What about Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, American computer scientist and a complete pioneer in the field? She changed the course of history with her work in computing after coming from a mathematics/physics background, and accomplished far too much to to describe here... but one of the interesting bits of info about this amazing woman is that, "to prove that things did not always have to be done a certain way, Hopper had a clock on her wall that ran counter clockwise".

Lol so I take it everyone understood every area of their field that they looked at for postgrad study right away

Seriously, when you wanted to do, say, a phd in the field of psychology - did everyone just understand the subfields you read the papers on enough to hold a conversation with a fellow postgrad/lecturer on the subject? It all just seems like such a steep learning curve (as interesting as the papers are it's quite frustrating having to look up the definition of words in order to understand each sentance of a paper :( )

Maybe I'm not suited towards postgrad study....

2 problems:

1) In my subject area, pretty much everything looks interesting (enough to study intensely for several more years). There are areas which I have less experience in, so it would be a greater learning curve to do postgrad study in - but I've never minded this. How does a potential postgrad even begin to pin down the topics to apply to?

2) In the subject areas I'm less familiar with, I can barely understand any papers about. Obviously I've read into sub-topic areas of my field as much as possible, but some potential lecturers' online sites re: research areas are like gobbeldygook! What I do understand look very exciting, but how am I supposed to contact potential lecturers when I can't even hold a conversation about their research areas?