Are you a grad student or a post-doc?

In my experience, and that of watching my friends and undergrads working under me, is that for someone a bit young looking it seems grad student is the first guess, then post-doc. The guess of grad student seems to be standard no matter how young the person looks. I had that guess directed at me as a zit-covered highschool student. Further, if you don’t look like a prof, and are hanging around somewhere where grad students don’t tend to be, the guess will be post-doc, which I, at least, had directed at me during my undergradyears and before. I think the guess goes to post-doc second mainly out of not wanting to offend anyone. It’s probably much better to guess a highschool-age kid hanging around is a post-doc than to guess a post-doc is an undergrad!

I managed to mistake a prof for a grad student at a recent conference. Not so good.

You know what? I hate Bagpuss, he was always was on during school hours. Which meant, for me to watch Bagpuss, I had to be ill. One time I was off, even though I was terribly ill with the measles, I would still watch it, just to watch Professor Yaffle. I had a feeling, back then that he was based on a real character, and today I found out who. So thank you for looking like professor Yaffle.

Qubit

Actually I’d guess that you and Rob Knop and the others falling into the category of stereotypical Physicists have an easier time in that regard. Those of us who do not fall into the Venn diagram intersection representing nerdy fashion-challenged older white males in glasses have a harder time convincing people that we too are in Physics! (I think of it as surmounting an energy gap.)

Unfortunately I do seem to look like the stereotypical physicist, so much so that people have guessed immidiately what I do purely on my appearance. At one time a friend of a friend I never had seen should pick me up at a trainstation and she went straight for me:
“You’re f?”
“Yeah, s gave you a good description of me?”
“No, I just looked for the guy looking like a physicist.”

I also got the same line as Rob Knop a couple of times, so sorry, my experiences do fall on the other end of the spectrum, no witty remarks here…

Shortly after I got there, a visiting scientist from Duke asked me, “Are you a grad student or a post-doc?” It was sad to admit that I was in fact a rising sophomore undergraduate….

Nowadays, sadly, I look like the very typical example of the physics professor — overweight nerdy white guy, perhaps not yet as old as I’m supposed to be, but with messy hair around a major bald spot. I don’t dress very well either. And I wear glasses. I only manage to break the stereotype when I’m tooling around campus on a unicycle. Yeah, that doesn’t make me look less nerdy… but it’s not what you expect out of your physics professor.

-Rob

“You look too old to tell the difference!”

“and…?”

a few “and’s” usually makes people approach a (fixed)point of confusion

Alternately, “That’s what your MOM said!”

Because many of us academics know that we’re not supposed to be relaxed.

As for too young to be a physicist– I’ve never gotten that one. However, there’s a grad student in my department who is only 3 or 4 years younger than me. (He came back to grad school after some 10 years out of college.) He was a TA for me, and one day one of the students was telling him something about how old Professor Knop is. He asked this studend how old they thought he was; the response that Professor Knop was way older than him. That made him very happy, and he reminded me of it several times in the next few weeks.

If somebody gives you the “you look too young to be a professor” thing, you might come back with a, “hmm, and you seemed to smart to be a stereotyping idiot,” or some such. Depending on whether or not you never want to hear from them again.

Of course, you could also just say, “give it time, that will go away.”

-Rob

Until I realized I was almost twice the age of my students.