Timothy Burke wrote a great essay, Should I go to Grad School? In a word, no. He writes:
Graduate school is not about learning. If you learn things, it’s only because you’ve already internalized the habit of learning, only because you make the effort on your own and in concert with fellow graduate students. You learn because that’s what you do now, that’s your life. Don’t go into it expecting to extend the kinds of healthily collaborative relationships you’ve had to date with your teachers and don’t go into it expecting to extend the kinds of educational nurturing you’ve had to date. Graduate school is not education. It is socialization. It is about learning to behave, about mastering a rhetorical and discursive etiquette as mind-blowingly arcane as table manners at a state dinner in 19th Century Western Europe. Graduate school is cotillion for eggheads. For all these reasons, graduate school is not something you want to experiment with. Think heroin–this is your brain, this is your brain on graduate school. Think Al Pacino in “Godfather 3″–just when you think you are out, you will l be sucked back in again. Academia, especially in the humanities and the social sciences, is a total culture. It colonizes most aspects of your life. You are never not an academic–the little mental tape recorder is on all the time, or it had better be if you want to be good at this life. Anything is grist for my mill as a teacher and a scholar, and that is as it should be. Graduate school is, if anything, even more totalizing than this. It gets into your pores.
Dorothea Salo’s tale of grad school burnout is sobering, but not unusual. She discusses misconceptions:
Misconception 1: Anyone who starts a graduate degree and does not finish it lives the rest of his or her life permanently embittered, resentful, and with a sense of personal inferiority.Sorry, not so. Sure, some people live that way; my mother (who left while writing her dissertation) is a textbook example. When I left school, my father discussed her lifelong regret with me to try to scare me into going back. But I’m not bitter, I’m certainly not inferior, and if I’m resentful, it’s a resentment of a ridiculously stupid, unfair, and ineffective system, and I express my resentment by writing these pieces in hopes of helping you survive the system and perhaps even forcing the system to change. I don’t automatically resent people who succeed in academia, I don’t resent all the academics I’ve ever known, and I don’t resent academia as a whole. Does a bitter, resentful person try to help other people do well in the same situation she failed at? That’s what I’m trying to do.
I finished my master’s degree in one year, and later wandered aimlessly through the business world. Actually, teaching at universities overseas was a delight because it allowed me to teach without having to go through the hoops or advance through the pecking order. Here are my superficial thoughts about academia:
- Grad school is a volume-based business. You better be able to crank out a lot of essays and reconcile yourself to the fact that a large percentage of it will be mediocre or ultimately unimportant.
- Tenure track jobs in humanities are impossible to find these days. Finding tenure-track jobs in any discipline can be practically impossible.
- Four year institutions are dinosaurs. The real innovation is occurring at professional institutes and community colleges. Unfortunately, a lot of these involve adjunct (i.e., part-time ) instructors.
- Despite the fact that I was in a literature/creative writing program, I accomplished little in the way of serious independent reading or writing. I did however accomplish a great deal of that immediately afterwards.
- I took two semesters of graduate level instructional technology courses at University of Texas at Austin. Great courses, great students, but it became evident that I didn’t need to be taking courses to learn the things I did. Grad school requires a lot of face time and renders your schedule absolutely inflexible.
- It really helps if you have a spouse not in academia who could move if you find a job in academia.
- Grad school sucks, and so do the politics and turf fighting, but the international demographics of it makes it good for potluck dinners.
- I never figured out what it meant to “give a paper” at an academic conference. For the sciences, you didn’t actually have to write the paper, only conduct (or help with) the research. For humanities, it meant merely submitting an essay and having them agree to let you give a talk on it to 10 other academics (optimistically speaking).
- It’s practically impossible to regurgitate well and say interesting/original things at the same time. Why? If you write an original paper, you are criticized for not mentioning Scholar X or Scholar Y or Theory Z. On the other hand, if you do cite Scholar X, Scholar Y and Theory Z (along with several others), you find little room left for original thought or analysis.
- The problem with PhDs is that your particular field of study or analytical method can fall out of fashion very easily. In the 80′s, using deconstructionist methods to analyze texts was a lively way to understand texts (and helped with academic advancement for practitioners). In the 2000′s, this type of analysis seems irrelevant and incomprehensible. Perhaps a scholarly approach will stay trendy long enough for you to find a job, but regardless of whether you find success, you need to face the fact that 10 years from now scholars will find your subject area or method outdated, irrelevant or overrun with prospectors.
- Absolutist and polemical rhetoric can help your cause, provided that your scholarship skills are basically sound. Notoriety is a great way to reach the top of the academic heap (but it’s a debatable question whether it makes you a better thinker).
- Many tenured faculty have unrealistic notions of what the job market is like now or how tough the competition is. Either they haven’t been involved in hiring decisions recently or they base their notions about the current job market on what they experienced when they were seeking a teaching position 20 years ago. Back then, many things were different: the minimum requirements, available opportunities and typical experience. Even the best-intentioned faculty member may not have access to fresh information (other than what they hear secondhand at conferences).
April 2008 Update: I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the steady stream of comments on this piece which I wrote without much thought. If you liked this, you might also like my piece, Graduate programs in creative writing are not a complete waste or time. In my blogpost titled Jobs for Writers at Universities & the Covert Intellectual , I reach this juicy conclusion:
For those of us who work as “covert intellectuals” in the workplace, taking subversive political and social positions, finding the daily outrage to blog about or the latest online philosophical conundrum to cogitate over, the key question is whether our advanced study makes us better-equipped to deal with the money-obsessed workworld or simply increases our alienation from it. One delightful essay described web-surfing-at-work as the ultimate “opiate of the masses,” calling it a reward for having to endure the soulless world of business. I laughed when I read it, thinking it a delightful pseudo-rationalization for workplace sloth. As the years go by, I have to wonder whether the clandestine nature of work surfing causes the thinker’s voice to diminish. When people seek academic jobs, what they are really seeking is a way to maintain a public identity as an intellectual; an academic job gives one the right to be a gadfly or a bohemian and not get fired. On the other hand, the technology/Internet boom has produced enormously interesting and profitable jobs for educated people. (I would argue that liberal arts graduates are one of its main beneficiaries). The work environment is comfortable, challenging to the brain and full of workplace diversity. I may be the only blogger in my group of technical writers, but the rest of us have equally diverse interests. In many ways, our workplace conditions are more conducive to intellectual cogitation than an academic niche. The modern work environments I have inhabited over the last 10 years have been enormously tolerant of intellectual curiosity, personal growth and diversity of opinion. Yet, everything seems geared to productivity, business goals and profitability. Such a work environment is conducive to learning; but can an intellectual find it satisfying over the long term?
March 2 2009: See also this persuasive and important piece by Penelope Trunk: Don’t Try to Dodge the Recession with Graduate School.
Graduate school forces you to overinvest: It’s too high risk. In a world where people did not change careers, grad school made sense. Today, grad school is antiquated. You invest three to six extra years in school in order to get your dream career. But the problem is that not only are the old dream careers deteriorating, but even if you have a dream career, it won’t last. You’ll want to change because you can. Because that’s normal for today’s workplace. People who are in their twenties today will change careers about four times in their life. Which means that grad school is a steep investment for such a short period of time. The grad school model needs to change to adapt to the new workplace. Until then. Stay away.
Actually I’ve started to have a slight change in heart about my blithe dismissal of graduate school. I think investing 2 years in a master’s program makes sense, especially if you think you can derive some benefit just from that (without following the full PhD path). Geek visionary Paul Graham suggested a brilliant criteria for evaluating career decisions: which career path will leave more options open?
In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don’t commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.
It’s not so important what you work on, so long as you’re not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you’ll take.
Suppose you’re a college freshman deciding whether to major in math or economics. Well, math will give you more options: you can go into almost any field from math. If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get into grad school in math.
Flying a glider is a good metaphor here. Because a glider doesn’t have an engine, you can’t fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind. So I propose that as a replacement for “don’t give up on your dreams.” Stay upwind.
The problem with grad school is that it tends to limit your options. Consider my own academic fork in the road: should I go for the Phd in Literature/Creative Writing or not? I saw a lot of value in doing so, but it also made my whole career dependent on climbing the academic ladder (with all its interdepartmental politics) and a finite number of funding resources. Now that I’m outside academia, I can see lots of options I didn’t see before. On the other hand, I still miss the camaraderie and the contact with students. Sometimes I feel like a lonely intellectual.
One great thing about graduate school is that you are encouraged to focus on one research area and pursue it relentlessly. That experience can be educational in itself. I had a good friend who was a brilliant thinker who found himself incapable of writing even a master’s thesis (even though writing was one of his key talents). He realized a valuable thing about himself. He enjoyed being a cultural critic but felt limited by concentrating on too narrow a subject. (I am precisely the opposite). He writes prodigious amounts of highbrow film criticism, and perhaps getting out of academia was the best thing to happen to him. That was a 2 year life lesson worth paying for.
Responding to Penelope Trunk’s piece, I think we all have a need to take off some time to focus on retooling, obtaining certifications, pursuing intellectual projects. That is not slacking off. In fact, that is the path to growth and career advancement. What does this require? Superior time-management abilities and ability to stick to a budget. This is really hard. Also, I think we need to be able to change course rapidly. I took off 1.5 years from a full time job to work on various personal projects. I quickly discovered that working on my novel seemed to take precedence over my other projects. That was where my heart and mind lay (and I still regard my writing during that time as my best). On the other hand, I ended up living off a credit card for longer than was reasonable under the circumstances. Will finishing this novel help me in the long run (I mean, financially, not psychologically)? Hard to say. But when you carefully save for something, you tend to be very frugal with your time.
