Who Gets to Grade Me

2026-10-07T00:00:00Z

Most people start questioning the authority figures in their lives in their teenage years. They start having problems with their parents, their teachers, anyone that they always assumed had some sort of power over them. That never really happened with me until my senior year in college.

The summer before I started my senior year, I had gotten accepted for a visiting researcher role at UCLA in one of its most prestigious labs. I was to work on research into how AI and GANs could be applied to the field of histopathology. I always knew that this was a huge deal, but I realized its true extent once people started guessing the name of the laboratory and the professor that I was working with, even in the most unrelated settings. I was given a huge degree of autonomy in the lab and still a large number of responsibilities. Over the five months that I was there, I felt like I had learned everything that I possibly could at my level of education. Everyone was happy with my performance, and it seemed like the work that I'd done had helped the team move the project forward by quite a bit. By then I also had two publications, and the review article that I'd written became the most read research article from my university's engineering faculty for two years, at least that's what ResearchGate told me every week. I was proud. Probably too proud.

The very next semester, full of pride in the work that I had done and the knowledge that I had gathered, I picked a course on medical imaging and machine learning, an area that I had become quite passionate about. I attended all the classes, took notes zealously, never missed a deadline, and studied rigorously. I got a B- in that course. Not a terrible grade on paper, but the professor was quite generous with letter grades.

It was quite the strike on my ego. Around the same time, I had also started at Tesla, working on autonomous driving and computer vision. On the course selection screen, I saw a course called "Computer Vision for Autonomous Driving". Just what I needed. However, I just couldn't select it. I knew the course was difficult, a difficult professor was giving it, and if I didn't get the best grade possible, I'd feel like a fraud and a large chunk of my peers would consider me a fraud. I eventually settled on an easier course, passed it with an A and graduated.

At some point, I truly saw the mental impact that academia had on me. I realized that it had turned me into someone scared of being graded and judged, someone scared of failing, and someone scared of being labelled a fraud by my peers, and most importantly by myself. I had been so focused on keeping a good grade point average that I didn't take the course that I most needed for my professional career.

A new way of thinking also started to take hold of me. I was getting judged for my work every week at Tesla; some weeks I was berated and some weeks I was congratulated for a job well done. Good or bad, I was being paid for them to judge me every week, and for me to try harder whenever I fell short. What did my professors and my university offer me? I was trying to be better each week and being judged constantly for my work there too, but instead of being paid for my efforts, I was paying them a very substantial amount for it.

I look back on those times and realize that I had been a coward, and I still feel shame for some of my decisions back then. However, I still think the disillusionment that I experienced was what put me on the right track. I promised myself that I'd only ever let the markets judge me and my work; I'd only let customers give me a letter grade of an A or an F.

It took me a while to actually keep that promise. Starting my own company was the first big decision I made after it, and it's the closest thing I know to the course I was too scared to take. There's no curve, nobody is generous with the letter grades, and if I fail, everyone gets to watch. My customers grade me every week now, and not every grade is a good one, but I'm still trying to be better each week, just like I was at Tesla.

I'd be lying if I said the fear went away. I still care a lot about what people think of me, and I still get that feeling that someone is about to call me a fraud. The difference is that I don't let it pick my courses for me anymore, or at least I try not to.

I never did take Computer Vision for Autonomous Driving. I just ended up picking a much harder one.

Doruk Yalcin — Blog

Who Gets to Grade Me