the answer that seemed obvious to me was somehow not applicable here.
And yeah, I also had some times like OP, where I did take the risk and mention my idea, and everyone was like OMG THAT’S GENIUS, HOW DID YOU KNOW THAT and I was like …how did you not know that???
but the thing is– even if they know a perfectly normal or higher than normal amount of stuff about their field– other fields are not their field!
so they don’t know the things that “everyone” in that other field knows!
You know that xkcd comic about geologists making assumptions about which facts in their field are common knowledge among the general public? Yeah. Every specialty has that. (Which is why that comic is now a meme where people paste in pretty much anything.)
and if you are a Jack-Of-All-Trades with such varied interests that you have learned the “basic, everyone-knows-it” knowledge for dozens and dozens of fields?
…then you can end up forgetting that the Master-Of-One who’s your professor in this class might not have done the same thing.
so it can be worth asking. (Although there is a risk that your worries were right and your answer really doesn’t apply here and you will look stupid or obnoxious for asking! But you never know until you ask.)
There’s another post somewhere, about the best ways to frame that sort of question, to minimize the amount of Looking Stupid and the amount of Looking Like You’re Trying To Tell A More Experienced Person How To Do Their Job.
I gotta find that post, it was good advice.
Like, instead of saying “don’t do that, it’ll make the machine explode because of X fact that I learned from a different field!” you can say something like “oh neat, I wanna understand this process better, what steps are you taking here to prevent the machine from exploding because of X?”
And then they might actually listen to you– and if they DO have an answer then they’ll tell you and you learned something– but if not, then maybe you’re the genius who saved the day.