One of the underlying problems is the 40 hour workweek, which makes it next-to-impossible to pursue outside projects. A lot of company benefits kick in only if you are working 32 hours or more. Some people of course want to work 40 hours because they absolutely need the money. But others can satisfy their intellectual curiosity and creative dreams simply by having 3 or 4 days a week to work instead of 5. Some fields understand this need to allocate time for intellectual projects; other fields do not (it is equated with sloth or lack of ambition). Some fields understand this perennial need to retool; other fields are less tolerant. Even if you “drop out” of the job market for a year or two to work on fun/creative/intellectual projects, you still need to be able to point to accomplishments during that time–so future employers can see that you are becoming a more valuable (and productive) worker.
The comments on Penelope Trunk’s piece are revealing. See this one:
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned the signaling value of pursuing higher education/advanced degrees. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)
It may not be possible to prove that an employee is smart or productive in a resume or job interview, but going with the assumption that education “costs” (i.e., is less challenging, not economic cost) high-productivity workers less than low-productivity workers, the pursuit of advanced degrees serves as a useful signal to employers as to which workers are actually high-productivity, even if it has no practical impact on their actual productivity.
March 2 Update #2. Thomas H. Benton asks seriously, is going to grad school is like being in a cult?
Nevertheless, understanding the varied social experiences of graduate school (student culture as well as formal instruction), as a kind of cult helps to explain why so many people cannot be dissuaded from staying in school — or working, year after year, as underpaid adjuncts — when it is manifestly against their interests to do so, when they sincerely want to get out the academy but feel impeded by irrational fears.
And hey, maybe treating graduate school as a kind of cult from which one needs help to escape might give rise to some unconventional new positions for all the unemployed Ph.D.’s.
Let’s say a mother finds an application to Duke University’s Ph.D. program in English under her daughter’s mattress. Obviously the mother is devastated. If she does nothing, in a year her daughter will be dressed in black and sneering in obscure jargon at the Thanksgiving turkey and Aunt Sally’s cranberry Jell-O mold. Where can a concerned parent turn for help?
To serve this need, former academics could reinvent themselves as counselors; they could coordinate interventions with the friends and loved ones of people who are flirting with graduate school, or who have been enrolled for several years but lack the will to leave, or who are trapped in dead-end adjunct positions. These “academic exit counselors” could foster the kind of loving, supportive environments that “academic captives” need to return to a normal life.
Of course, in some cases, tough love may be the only solution. And former graduate students and adjuncts could put together a traveling program for kids who still have time to turn themselves around. They could even make a documentary. It could be a nerdy version of Scared Straight: “You fancy-ass punks think you’re so smart? You think you know something about hegemony? I got a Ph.D., 50 grand in student loans, and I clocked 20 years as an adjunct. Now I’m here to tell the truth to suckers like you.”
Here’s Benton’s recommendation to people considering grad study in the humanities: Don’t!
The follow-up letters I receive from those prospective Ph.D.’s are often quite angry and incoherent; they’ve been praised their whole lives, and no one has ever told them that they may not become what they want to be, that higher education is a business that does not necessarily have their best interests at heart. Sometimes they accuse me of being threatened by their obvious talent. I assume they go on to find someone who will tell them what they want to hear: “Yes, my child, you are the one we’ve been waiting for all our lives.” It can be painful, but it is better that undergraduates considering graduate school in the humanities should know the truth now, instead of when they are 30 and unemployed, or worse, working as adjuncts at less than the minimum wage under the misguided belief that more teaching experience and more glowing recommendations will somehow open the door to a real position.
March 2 Update #3. One reason why young people are attracted to the idea of going to graduate school is that job prospects seem so uncertain and dismal. Consider the advice I often tell recent humanities graduates: “Generally your career in your twenties will suck bigtime. Most of your jobs will be unfulfilling. You may feel stuck. However, when you get into your 30s and 40s, your career prospects will improve considerably. Your ability to take advantage of professional opportunities will be a key asset. Your ability to survive through your twenties will build character; it will teach you how to understand market signals and adapt. It will also give you insight into what you really need in a career to be happy. Many engineers/lawyers/medical professionals start their career by choosing career paths solely on the basis of job stability/earning potential. Only in their thirties will the enormity of their mistake become clear. On the plus side, these kinds of people will have enough accumulated savings to make a radical career shift possible. But these practical types have a hard time imagining themselves being happy in careers with incomes under $60,000/80,000/100,000, etc, so they end up picking another safe (and unfulfilling) path.
In my opinion, if humanities grads had a better understanding of how sucky jobs in their 20s will be, it will offend them less terribly if they have to do occasional gigs as a waitress/data entry clerk/bookstore clerk/substitute teacher. Maybe humanities graduates are attracted to the status of being a graduate student because they cannot reconcile their identity of being multi-talented with that of working as a slave in an industry they care little about. On many occasions, I’ve met remarkable and talented and upbeat individuals working at transitional jobs while pursuing some outside interest or taking a night class or studying for a professional certification. There is absolutely no shame in that.
To follow up on that previous thought: when I came back from overseas, I worked a year or two as a temp worker doing a wide variety of things. I didn’t make much money, but I learned a lot about how businesses really operate. I could see firsthand how technology had transformed many industries and what kinds of skills were in great demand. Also, I got a chance to learn about many hidden jobs in areas I would not have known about. My point here is not to encourage people to work at these jobs forever (some of them really sucked). But it’s often easy to parlay this firsthand knowledge into a career you would find both rewarding and challenging.
September 6, 2009 Update: Dorothy Salo (quoted above) has updated her thoughts about graduate school.
I hope you realize that the major contribution I made to my own survival and (eventual) prosperity was opening up my life to let serendipity help me, rather than ceaselessly bemoaning my fate. I hope you realize that it’s a great big wildly varied world out there, a world with as much room for ex-grad-students as anyone else.
One vital lesson I may not have made clear is that failures, even bad failures, contain the seeds of future successes. I landed the electronic-publishing job because of the manuscript-transcription work I did in graduate school. The job after that was with an ebook outfit, obviously attracted by my strong record in that field. Ebooks were dying on the vine at the time, but that turned out not to hurt me at all; the experience I gained working with them meant immensely more. A freelance tech-writing job I’m working on now, in fact, also stems from old ebook circles. The poorly-paid data-entry job I took ended up paying for most of my library-school degree, and the younger woman who got the supervisor’s job I had wanted became a brilliant example, a recommender when I hit the job market again, and a real friend. And some part of the reason I landed my new dream job has to do with my old publishing experience—some of my soon-to-be colleagues want to start a new journal. Look to the future, by all means, but don’t shut the past away. It helps in the strangest ways.
Update:December 22, 2009. The job market for humanities graduates is always sobering, but this MLA report is especially so:
positions in English language and literature will drop 35 percent from last year, while positions in languages other than English are expected to fall 39 percent this year. Given that both categories saw decreases last year, the two-year decline in available positions is 51 percent in English and 55 percent in foreign languages.
December 22, 2009 Update 2 I am right now working on a collection of literary essays about a brilliant and underappreciated American short story writer. I can’t say it hurts me to be writing it outside of academia, but for some intellectual pursuits, it’s next to impossible to do it without institutional support. Perhaps you should ask this question: in order to pursue my intellectual goal, do I absolutely require an academic institution to accomplish it? Note that we are no longer talking about career goals; we are talking about intellectual goals. Even if you require enrollment in a graduate program to write a book or conduct research, it doesn’t automatically follow that it will help your career. You need to have already accepted the fact that your intellectual goal is worth pursuing for its own sake.
Update:December 22, 2009 . Obviously the commenters on this post have given amazing insights into the graduate school experience. A request. Can you mention which subject you are studying in graduate school (that is, if it doesn’t reveal too much!). Thanks.
Update: January 27, 2010. See this metafilter discussion of this article.
Update: Feb 11 2010 . This forum discusses what a master’s degree is worth. I also found these comments by readers to be helpful, especially this one:
Whatever the calculations or conclusions, a prospective graduate student should understand that he or she will become a paying customer who is handing over money to a program that only exists because there is a market for it — not because the world actually needs another 5,000 screenwriters or marine biologists or historians. Too many of us think that the number of programs is somehow scaled to the number of jobs that are available to all the graduates out there. As long as students are willing to pay, education institutions will be there to collect their money. Whether this bubble bursts depends on whether people wise up to this truth.
In 2007 Liz Pulliam Weston estimated how graduate degrees increase earning potential. There is little net income gain for people seeking masters in liberal arts or social sciences (and a mixed gain for people in law, science, or business). This is not particularly surprising, and it depends on the area of concentration. For example, I could imagine that some areas of linguistics might bring a person into lucrative areas of AI, natural language processing or even computer programming. Even in the low-paying field of creative writing, it’s conceivable that a class publishing project could introduce you to XML or web design or even multimedia production. Therein lies the paradox of graduate school. If your graduate program gives you lots of room to explore, there certainly will be payoffs. On the other hand, if your graduate program seems more interested in weeding people out (through burdensome requirements and prerequisites) and forcing you to narrow your intellectual interests, then these kinds of payoffs are less likely. I mentioned before that during my graduate school experience, I felt as though I hardly had time to read or write anything. Instead I was writing pointless short essays about F.Scott Fitzgerald and workshop critiques. If I had to do this for more than a year, I probably would have gone crazy.
