Whenever I tell people I'm studying to be a chemist, they seem to immediately assume (as one british woman recently put it) that I "must be very clever!" I, on the other hand, have some serious doubts.
For starters, is science really more "intelligence demanding" than the humanities? This is a tricky and debatable subject so feel free to disagree. But by my own personal definition of intelligence though, it kind of is. Intelligence is technically defined as "capacity...for mental activity" which seems about right. Personally though, I think of true intelligence as creativity within boundaries. If you have a blank piece of paper you can do anything too, then well, anything can do anything to it and it's not all that special. If you have to figure out a way, say, to turn that paper into something specific while working within a variety of limitations, then that clearly takes a lot more thought and cleverness. The reason a lot of people think that art is easier than science, is probably because (technical drawing and rendering skills aside) progress art is all about creativity, and progress in science is all about creativity within an ever increasing number of limitations (AKA Problem Solving). It's also very common to find someone who is good at humanities but bad at math, but (in my experience) much rarer to find someone who is the other way round. But rarer doesn't always mean better, so please, feel free to prove me wrong. Of course I'm going to propagate the idea that science=smarts, because I'm a science student, and this is very flattering to my ego. Besides, Being good at studying something is can be very different than being good at doing it.
But asides aside, back to my nagging personal insecurities. Intellectually, I've always found myself in kind of an awkward middle ground, and I never know how smart I should consider myself to be. My SAT scores were good but not perfect. Sometimes I was in the top 10% of my highschool class, sometimes I struggled for hours to get a B-. People think I'm smart because I'm a science student in a nice college, but my grades are mediocre and my college is no MIT. My highschool English teachers thought I was brilliant, but my PreCalc teacher practically had to feed me answers on a regular basis. In middle school I once developed a math formula for checking answers that my teacher had never heard of, and one day she even asked me to go over HW infront of the class for her when she had to leave abruptly; but I often have the memory of a goldfish and need to study for really long periods of time. My highschool class voted me "most intelligent girl," but nowadays I am a dark horse wannabe doctoral candidate if there ever was one. After two semesters of "biting off more than I could chew" one thing is clear: I'm going to need to learn how to chew more.
Personally I think grades are mostly based on how a course is graded, and have little to do with the actual material of the course. My teachers always tell me that I'm very smart and blame any inconsistency between my supposed intelligence and my grades on lack of organizational skills and effort. But I often wonder if they're just confusing intelligence with the ability to express myself well, learn from a book instead of a teacher, and act with confidence (which is sometimes pulled out of my ass), instead of panicking and demanding immediate babying. Maybe I'm just good at acting smart?
Well, we may soon actually find out. The more time I spend studying chemistry, the more I find that a) almost everything I like about chemistry involves physics, b) I like a lot of things about physics too, and c) Both chemistry and physics are based on a lot of math. The obvious course of action then, is to take more classes in math and physics. Which is what I'll be doing. All at once. And (hopefully!) in an Ivy League University. If there was ever a time that I could admit to feeling "math anxiety" this is probably it.
Oh, and If I fuck this up, then I might as well forget about gradschool. Let's hope that'll get me to class on time.
