I have come to a rather large conclusion in the past three weeks: I Do Not Like Grad School.
And I have a long list of reasons why. Call it venting or ranting, but I am going to term this post as a bit of Life Reflection. I have considered getting my so-called 'priorities' in order for awhile now, and writing some of these thoughts down might help steer me in that direction. At the very least, I will feel better for having straightened things out, filtered them out of my head, and putting them out there for others to use as evidence against me.
When I was a junior undergraduate student, the idea of graduate school seemed like anathema to me. I was having a horrible year (despite getting fantastic grades) riddled with clinical depression, social interaction issues, and a strong feeling that I would never be able to live the sort of life I really wanted. In short, I was having that college life crisis that seems to happen to many of us when we hit second semester of senior year and realize that life outside of academia is about to hit us hard.
It was during this time, that an adviser told me to apply to our school accelerated BA/MA program. Admittedly, when I was accepted to this school as an undergraduate, the 5th year program was a huge draw for me. If your grades are good enough, you are allowed to complete a MA degree in a fifth year after senior year tuition free. Pretty good deal. When junior year hit, I was no longer seriously contemplating it because I figured out that research science was not my cup of tea. All I wanted to do was write novels. My adviser, however, told me to send in the prelim application - just in case. And then she catered to my interests and set me up on a course for completing said MA by concentrating on science writing rather than research. Color me happy and sight more likely to complete the full application for 5th year. Which of course I did. And here I am. A 5th year MA student.
And now I come back to the conclusion that I had a junior. Graduate school is not making me happy because it's not something I really want. The work I am doing is not very important to me, nor something that I am really very interested in. As an idea, I like it. In practice, it's not enough to excite my passions and drive me forward. I knew two years ago that it would be difficult for me to complete a degree like this - because it requires you to know what you want, or at least to know how to operate under the self-hypnotizing lie that you are doing what you want.
The problem then, as now, is I do Know What I Want. I want to write! I am a writer. A novelist. This is what I want to do all the time. I don't want to solve the world's problems. I don't want to draft letters to Congress telling them why they don't understand the scientific things they claim they do. I don't even particularly want a day job that involves hobbies I am fond of... photography, hiking, traveling. If anything, I would want a boring day job where I rarely had to think -- so I could spend my time thinking about writing which is what I would really be concentrating on anyway.
Since I've officially become a graduate student, I've also experienced what I would consider some significant changes to my daily life. For the first time in my life -- I own a car, I cook for myself every day, I have a significant other that I spend the vast majority of my time with, I do not have an amount of money that I can know is just There... I've been a bit hung up on these changes and trying to assimilate them into my life. Deservedly so, I would say. Perhaps some would disagree with me, but it has been difficult for me trying to figure out out to balance my social interactions with personal maintenance with work. I probably need to compartmentalize more, but the significant other thing? Yeah, that's made me happier than I've been.. probably since I was about ten years old. So I've been reluctant to be serious about other serious things simply because of that one serious thing. My bad.
I feel that it is disappointing to learn that what I really want out of life is simple -- I want to love, be loved, and to do what I am truly passionate about. And all of these are such simple things. If I could go back in time and tell my sixteen year old self this, she might have laughed at me. Well, my eleven year old self certainly would have. My sixteen year old self might have given me a cynical smile and called me an idiot for not realizing this sooner.
At any rate, I have come to the not so minor decision that my life is essentially directionless and directed in about a hundred different directions all at once. It's discomfiting and exhilarating in a way that I am really not prepared for. I doubt anyone is ever really prepared for their life decisions. You just deal with them as they come.