Here’s an interesting comment made by a reader on a thread about Immanuel Kant:
For me the constant problem in learning philosophy would be that I would think I understand something when in fact I didn’t. Probably 70% of my interactions with teachers consisted of me saying, “So Kant’s saying X Y and Z here, right?” and the teacher grimacing and saying, “No, I don’t think Kant wants to say that.” It’s a pretty humbling experience, and by the time I left I had a good appreciation for what it takes to have a legit understanding of some great philosophical work–namely, years and years of arduous study. So anyway, I think MY’s comment about needing to read philosophy under the “watchful eye and whip-hand of a teacher” is right on, because–after reading some dense passage a couple of times–you will start to convince yourself that you understand what the guy’s talking about, and you might even start having opinions about it. But when you actually have to explain the text back to someone who knows their stuff–unless you really are truly gifted–you’ll quickly find that you didn’t have a good understanding of the text after all. The real test of philosophical understanding is repeating back the argument to someone, not reading it on your own.
In other words, it is difficult to do textual analysis on one’s own without having a bona fide expert being around to wince whenever you oversimplify a thinker’s meaning. Perhaps the benefits of graduate school derive simply from being in the presence of another expert who is aware of the deeper nuances in a theory or text than you would normally be. Getting a master’s 20 years ago gave me a better appreciation of how much more complex the literary/publishing world was than I imagined; I realized early on that what I regarded as “literary brilliance” was really nothing more than minimum competence. What a rude awakening! I have learned a lot on my own since then, but overall I think I benefited from having this awareness come sooner rather than later. The next question is whether keeping a blog or actively participating in a forum can provide a similar kind of feedback mechanism. Maybe so, but only if netizens restrain their distaste towards eager newbies.
{ 117 comments… read them below or add one }
Whoever wrote this is my new hero. I am a graduate student in one of the social sciences at a prominent university in the South and I hate it. I have always hated it. Every word of this essay is truth.
I’m 42 years old and have already failed at evrything else. How can I be failing at my English Ph.D. work too? Yet I hate it so much I don’t function even on an antidepressent. How does one get out of this alive?
I’m only in the first semester of a masters program and I already feel like a slave, even without the research requirement. Every second of every waking moment is spent either doing something for graduate school or thinking about doing something for graduate school. It’s like being in the one hundred yard dash with 75 other people and we’re all totally frazzled and stressed out and running on and off the track and panting and bumping into each other and wondering why it seems like the finish line keeps moving. Graduate school definitely sucks.
I’m a sociology graduate student, and went looking for research last semester on graduate education so that I might understand if the bullshit I was going through is common. Curiously, the only empirical research I could find on graduate education was done in the 60s and 70s. Nobody really wants to talk about it. I guess we’re supposed to learn to study every other than ourselves and the fucked up excuse for higher education that is graduate education. I think it’s a shame. A big, fat shame. It’s no wonder that grad schools send power-hungry, psychotic, angry, and cut-throat individuals out into the world to educate the young–after all of the trauma they go through in graduate school, what else could be expected?
Grad school absolutely sucks it.
I went into Grad School for a few reasons…
1) Job market was very tough in my state and I wanted to be more marketable 2) I always enjoyed college and missed that feeling of learning 3) I wanted to get a degree that people respected and could get me into a cushy career in a tenured-position.
Here I am, halfway through my first semester, and I don’t want to waste another second with school at all.
First off, grad school is NOTHING like undergrad college. I have no face-to-face classes (all online) and being in a sea of 18-22 year olds who have never been in the real world for a day is frustrating to no end. Basically, you pay MORE than you did for college but only get the classes and nothing else…and watered down versions of the classes at that.
Second, Grad School is not so easy once you have a 4 yr. degree. If you aren’t having a good day or a particular assignment is bothering you, you’ll think, “Why am I even doing this!?! MILLIONS of people “ONLY” have a Bachelor’s and they’re doing great! Get a grip dude!
Oh, and full-time and tenure jobs are near impossible to find nowadays. Colleges want all adjunct (who don’t require benefits) if possible).
Basically, Grad School is overrated. And as soon as I get a chance to be back in the real world, I’m escaping!
I hate graduate school…I read the above article where it was theorized that dropping out of grad school causes a person to go through self-doubt phase, in fact staying in grad school, doing bad and feeling like an idiot is worse for self-esteem. I hate every second of grad school and going through the worst phase of my life because of it. Engineering is worthless to say the least…it is of absolutely no consequence, it is stupid and no relevance to the real world…it is making me stupid rather than making me intelligent! arghhhhhhhh….anyone else feels that way too ?
I totally agree that grad school sucks. I have been obsessing about dropping out. I am so burned out that I can hardly function in any other area of my life. I honestly wish that I had just gotten a job after graduating with my BS. Now I am in a lot more debt and will feel like a total failure if I don’t make it through.
it’s validating — and sad — to read about other people who seem to hate graduate school as much as i do. i think that the issues already mentioned are compounded for students who did not take a linear path from high school to undergrad to grad school. implicitly and sometimes explicitly, i get the message from professors that everything i learned through my work-for-real-pay experiences is wrong. my department is full of cutthroats and gossips; there is so much pressure to publish and present that we are all in danger of getting grossly attached to our ideas and methods, as mediocre or brilliant as they might be. and no one wants to hear that you’re struggling, or having a month of bad days. to say as much is portray yourself as a weakling and a failure. i’ll echo a previous comment: grad school makes me feel stupid, rather than brilliant; i feel torn down, rather than edified. i hate graduate school. i regret applying and accepting the offer. i should have kept my job at that non-profit; the pay sucked but at least i was content. now i’m 1600 miles from home, i miss my lover, and i’m the most miserable i have ever been in my life.
I needed to read this today. Grad school sucks. I’m surrounded by socially awkward and *joyless* professors. No one smiles, no one laughs. Rather, they are overtly consumed by their dimwitted articles that no one reads. It must be nice being so certain to have grasped the “truth” on life. It is equally more delightful when they feel the need to dominate and postulate their ‘enlightened’ ideas on a captured audience. You will quickly learn not to argue against them or you’ll be told, in no uncertain terms, that you’re simply not “academic” enough. It’s truly a system for and made by the most privileged individuals.
I’ve been thinking of leaving my graduate program for quite some time. I think I rushed into a thesis-based program, while I probably belong in a course-based program, or not in graduate school at all. I often wonder if it is too late to enter a different graduate program, while leaving the one I am presently enrolled in.
P.S. graduate school is an all-consuming entity. Like Glenda, I also experience an inability to function in every other area of my life; I’ve been disinterested in everything that I used to love. I feel like I’ve been exposed to a world that has changed my life forever. A world that many, luckily, never have to see.
So you think grad school sucks? Just wait until you’re a ‘part time prorated’ postdoc. If you hate grad school so much then do something else. I read a joke somewhere that there are no winners in graduate school, only survivors and failures. Most failures reason that their academic demise was a result of something their advisor, colleagues, or university did when in truth they just weren’t cut out for the degree. Christ, will you all stop waxing eloquent about how unfair grad school is and man-up!
Danimal, I see your point as much as I see everyone else’s. You have just finished a graduate degree and its clear by the optimism dripping from your words. I believe many of us are not able to merely “survive” and be happy; we have always driven towards a more meaningful existence and we all find the graduate school existence to be demeaning and demoralizing because of the inability to feel like you are improving. At every turn we are reminded how terrible we are, and its only when you have survived that you are champion. That we all contemplate leaving and complain is not the issue, its that we continue to survive and complain that is really what matters. The obligation to endure gives us the right to complain. Oh, it will get better. It will always get better, they who have been through it say.
In December, I finished by Bachelor of Music degree in flute performance and have just taken a bunch of auditions for graduate programs on the East Coast. It is exhausting to do those auditions, be on the road for weeks, come back to my hometown, and play a full-length recital. The overall burnout I’m feeling now, I think, is more related to the bs I experienced in my program. A huge lack of communication, lots of backstabbing, a lack of boundaries between students and certain professors, most professors being unresponsive and uncaring, all sorts of double standards, seeing students of a lower playing level and dedication get all sorts of opportunites that those who deserved them did not get. I also wound up hating my main teacher because of all the problems she caused with all of the students in the studio. It got to the point where music and learning did not matter anymore.
So, I’ve seen plenty already and am glad to be out of that program. I can just imagine what grad school could be like. As for where I finished my BM, I’m never staying there for any reason. A lot of classical musicians go to grad school because they feel they need more experience and honing, because as far as performing professionally goes, the degrees themselves don’t matter. I need to start thinking of some alternatives, but don’t know where to start. Ms. Salo’s website stated to create yourself a back door, and I’m trying to figure it out.
Thank you for posting this, and thank you for the comments. I have spent the last four years of my life (yes four) in a graduate program hating–loathing–every minute of it. I experienced the “inability to function in every other area of my life,” and the “obsession” with quitting, but I also felt that it had drugged me to the point where I couldn’t fathom anything beyond grad school either. It is a serious, serious problem. I have been depressed, feeling inadequate–basically everything everyone here has said. I’m quitting after this semester. A lot of people think this is nuts. But it’s nice to know there are some other people out there who get it.
