<p>I’m only an undergrad, but I’ve been doing some work with a professor. He recently invited me to an AMS meeting to watch him give a talk. I went and ended up watching some of the other talks in the session since he was going last.</p>
<p>This whole event made me realize that as smart as my professor is, it seems like compared to a lot of the other people there, he wasn’t that smart. The other thing is that his presentation skills are not very good. His slides were just walls of text and equations. He even put proofs of theorems on his slides, which made him look like an amateur compared to other professors. No one else did things like that. </p>
<p>I’m just wondering, what would happen in grad school if you started working with a professor and just realized that there are much better people out there who you could be working with instead.</p>
<p>In my case I’m fairly limited in my options, and believe it or not, I ended up picking the less awkward out of the two possible professors I could have worked with. The other professor may definitely be much smarter, and in fact the professor I work with has even told me to talk to him, but his social skills are a thousands times worse. I have a class with him now, and he will never directly look at you. He will look up at ceiling. He also does really weird things. I’ve heard stories about how last year, he would always bring an extra belt with him to class, because he said he was afraid his pants would fall down. </p>
<p>I think the thing this whole experience has taught me is that not only is being smart important, but you need to have good social and networking skills. I talked to one of the professors that presented at the AMS meeting afterwards, and not only was he really smart, but he was approachable and it was easy to have a conversation with him.</p>