Academic Insecurity

For Aramaic today we translated a 5th cent. BC fragment from the Words of Ahiqar, a widely-attested document of a similar style to Proverbs in the OT. Well, I thought the translation went okay, but today in class Dr. Seow spent most of his time rattling off how to figure out what the vowel points would have been in the 5th century, and how the Masoretes (the scribes who added vowel points to the Bible) would have pointed it, and what word it came from in Proto-Semitic and Akkadian and Phoenecian, and Lord knows what else. I've had linguistics, so I understand what he's talking about on a theoretic level, but he just whips out these ancient hypothetical forms and them some PhD student asks if there should be a circumflex over the aleph and he says it's just a mater, and then starts erasing and rewriting things and before I know it I'm as lost as you probably were at "Aramaic". Apparently I'll be able to do this with my eyes closed after I've taken Historical Hebrew Grammar. At any rate, there's nothing like being in a class of mostly PhD students to put me in my place, so to speak. And just to thoroughly humble me the other junior (first year M.Div. student) in the class commented on how he got most of the Masoretic pointing right. I hate the competitive nature of academia, but that was really the first time in interacting with a fellow student that I've thought "this is my competition." I guess this all means that I need to step it up a notch. But how high is that notch? I need to keep finding that balance between working hard and chastising myself for not being on the same level as the PhD students. Of course I don't know as much as they do! They have 3+ years more education than I do. One of them is a native Arabic speaker, and therefore obviously Semitic languages come naturally to him.
None of this stopped me from drooling over the Near Eastern Studies department while I was hanging up posters at the University this afternoon. Like a moth to the flame, and come back for more linguistic burns.