I am so glad to hear I am not the only one who feels this way. I am in my first year of a social science PhD program. In addition to the workload and expectations being somewhat brutal, the social aspect is really depressing. Another problem is that in my program everyone is trying so hard to be perfect that no one will admit how demoralizing and encompassing graduate school is. I have heard it called “four years of boot camp for the mind.” In my case no one I know outside of school is an academic and they have no idea that grad school is not just going to school, there is a whole other level of mental bullshit you have to deal with. Personally, I will just be happy when my coursework is over. I really love my subject and doing research, but a large contingent of my classmates are so competitive and stuck on being perfect that they suck the fun out of everything. I think you can only keep going by reminding yourself that grad school is just a limited time in your life (4-5 years hopefully) and that you don’t have to let it define who you are as a human. That is my strategy for today anyway! Good luck to everyone no matter how you decide to pursue your career goals.
Txstingray, you’re SO right when you talk about the social aspect and mental aspects of grad school. The people are so anal retentive and obsessed that it’s hard for me to keep my own perspective about things. I loved the field I chose when I was in undergrad. I was excited and motivated and felt confident in my skills. I’m in my second semester of grad school and it’s hard to even remember what those days felt like. The grad school environment has managed to completely demotivate me, while also making me feel inferior and incompetent. And this is coming from a person who graduated Phi Kappa Phi with honors in undergrad. I have decided to definitely not continue on to get a PhD.
All good comments. Grad school sucks for sure. If you are doing sciences and experimenting, it may be a better fit. I am doing an Arts Degree and hate it. It is simply insane the amount of reading and essays we must do. I can’t believe it at times. Literally pumping out about 100 pages of reading per day, and about 150 pages worth of essays per semester.
You think about only having 3.5 months to become an expert on several subjects and then have to write about it very difficult. Then the Dogma sets in. I am SO SICK of reading other people’s perspectives/ideas and then having to cite them. It is total crap. I have found the process so far to be both good but also completely myopic and absurd.
I am at that stage of demoralization right now- 2 years in. Actually, 3 (I transferred due to a natural disaster in my area). Lemme tell ya- I see the mundane students who kiss ass get all the rewards (and monetary awards), and now funding has been cut for third year students- last years cohort was so big that all the money is gone. My experiences are a bit different…some of my professors even laugh at times. But I also so a lot of personal stories being shared in the classroom, and passing for teaching. Student’s ripped apart in front of their classmates.
I also see some very good teaching and mentoring going on, but not a lot of creative thinking in regards to problem solving. Now I am seeking full time employment to keep on top of my expenses, and am very worried that I will now be seen as “not dedicated”, will not get to do the things a “good” doctoral student does, like conferences and paper publishing prior to graduation. It will be enough to get the comps and dissertation out of the way. Oh well… I guess I can see both sides of the coin, but right now, I am on the losing end of the toss.
I am currently leaving my PHD program and I have landed an incredible job in the business world. My PHD program is in the humanities, so everyone is shocked that I could get such a job. Most of these people are academics or wanna be academics who couldn’t see themselves in my position so they project their insecurities and failures unto me and others like me who have the ability to function in both worlds. But what is the value of a liberal arts education if it doesn’t equip you to survive by using multiple skills (networking, broad knowledge,etc.) in the “real world” instead of retreating from it into the “ivory tower” to “research”. What good is your “research” if it doesn’t have an impact on the real world. Academics seem to be caught in the idea that a degree qualifies you for something.. there are ppl who had/have all A’s through grad. programs and somehow obtained PHD’s but that doesn’t neccessarily mean that they should be professing anything to anyone.. If anyone is interested economist Gary North talks about the economic stupidity of the PHD (esp. humanities. The several years of study which finally pay off when you receive a pittance for a salary and the chance to compete for tenure (if you get it.) http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north427.html . I wish all who pursue this road the best. Maybe one day the academy won’t be filled with bitter, selfish individuals…but until then the world of menial pay and useless stress is a great place for these people who have no real contribution to make to the world.
Oh Grad School, how i loathe thee…..I am currently in my 4th year of a doctoral program in clinical psychology. The thing that bothers me the most…..aside from in essence having to teach myself and learning much more by practice is the unbelievable narcissism and “holier than thou” mentality adopted by many professors at my fine institution (and i use that term loosely). At times i feel like i am in middle school again jumptin through hoops continuously with no end in sight. I believe like many things, grad school is a money racket.
I happen to find this website by searching “grad school burnout” on Google. It makes me feel glad that I am far from alone with my current predicament. The reason why I am feeling burned out already at the end of my second year is due to the trauma that is prelims. I took my prelim oral exam at the beginning of this month in front a three-professor committee that were renowned for being incredibly tough. Unfortunately, I had no say in who my committee members were and they picked courtesy of my graduate advisor and the abstract topics I submitted for the exam. After being given a grueling three weeks to pound out the proposal and a two-hour oral grilling session by the committee, I was given four weeks to rewrite my hypothesis and aims in my proposal. Sounds like a lot of time, huh? Well, after going through the whole hazing process, my productivity level shot down and hasn’t recovered ever since. I have no more than a week and a half to submit my proposal rewrite and I am still wrestling with my lack of motivation. I thought that the rewriting process would be easy but instead I have found it more frustrating, sniffing out any fire of passion for my prelim. Honestly, I have to let this out – I HATE PRELIMS! This whole hazing process has removed my desire to get a biology Ph.D whatsoever. Right after I finished prelims and realized how traumatizing it was, I talked to some folks I knew who earned biology Ph.Ds in the past. One told me how much he regretted toiling his butt off for that degree and losing the rest of his 20′s in the process. The other told me that the employment prospects for biology Ph.Ds in academia and industry are getting more dismal. Teaching and consulting are probably the jobs that are still in high supply. I closely observed my colleague, who will finally get his Ph.D this summer after spending seven years in the program. I never mentioned this to him but he is seriously the errand boy for my adviser and has to carry out several projects at once at his whim in order to graduate. He sleeps only 5 hours a night and works more than 12 hours in the lab. He also comes in both days on the weekend. I know that when he is gone, my adviser will set his sights on me. Knowing that I can never match my colleague and I am unwilling to give up the things I enjoy (especially serving at church), I will definitely settle down for a master’s. However, I run the risk of losing my funding from my PI since I will no longer be worthy to be his student. Therefore, I will have to play this game with him very carefully. I guess what is motivating me to get over this prelim rewrite is to maintain my status as a Ph.D student and keep the manna flowing. Also, I plan to work extra hard this summer to get enough data for my research project. Once I possess enough working data, I will spill the beans to my adviser. That way, all I have to do is write a master’s thesis and I’m on my way out of grad school. At the same time, I’m working on a contingency plan after exiting grad school. I happen to know a friend from church who works as a high school math teacher. I will ask him more about getting the teaching credential for high school science and work on getting a job teaching chemistry in a local high school in Texas. I heard that the starting salary for inexperienced teachers possessing master’s or Ph.D degrees is the same.
In addition to my previous post, I might as well for fun describe how studying for a science Ph.D is like communism. You will never get this in Jorge Cham’s Ph.D comic strip. Not that I found his strip amusing in the first place. Actually, I find it incredibly depressing. But here we go:
Studying for a science Ph.D is like communism for the following reasons:
1. When your undergrad profs are impressed with your grades, they praise you and convince you to apply for grad school. Most likely, you are brainwashed into thinking that grad school is like an extension of undergrad. This is no different than the propaganda the Soviet Union and North Korea pounded out to repatriate unsuspecting overseas Armenians and Korean-Japanese. They were tricked into thinking that their respective countries were socialist paradises following with milk and honey.
2. As the years go by in grad school, your adviser wants you to give up your own personal interests and well-roundedness for the sake of your project and his/her reputation. This is no different than North Korea and China during the Cultural Revolution, where citizens were forced to give up their land and belongings to the government. The more they gave up, the better the reputation of the commune/county and the local party chief/commissar.
3. When you want to quit or settle for the quick consolation prize of the master’s degree, academia scorns at you and labels you as a “sell-out” to the real world. This is no different than in the Cultural Revolution in China. If you turned your back against communism in that era, you were labeled as a “capitalist-roader” or “counterrevolutionary.” “Capitalist-roader” seems more appropriate a term for academia to label the quitters or master’s degree seekers. Both are already set for the real, capitalist world anyways.
4. Every year, my graduate program will invite a professor with renowned credentials to speak at the university. Last fall, the program got James Watson, the scientist who discovered the structure of DNA, to come speak. Obviously, the program wants to use these speaker series to encourage us to get the Ph.D and go through the academic route. This is no different than the brutal propaganda spewed out by the Soviet Union, China and North Korea. The propoganda constantly batters its citizens with false hopes that it can aspire to be the top communist cadre ever like Lei Fang, Karl Marx, Kim Jong-il and the proponents of the Juche self-reliance philosophy.
5. Lastly, many science Ph.D’s at the end of grad school will be so brainwashed into thinking that climbing up the ladders of academia is the way to go. They will then spend the next 5-10 years as a postdoc earning a measly salary, waiting for that break to get an assistant professor position, whose job market is continuing to shrink as time passes. And for those that are lucky to get that post, they have to face the next 7-10 years fighting for tenure and wrestling with the “publish-or-perish” environment. This battle involves applying for increasingly elusive grants, working almost every day in the lab and aggressively recruiting new grad students into the lab. This regimen to break and gain respect in the academic world takes you nowhere most of the time, just like the economies and societies of the Soviet Union and North Korea.
