Who are You to Review Me?

I have a tutor meeting next month, this wouldn’t be so much of a problem if I didn’t have to write a professional development review. Not only do I have to write a professional review of myself but I have to have an in person meeting with a tutor from my UK university; my tutor has to have a meeting with my supervisor in the US and then all three of us have a meeting after that, presumably to talk about me. Now usually I love to talk about myself as most of my friends and family well know, but when it comes to professional development I feel like I have an (un)healthy dose of imposter syndrome. Also who wants to know for a fact that a meeting happening at a very specific time that you are not a part of is for talking about you and your progress and contribution to your work environment?

The review covers four categories: transferable competencies; application of academic learning; professionalism and organisational awareness. I need to give myself a grade and then go on to write about what I have been doing well, with examples, and what I need to work on improving. I have to do this review up to four times over the course of my year abroad. Once before I started and a week before each of the maximum of three meetings. After I have written my part and submitted it to my Supervisor in the US and my tutor in the UK we have the meeting. For the first meeting it is in person and at this meeting they both have to give comments and feedback about what I have written and then I have to put those comments on the document and come up with a plan of action until the next meeting.

While I have been in the US I have had a lot of fun in the lab and with all the people that I work with but also, there have been some ups and downs. The main one being the indecision and changing of my project. As part of my stay here at the lab I have to show that I contributed to a project by giving a poster presentation and writing a report when I return. My supervisor also wants my name to be on at least one published report. With that in mind I was expecting a longish training period and then to discuss my project. In September my supervisor asked me to come up with some project ideas, I wasn’t anticipating this discussion until at least November so it took me by surprise, additionally after talking to the other students I found out that their projects had just been given to them by my supervisor. So after a week I went back to him and brought him some ideas and he turned around and gave me a project. I planned on starting this project at the end of October. I asked for help in learning the skills necessary to get started and decided on my methods and course of action and on day 1 I streaked my samples (put the bacteria on a dish of non-specific growth media). On day 2 I was told that I wasn’t doing that project anymore because there was something of greater importance to do. That is how I ended up on my current project: retail meat surveillance.

For this project (which was already running and I was helping with on the side) I have to take the samples that were being generated and instead of sending them off to be sequenced we now have to sequence them in house. That means me and two other students have to isolate the DNA from the bacteria and prep it to be Whole Genome Sequenced. So from start to finish, each round of samples from collection to WGS takes upwards of two weeks for batches of 24. The data will need to be run through a program to understand all the information that is provided by the MiSeq which is where the most effort comes in as the program is quite complicated and the information provided by the sequencer is also complicated. Overall, the data analysis is the part that will require the longest and most amount of time and that is the part that I feel the least confident about.

Now I am not concerned about my contribution to the project or even about getting it done in time or even learning new skills, I am most concerned about my Development Review because who am I to review myself? Anyone as narcissistic as me surely can’t be a reliable source of review. Or maybe the other side is true and I don’t see enough of my own skills to be able to talk myself up, either way I am nowhere near qualified to review myself.