I’m finishing up a phd this year after a long, tortured journey at an institution I hated. I was adamant about not quitting because I am a very stubborn person. Unfortunately, I now realize that for various reasons I am not suited for academe and have come to loathe my chosen field. Having said that, I would not automatically tell someone not to go to grad school.
If you have a real love for your discipline, and are content to lead a quiet, quasi-monastic existence with few rewards, and no expectation of academic glory, then I would say by all means go to grad school! These austere souls are the people who succeed no matter what, because their reward is being able to do something they love every day: studying, thinking, writing, and teaching undergrads about a cherished topic.
If, however, you want to go grad school because you have a burning desire to prove your brilliance to the world, boost your intellectual self-esteem, please your parents, etc– for God’s sake don’t go! Furthermore, if your head is full of dreams of gaining professional adulation, or simply modest hopes of ultimate employment and minimal financial security–disabuse yourself of those notions immediately!
Expect a life of toiling away in obscurity. Expect to be poor. Expect to go unacknowledged, because that’s most likely what you are in for. Expect that your love of your topic will be your only form of compensation.
If your love for your field doesn’t exceed your capacity to weather a 7-10 year shitstorm generated by colleagues, department heads, and profs, then for the love of God, don’t do it!!!!!!!!
A last word. If you drop out of Grad school there is no need to wallow in self-loathing or point fingers at advisors, departments, etc. (though I’m very aware that many people get shafted by such individuals). It doesn’t mean you aren’t intelligent, or that academe is just a craphole full of effete useless ivory tower eggheads. Rarefied as some of their productions are, I admit I have enormous respect for genuine scholars–some of us are just more suited for other professions.
PS
To brighter future:
It’s great that you have landed a good job and are out of an environment that you don’t like. Kudos. But I don’t think it’s right to dismiss those who stay in academe as economically stupid, or incapable of surviving in the real world– some people are there because they truly love classics, philosophy, science, etc. Some people, also, were just born to fill that niche. Trust me, I am no grad school apologist– I have been miserable for years now! But I have also seen a great deal of intelligence, hard work, and pure idealism in academe that I continue to respect.
To Sine Schoastica:
I agree with you. Some people are born to be academics but it was economist Gary North who labeled their efforts as “economic stupidity”
I’m glad I searched “grad school sucks” on google, but I’m somehow shocked that I haven’t done so before now. I recently spent several months considering dropping out, but now I have decided to stick around until they kick me out with my M.A. (I’ve seen it happen with others and I’m at a prestigious place).
On the other side, part of me still thinks I’ll stick it out, but here are a few problems I see:
1. I’m in political science. We have nothing. We’re not a science. Damn it. If we DID follow more stringent methodology and research design we might get somewhere…but even then there are problems. Bayesian? What the hell can formal modeling tell us when the whole point of politics is to be strategic and change payout structures. As I said, we have nothing.
2. I feel so guilty for not working harder. I’m fully funded at a top ten university (in my field) and the professors have been great. The students are nice. So what is my problem? Mostly…it’s that I don’t believe in political science AND I’m jealous of my friends who are REALLY starting to jump up in salaries now… (late 20s and the NY crowd seems to be doubling salary every 6 months) But objectively (because really, isn’t that what the social sciences are all about…grrrr) I understand that I am paid to do almost nothing but read things that I find interesting, and at the end of the day someone will give me a PhD.
3. It is nice to have an excuse to NOT worry about things like buying a house, finding a husband, doing a 401K, etc. However, I think part of the thing that really pisses me off is that I don’t understand why smart people get sucked into this deal… I mean, I do understand because theoretically we spend our time reading about interesting things and discussing them with others… But it is so damn frustrating to realize that the time lag between political science and public policy is AT LEAST 15 years. Oh yeah by the way, there’s this dude Stathis Kalyvas who wrote A LOT of things that would be abs invaluable to any US administration… Do they read him? No. What the hell are they waiting for? His book is called the logic of civil war, and guess what…he didn’t just pick that out of a hat. It’s really fucking good, and once I realized that no one was listening to him I was like…well SHITE, there’s no hope for me…
I am currently finishing my MFA and it has been one of the worst experiences. I have been told by my advisor when I wanted to leave because I was not getting what I wanted (access to facilities, advising, community, developing a body of work) she said, “if you graduate you can get a job.” The students are basically funneled through the system. I refused to pay for the experience and got scholarships. But the standards of education at my school, scholastically and teaching professional and artistic skills was very low. The program was on the verge of collapse until the hired a chair previously from Northwestern and now we have been stuck with a program in continual flux. The administration and some faculty have contributed to an divisive and toxic environment. Then inarticulate angry students decide to complain about everything irrelevant without the desire to change the situation just to complain. It has been HELL. Last fall I was so worn out and sick that my doctor told me to take a leave of absence. We are required to write a thesis paper, have an art show, create inteactive DVDs of our work all has been good experience. But in an MFA only fashionable thought is allowed. So your thesis paper is scrutinized on the basis of whether you are speaking current art speak bullshit. I have done an extraordinary amount of research on psychology and post-psychology in relationship to my work. But if you don’t mentioned deconstructionist theory, that my faculty does not understand anyway then it is not legitimate. Then when I did that research I found the teachers knew little or nothing about it. It is an absurd situation because my teachers are criticizing what they in most cases have not even read. They don’t even read the theories they profess are the “right” ones. In some cases they simply looked up the subject in Wikipedia! Today art schools have reached this level of insane absurdity. When what I really wanted from it was to gain more skills in art making! I am now exhausted but have only a week left. It is almost over.
my drunken thoughts on grad school:
i hate the morons in grad schools. they are all worried about what other people in their field think. all these morons do is regurgitate what’s already been published, so their paper has better chance of getting accepted. don’t get me wrong, there are truly good papers, but they are very rare. a whole lot of these people in grad schools (profs mostly) are followers, and are not original thinkers at all. fucking asshols.
anyways, i agree with most of the statements on this board. grad school definitely sucks, and is for certain type of people only (the shitty type of people). and i am drunk this evening cuz the skool’s got me down!!!
i cann’t wait to get out of this shit hole. i am out!
I am in the process of thinking about going to Grad school for my MBA. My husband had a really hard time with graduate school. Yes, you have to do a lot of writing in Graduate school. I think what really sucked was he had to do a lot of group projects. He had a person in his group that didn’t turn in her work on time. The professor allowed the students in the group to decide on the group grade.
I am in my second-to-last semester of grad school, hating every minute of it, and COUNTING the days until I am finished. I am absolutely miserable.
On the bright side, finding this website made me smile and feel much better about the fine mess I’ve gotten myself in.
The fact that I feel guilty if I spend my weekends doing things other than my grad school work is ridiculous. I miss spending time with friends and family, and I find myself saying “no” to their invitations due to my massive workload! I cannot wait to get my M.A. and have my life back!
I am in two MFA programs simultaneously and I love it. There’s another way to look at the forced weenery and language globs: they polish you. They make you mature. They refine your ability to focus. Some of it is time-wasting, and those are the parts you zip through.
Good God, I hate grad school. I am a first semester Master’s student and I am already jaded, 7 weeks into my graduate level education. In order to fund this ridiculous endeavor, I must work a 30-hour a week, menial job on top of my classes and the work that comes with it. Our department is so poorly funded that hardly anyone got funding and those that did are total tools. They have no personality, no passion, no spark, no teaching experience (though I am told that that is how you GET it in the first place). Luckily, I went to a private undergraduate school where undergraduate teaching was part of upperclass seminars and publishing opportunities were abound. I have two years of experience already in assistant teaching, yet dumbasses with no teaching experience got appointments and the TA positions that fund their education. I, unfortunately, must work retail full time in order to live off campus and away from undergraduate life.
I feel completely incapable of original thought, I have no idea how to please professors, and I am under constant scrutiny from Ph.D. students in my department who like to pull the seniority card on me when convenient. Ugh, pluuuuuhlease! Already having a master’s doesn’t make you ACTUALLY intelligent.
I, like so many others, left a fantastic job at a non-profit organization when I was poised for a promotion and salary increase for this piece of shit we like to call “higher education”.
I have to disagree with most of these posts. I loved graduate school. I completed my MA in 1.5 years and the program that required coursework and a thesis. The program was hectic and I was ripped apart by my instructors for the first semester, but the people and writing experience gained was well worth the stress. I completed my degree at a university in Australia. If anyone is interested in pursuing a social science degree in another country, Australian universities offer a lot of scholarships.
P.S. – Sorry about the typos
Dear Anonymous,
If you loved your grad program SO much, then why the heck are you even here? If you’re so optimistic, then why are you commenting on a page that clearly states that “grad school sucks”. In fact, I googled the keywords “grad school sucks” to find this page. What drew you to this den of cynicism, then?
In short, don’t crap on our whining because you loved your program. A lot of us have good reason to be upset and unhappy. I’d like my space to wallow and loathe because that’s how I, sadly, get through my day. I’m sure that we’re all very happy to hear that someone enjoyed themselves, but for now, we’re all in this hell-hole trying to navigate our way through the bureaucratic bullshit and it’s not a pretty sight. Give us a break…
Oh for fuck’s sake, grad school is a HUGE PIECE OF SHIT. I can’t stand it, never have, never will. The only consolation that I have is that next year, I get to give the new cohort “advice” during their orientation week…and I am just waiting to lambaste the entire department.
Fuck the power plays, fuck the impenetrable bureaucracy, fuck the intimidation, fuck the belittling, and fuck the dishonesty.
I am seriously depressed right now from the two months of hell that I have been going through doing my Masters. I totally agree with many people here and agree with that person who said that theories and theoretical schools (the coming and going of them) are like trends and fashion. They are!! I am finding myself learning theoretical models that I intrinsically disagree with or find problems with. I find the professors not able to explain and teach.. I constantly feel stupid, inadequate and it’s absolutely killing me. There is no support or compassion amongst my group of grad students and no support offered anywhere on campus (like mental health services.) My confidence has been in steady decline since week 1 and i am SO EXHAUSTED from homework and writing essays (even though my program is supposedly a practical-based program) that I can’t think straight. All the years (12 to be exact spent in the real world, and all my experience from the real world are discounted.
hey guys,
i have not been able to get out of bed the whole day. i woke up in the morning with a huge headache. why? i am
emotionally drained. im in the third semester of an econ phd program. i am still traumatized from my first year,
which could only be described as pure, un adulterated hell. it left such a huge psychological impact on me, that
i cant seem to accept the fact that i am smart. 8 people left my cohort in the first year. the fact that i didn’t
was not because i was smarter than them, but i became so obsessed with not losing and not disappointing my dad, that
i sacrificed my physical and mental health to be here. now i am here, in my third semester, my TA responsibilities
have overwhelmed with, with a prof who thinks that this is the only thing that i am supposed to do. i have been
neglecting other courses, those profs are pissed off with me. i passed only one prelim, after my first year (again,
i had to KILL myself for that). i have another one in january, but i dont have the time to study for it. my time-
management skills are not great, but i cant even think straight anymore. if neone told me now, i will give you a
ticket to go back home ( 8000 miles away) i would pack now and leave…its funny, i feel more dumb now than i ever
did in my life. i think academics fool themselves into thinking that what they are doing is something great. but
i see through them and i see through all the BS. i will mostly take a masters and leave, and regain my life back.
this is not a way to live.
Bravo Econ Burnout! You should probably take the Master’s. You may be protecting yourself b/c if the economy keeps going the way it’s going, they might just put you and your professors out.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/business/26endowment.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5124&en=c8abd305a6b3f839&ex=1385442000&partner=facebook&exprod=facebook
A Master’s Degree. Sounds inviting, important… The chance to continue the wonderful experience of undergrad study at a brand new college in an exotic location away from home… The chance to meet new people and make a great choice to continue “higher education”.
Yeah fucking right.
I still know hardly anyone here after over a year, I have 40,000 in student loans to finish school which effectively locks me in for the duration, I like many others, despise the frolicking freshman who actually have time to *GASP* joke around and bother me in the library while I am finishing yet another paper, working my ass off, consulting my APA manual, editing and re-editing, only to recieve a much lower grade than I believe I should have and be forced to do the same thing next week, except it will be twice as hard. Oh yeah, I have a 62 right now and I have to get a 75 to pass the class and we have two assignments left.
Fuck.
reading this thread does help me alleviate some of my pain a bit, as it’s nice to feel that I’m not the only one in the world who’s suffering from the same misery…
but…like many of you, who are taking the time to vent online, I hate grad school, but at the same time, I don’t want to quit yet…there’s still that last strand of hope that if I just suffer thru this, life will be beautiful again, and I can look back on all this and say, it was all worth it.
I’m seriously suicidal right now…and feel so dejected, and feel like I’m stuck at this singular path of no return, and the end is so dismal.
for ppl like us, this frame of mind is the least conducive for learning, or let alone do anything productive…
so what do we do?? I need help!! I have no idea what to do!!!
Why is everyone so down?
I’m a third year Math PhD student at a good school and would not trade it for the world. I get paid to learn about a subject I love, teach undergrads, do research, drink beer with other students and professors, and generally have a great time. Yes, there are times when I feel like I’m going insane (grrr to long problem sets). I’ll be out when I’m 27 years old and can work in either aca
Graduate school is great if you don’t mind working really hard with no breaks. Winter break? ungrads get to go home and enjoy the break with their families. I..as a biology masters grad student, have to work on my research.. even on the weekends.. I just got through my first semester here. Goodbye to any free time. Goodbye to any life. Hello to long hours writing papers, working on research in the lab, looking at data, being frustrated that you only have a certain amount of time to get the research done, spending long long hours in the office, working on weekends and during holidays.
I love when I give my proposal to someone and ask them how it is, they say that it looks great, but then they hand it back with hundreds of corrections! All they do is push for publications to make them look good. If I could get a good paying government job without a masters degree in biology, I definatly wouldn’t do it. Grad school does suck the life out of you.
You know, I’m glad I found this site as its making me laugh in the face of my insanity!
I’m going to grad school at the same school I received my BA in History so I can get my MA in History. As I know of the good and bad professors and their styles, I figured it would be easier for me to move through the program. Well, I have been proven to be very wrong on that belief! There was this one professor who as an undergrad I took three classes with and loved it all. This past semester I happily decided took a grad seminar with him on US colonial history, and now I NEVER want to be in his classes ever again. Sometimes I have to wonder if this some big sick joke being played on me. In addition to the over the top amount of reading inept books and getting enough words in to make a twenty page research term paper, as a TA I have to grade over forty nonsensical papers written by freshmen and work in a lowly job sometimes up to thirty hours a week to pay for this disaster.
I’m burnt out, sometimes I’m wonder what would happen if I took a day to sleep it away or watch TV. As it stands now, I get five hours of sleep on the typical school night. Each book to read becomes more excruciating to read, each essay becomes more agonizing to write. I’m getting grey hairs. I drink more on the weekends. It’s getting old, and as I get older, it gets worse.
My only hope is that this all pays off in the end, but that train is ready to leave soon. No regrets, right…?
These are some interesting responses to graduate school, and I had many of the same responses years ago (at least ten) when I was getting my M.A. in literature. Back then, I thought I’d go on for my Ph.D., but I discovered I was more of a creative writer than a research scholar and really didn’t fit into the English Ph.D. mold. So I have mixed opinions on not having obtained a Ph.D. There is the inevitable sense of failure, not to mention the loss of a prospective career in teaching at an advanced level. There is the dismay at watching mediocre peers succeed where I did not (although I should stress I was undoubtably just as mediocre myself back then!). On the other hand, I appreciate the chance at becoming acquainted with the great literature in the English tradition, and I enjoyed the hard work I put into my master’s education. I think my master’s program made me a better person emotionally and morally (if not materially!).
Most of my professors were terrible, especially those in creative writing (sinecures if ever there were).
I should mention that I actually went to two schools, transferring midway through my master’s “career.” The first school was I think geared more toward generating English teachers than research scholars, but it would be a mistake to say this made it a worse school. The second school was more of a “Research One,” high-class operation, designed to produce research scholars. The curious thing is how much more warm and welcoming the professors were at the first school. They may not have been at an A-one school, but they were more human, and I don’t think I learned any less from them.
So, a few thoughts from someone who remembers what it was like more than a decade ago. In large part, graduate studies in the humanities haven’t changed much, I can see from the comments above.
I am a first year doctoral student in a top ten program in my field (social sciences). I already have my MA. I really thought I wanted the PhD, but now that I’m here I feel absolutely drowned in doubt. The interesting thing about graduate school in the social sciences at least, is that SO much of the work people does seems so detached from reality. People study such things as inequality and stratification, etc., and yet on the whole have NO real world experience AT ALL. Most grad students have never been out in the real world – never worked – never anything but school. 99% of what is written in graduate school is only read by other academics. Where is the social impact in that. How is this so-called culture of knowledge more valuable than really being out in the world and affecting social change. People seem to just randomly pull topics and subjects ot of their asses, having no real association whatsoever to the cultures or places they want to look at. Yes I do feel like I’m learning to structure my thoughts in a specific way, but I also feel that the unspoken pressure, competition, bureaucracy, etc. suffocates creativity. I am so frustrated. Seriously considering dropping out but I worked so hard to be in such a good program with full funding! Sometimes I think that 99% of grad students are only in school because they can’t think of anything else to do in life…
i am in my first year of a phd program in the humanities. last semester sucked; i thought i was going crazy. seriously. the workload was ridiculous. it still is, but now i complain less and make daily strategic decisions about accomplishing a day’s worth of work. but still, it’s a very steep climb. this semester, i spend more time in the department and try to socialize more at departmental events. but in part because i wasn’t as social last semester, i feel sort of like a pariah now. like i missed the boat in a way, and now i’m sort of on my own. there is definitely hazing going on–faculty and students alike target the weak or those who don’t conform. I have fallen into both categories on occasion. but it’s hard to know whether the mistreatment is malicious or just part of a rite of passage conferred on the new students. that is to say, it’s sometimes hard to know whether the mistreatment is mistreatment or good-faith training. I agree with the person who said grad school all about being socialized, groomed, molded. it’s not about your intelligence. they wouldn’t have brought you in if you weren’t intelligent. rather it’s about fucking with your head about your intelligence. professors know all about impostor syndrome and the anxieties of being a grad student. their job is to replicate that nasty, irreverent, ego-killing experience for their grad students. it may or may not be out of love or commitment to quality training. sometimes i think people are just blowing off steam by abusing their grad students. they break you down almost completely. if you get up again, well, that’s fine. no one really gives a shit either way. but i think that that’s the point. to survive and thrive, you have to be internally reliant–something that is perhaps not easy for those who have always been straight-A students and who liked getting praise from authority figures. that life comes to a screeching halt in grad school. this is where you either drown or become a very strong swimmer.
I’m back to read some of the new comments…
I’m half way through my 2nd semester in the Master’s program. It’s starting to get a little better, but the work is so overwhelming, tedious, mindless. I can’t find anyone to sit on my committee or help with my dissertation topic.
Besides all of that…What bothers me the most is that the profs can’t teach. They are fantastic at the undergrad level, but once they’re in your seminars, it’s like the lightbulb switched off. I have an exam in statistical analysis tomorrow and the prof simply doesn’t teach. He reads from the book and then expects us to go home and teach the concepts to ourselves. The 3 hours of class once a week is spent watching the professor write equations and sample problems on the board with minimal explanation and listening to the droning mathematical rhetoric that exactly mirrors the text. I have flat out given a wrong answer and the professor did not catch it… VERY disturbing and bothersome.
Needless to say, I’m screwed for this class and this exam…
I really needed to read this today– although I wish I would have read it before I started grad school. Everything I read in my PhD program (spanish lit) just highlights the “big picture” about life and the fact that we only have one shot at it. Yet, here I am, wasting my one shot at life alone in my room, reading and writing my brains out about trivialities! It’s such a sad contradiction. I feel like crap because my husband has to suffer for my bad decision. Like everyone said, though, it sucks you in and you can’t get out. It takes your life away!!
I’m amazed at how many experiences I’m reading on this board that are similar to my own. Of course I knew going in that grad school was going to be tough, but I had misconceptions about just what the tough experiences were going to be. I’d read advice that grad school could “kill your love” for your field, and thought that couldn’t possibly happen, because I was in it for the research. What I didn’t know in advance was that the research has little to do with exploring tangents of intriguing thought (you can wave goodbye to that pleasure when you get your undergrad degree) and everything to do with indoctrination into whatever school of thought is dominating academia at a particular point in time. However, if it were a simple matter of being bored with the material, I would have been only moderately discouraged by grad school. Class discussion is conducted in such a way that thoughtful commentary is not required, only glibness. Tiny bits of minutiae are argued as if they contained the answer to the question, “Why are we here?” These arguments go round and round, with no more than the most cursory attempt at relevance to the human condition (and by that, I mean relevance to real people’s lives, not hypothetical people), until you start to wonder, “Why the frak am I here?” And if intellectual exhaustion weren’t enough, add in the fact that sycophancy is rewarded to a degree much more obvious than in any other endeavor I have ever participated in (and I’ve been to boot camp, y’all). In retrospect, I think that leaving grad school was one of the best decisions I ever made, though it didn’t feel like it at the time. I really wish that these home truths about grad school were better known, so that incoming students could make more informed decisions about whether or not they want to pursue a postgraduate degree. The fact that this information is still underground makes me wonder if the accusations about racketeering don’t have at least a germ of truth to them.
i’d like to amend my previous post. more than anything, in the last post i was venting after a rough day. i inaccurately generalized when i characterized my department as uncaring about grad students. that simply isn’t true. and although there is little chance that anyone is going to find out who i am or where i go to school, it doesn’t feel right to let those inaccuracies hang out up there because i became frustrated and careless. there are professors here who have been tremendously supportive of me, sometimes despite my occasional immaturity and awkwardness. if grad school is sometimes frustrating and ego-killing, and the other things i wrote above, it is largely because i am daily forced to take an honest look at myself and to work on myself, not just as a professional or as an aspiring academic, but as a person who finally has an opportunity to be immersed in interesting, stimulating work but who sometimes doesn’t feel equal to the task. but this is a process; i have to keep that in mind. graduate programs don’t usually accept unintelligent people, but neither do they accept perfect people. there are a number of areas in my life that need improvement, and i simply have to accept that and work to improve those areas that are visible to me. one of those areas is my level of confidence in my abilities. and if i am experiencing any hazing in my department, then it’s probably a good thing for me, because the sense of self-reliance and self-confidence that can result from such experience is invaluable in any setting–even, and perhaps especially, in one’s relationships outside of academia. working with people of very high intelligence, keen perception, and refined communication skills is a privilege that i am trying to deserve. that’s not to say that this environment is easy to negotiate–especially for someone from my particular background. in other words, being surrounded by keen perception regularly means that i get to see my flaws, faux pas, unexamined assumptions, and other undesirable traits play out in front of me like a horror film. (more often, though, it’s a comedy.) and if “nobody gives a shit,” then that also applies to those moments when i screw up. i am learning that this ride becomes rough when i lose a sense of gratitude and forget to have a sense of humor. i am actually quite happy to be where i am; in fact, i have begun to think that i am exactly where i need to be.
Actually, there is shame in working shit jobs during your 20s. People treat you poorly, look down on you, and almost never think of you as multitalented. And too long in those jobs can crush your talents out of you. They take time away from activities that use your talents and help you to develop new ones. They wear you out and make you small.
On the contrary, graduate school is not shameful. People suppose that you are doing interesting things and making progress. It is a sign of wealth, class, culture, and productivity. Your poverty is excused, because it is seen as transitional and in service of something higher: understanding, accomplishment, that multitalented person whose future seems assured.
Also, TAing and adjuncting are on balance much better than most shit jobs; you make (at least in Canada) more than $20 an hour, which is not terrible, in a clean and civilized environment.
Those of us who have spent time in grad school mostly know that it is an exercise in deferral. We also mostly know that a great deal of what goes on in academia is not what it seems to those outside of it. While I was a grad student, I found this discovery devastating; I felt that I had a made a terrible mistake.
Many years later, I now think that graduate school was very good for me. It looks better on my resume than shit jobs would have. It was better for my sanity. I developed more talents there than I should have otherwise. And most of all, my degrees signal to other that I could afford to spent my 20s in school and travelling rather than working shit jobs.
I’m feeling the pain as well! In my last semester of a tech related masters program (took all my “harder” classes first) but got stuck in a group project class this semester with the following quality group members:
1- Someone who plagiarized 2 pages on the individuals 4 page assignment (not just forgetting quotes or citations – literally copy/pasting with denial afterward).
2- A combative egotistical maniac who just yesterday went on a rant about his “5th Amendment” rights after I shut him down on defying the instructor and our analysis host organization (when referring to freedom of speech…lol)
3- Someone who took an online course and now claims they have limited Internet access (as a reason not to contribute any work)
The clock is counting – 7 weeks left… 45 pages done, 21 left… I’ve digressed to one word e-mails to group members and am essentially doing all the work myself (since the Instructor views appeals for assistance in this class as a failure criteria). Bring them hoops on but I’m gonna laugh at anyone telling me to do a PhD!
For all of you have finished, congrats, for all who are still in the firing line, hang in there, and for those who have not been here, don’t do it (unless you’re REALLY dedicated and willing to put up with loads of stress and hoops).
Regards to all!
thanks everyone for all of your posts. I have had a very difficult experience in my grad school, most of it being difficult because of internal politics. I worked hard and long to be here, and I hate it, and it is nice to hear that I am not the only one. Sometimes misery does love company!
Only a few more weeks until summer– that means that I just get to work on my dissertation at home without the hassle of coursework. Huzzah!
I am seriously considering finishing my Master’s degree and getting the fuck out of dodge. I managed to get an A- on a statistics exam that I was not prepared for. It helped that the prof gave everyone 30 points to curve the scores; that’s how poorly everyone did. The sad thing is that 50% of us are getting tutoring and we’re still performing badly!
Tells ya something doesn’t it?
Oh yeah, this makes things so much better. This is my last year and the chair of my committee is going on Sabbatical. I won’t be in contact with her at all; she made it explicit that she won’t be reviewing anything. How, exactly, can she be the chair of my committee then? I have no idea.
I’m pursuing an MA in English, but not hard enough. I’m burned out enough to be behind in 3 of 3 courses, and am seriously considering taking Incompletes and bugging out to finish the last month’s work at a saner pace.
My big mistake, I think, was being here at all. The work in grad school can be interesting, but the volume of work itself is part of your education. It is fundamentally ritual in nature. Most of it serves little purpose, but you will need to keep up to do well in papers or tests. And keeping up is not a benign one-foot-in-front of-the-other process. It demands everything, and what’s worse, few will acknowledge it.
If you need your “me time,” but you don’t know how or want to plan your life meticulously, you will fall behind and burn out anyway. And then you’ll feel guilty for taking the “me time” and not burning out earlier.
for all of you still in classes, you _do_ get your life back after prelims. i promise. but getting my life back (i’m about halfway through a humanities diss.) hasn’t meant a resurgence in interest… either in my field, or for what i planned to do with the phd, teach. i’m finishing because i’ve invested in this… because i love the life i created after moving for school… because it’s sustainable to work part time and dissertate part time without feeling like i did in classes, that i had to work every second of every day… but all of that said, it’s likely i won’t become a professor. the economy says no, and my heart says no.
somehow, even on the days when it all seems to mean nothing (especially when i want to crawl under the table during poetry discussion because i’m not as “up” on recent poetics as i was when i was taking classes) i still want to finish. i know it might sound strange, but even if i do nothing with the phd i’ll feel good about finishing. i can’t really explain it… maybe it’s because my life has the balance it didn’t when i was pulling 60+ hour weeks, or that i can, unlike a lot of you on this list, put my studies away when i need to. right now, though, thinking about having more time for writing, for finishing, and for finally moving on (whatever i end up doing next) i feel like finishing the phd is the right thing. (well, who would quit after 6 years anyway?)
still, i hate the competetive feeling i get when i hear someone’s gotten really good funding! it’s frustrating–i’ve always worked my way through TAing and whatnot, taking on freelance, odd jobs, working a second job for the last 4 years, while a lot of people around me have sailed through on fellowships, scholarships, project assistantships. maybe the reason i feel good about the phd is because in the end, i will have actually earned it, both intellectually and monetarily. and doesn’t pscyhology have something to say about “owning” the choices you make?
Grad school has been a soul sucking experience for the most part. I’m a 2nd year Phd student in political theory and my colleagues are a bunch of pontificating morons, who are sexist, racist, and full of shit! TA ing gives me anxiety attacks, we were the keeners us folks in grad school and I think we have forgotten what most to the undergrad body was like – there to pick up! I had to learn an still learning about the “culture” of grad school, keeping tabs on everyone else, pretending to have read everything, trying to out do everyone, I am not of the same mind, I believe one can succeed without trying to run over everyone else, or being jealous, or being sneaky, I love my research and I have purposefully selected an area which is meaningful to me, very personal, and has a practical component… these days I try to hide from most, in and out no hanging around, people are so untrustworthy in grad school, I def.. do want to date a grad student!
What the hell did I get myself into? I finished my MA last year…b4 that I said to myself: No PhD, no way, I am going home. Then, when my application to PhD program was accepted…I did not know what to do. One morning after several weeks of hard thinking and maybe influenced what others would think if I did not continue into PhD…I entered the program…Right choice? I dont think so…I feel stupid, inferior to everyone around me, hopeless. Am I a failure? Most of the times I answer that question affirmatively . That is what being surrounded by people with no life other than writing and presenting articles has done for me. I cry many nights. All I want to do is tell these people who look down on me to fuck off, you are ruining my life. In case I did not make myself clear: Grad school SUCKS!!!!!
So most ppl who enter grad school find out that it’s not what they thought it would be. On top of that, there’s a new problem for grad students. Do you stick it out, milk that grad stipend for all it’s worth, and get that useless degree and be unemployed or do you take the plunge, leave the superficial shelter of academia and take the Master’s and enter this economy only to compete with the largest graduating class in American history and still be unemployed. Decisions, Decisions Doesn’t it feel great to have so many options…and you thought that by getting several degrees you were increasing your employment opportunities…tisk, tisk.
It’s been up and down for me. Yes, I know that as a fully funded PhD student in a science (well I think it’s a social science, but the university says science) department. I’m spoiled by my advisor’s negligence, in fact. I live in a crappy town, but crappy = affordable, so I’m comfortable, if lonely at times. The sad part is, even though I’ve got a great grad school gig, it’s still demoralizing and deflating. I miss being a work-a-holic! I don’t WANT to spend more time doing work nobody cares about, work that I don’t even feel good at. I love working in general, but I can’t force myself to work on my dissertation. I’m five years in, and I’ll probably need another 9 months or so before I can land a mediocre postdoc. But I want to be making a contribution and be excited about my work again. I don’t know what that will take. Is this just normal burnout, or is my heart telling me to look for other options? And what ARE the other options? Nobody in my department seems to know, and asking about this makes you look like you’re not dedicated to the field. I wish people could have an honest discussion about career possibilities post-phd. We won’t all get tenure-track jobs, so where is the weakness in discussing the other options? I know I want to finish, I love my subject area, I don’t think I want to continue doing mediocre, low-impact research…What next? And why is looking else where so frowned upon? The system is deeply flawed.
After a few days of reflection in a state of post-Master’s defense trauma, I have come to the realization that I am going to struggle through this PhD program if I continue to display any signs of my humanity. I must quickly jettison any outward evidence of my ability to engage with others and enjoy life— my desire for sunlight, my zest for interpersonal human communication through language, and my uncanny ability to “shake it like a salt shaker” (Urban Dictionary, 64) — if I expect these people to take me seriously. Fuck! I can’t tell you how much work it’s going to take for me to stop making eye contact!
One poster earlier said that he no longer believed in political science. At first, this statement seemed quite laughable, like saying that one doesn’t believe in peanut butter. But I understand what he means. Although I graduated with an MA in English literature, I’m not sure I believe in my field, either, at least in the sense that I no longer think it’s an essential field of study. In grad school, my professors commended me for my fluency in literary theory, and I still love literature. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening changed my life. But I slowly became aware of the huge disconnect between my field and the real world. Producing literary criticism is such an isolated act that has no appreciable impact on anyone else’s life. At least a grad student in the sciences could say that he/she helped create a new type of plastic that could be used in an artificial heart, a development that helped improve someone’s life. So I wouldn’t say that grad school in the sciences is always a bad thing, but I’ve begun to question the usefulness of a humanities education.
BTW, hello awkward is right. Grad school does negatively affect one’s social skills. Although I’ve never been an outgoing person, I emerged from undergrad with the ability to converse well in professional settings and carry on small talk at fancy gatherings. Grad school left me with no time for any social interaction that wasn’t strictly required, so my skills have evaporated and I will have to relearn them all over again. Maybe grad schools should offer free social skills classes as part of their programs.
I agree with doubting thomas. You have to have some deep inner drive to keep you motivated.
I’ve been having my own set of difficulties in grad school–much like those posted here. I’ll also admit that I have somewhat less respect for the “softer” areas of study, being a science student. Your drive has to come from within yourself in grad school. As an undergrad, I was sick and tired of exams and other students that were unmotivated, as I was very much interested in learning the material for its own sake.
In grad school, you must be self-motivated to some grander vision in order to get through it, although I will admit that many of the students at my school are just doing what they were previously good at (i.e. doing it because they are avoiding real-world work). My personal motivations have shifted somewhat, towards helping improve the currently abusive teaching practices at grad and undergrad levels. I don’t think “hazing” is the most effective way to produce original, creative, independent-thinking scientists…it’s better at creating narrow-minded and bitter autocrats, such as are common in our institutions. So perhaps all you bitter grad students can take these negative experiences and turn them around in the future? I.e. instead of complaining and whining, take on the responsibility of leading a new generation and new style of teaching?
Yep. Grad school has been the most alienating experience of my life. It is designed to make you feel inferior. Those who succeed are good at doing what they are told. Come to believe in the radical social theory that you study only to feel alienated by your family and friends (the ones who insisted that this degree give you credibility, so that you can “help” people) who mistake your professional advice for casual opinion.
To the individual who posted: why a science PhD is like communism: this is why people in the sciences are complete idiots (in the Lacanian sense of the term).
Thank you all for posting. It’s Saturday night and I’m home alone studying for a qualifying exam although there’s a good chance I’ll fail it. I am a misfit in my PhD program and don’t have any one to study/commiserate with. Reading this blog has made me feel like less of a failure for continuing to stay at home on Saturday nights. I am especially grateful to Bilbo for reminding me that shit jobs where people treated me badly weren’t exactly a career either. The phrase “a fine and pleasant misery” often comes to mind when contemplating grad school. Best of luck to all of you.
This article is wonderful, and the tens of people chipping in with experiences make it all the more useful.
I wanted to pursue a PhD in Engineering, and was admitted with a fellowship to one of the top 3 universities in America. Halfway through my Masters, things started to go very wrong. Every day became a nightmare, because I was clinging on to the prestige that I think a PhD degree had, and yet there was an ever-present subconscious discomfort. It took me weeks to realize that I didn’t want to do a PhD, and finding the reasons for that was relatively straightforward after that. I’ve finally decided to quit, and am truly seeing how bigoted and short-sighted most advice on grad school is.
Now that I am somewhat stable, I don’t wish that this period in my life should disappear. I learnt a lot, and it seems that going through a reasonable amount of pain gives you a strange kind of lasting contentment and happiness after the pain is past.
I am in week three…I’m already looking for jobs that I could maybe get in January if I drop out. I just realized that it is not where I want to be. I went to a very small liberal arts college for undergrad and now I am at a large southern university of like 45,000. It’s my first exposure to real academia and, frankly, I think it’s awful. I am enjoying my TAship, which has opened my eyes to possibly doing an alternate route for a teaching certificate. I think I would really enjoy teaching…so I guess this little bit of grad school hasn’t been a complete waste of time!
Thank-you for this board. I’ve been languishing in a (state-run) Master’s of Urban Planning program for 2.5 years…Required courses are only offered once per academic year and I’ve actually avoided taking a “core” courses because the professor annoys me so much! Top it off, the majority of people in my program are socially-inept and seem to hate PEOPLE. Ironically, they’re in a field which is(supposedly)geared toward improving urban space to benefit the public (which is primarily comprised of PEOPLE). There are times when I’m so frustrated by the attitudes exhibited by my “peers” that I’ve contemplated quitting. I only stay because the school’s my parents alma mater AND becoming an urban planner is my childhood dream.
It’s good to know I’m not alone. I just started a MPA program in Texas and I am doubting whether I should have even started. I hate the writing, doing the work and what not. I love working and I have this sense of being lazy about doing homework, research papers, etc. Sigh.
I am in the same boat as you guys. I started a master’s program in teaching and I hated it. I was absolutetely miserable. So I switched my program to a Master’s of Arts in Social Sciences. I feel like I should have taken time off between switching programs because now I am terrified I won’t be able to find a job. Meanwhile, I am getting more and more into debt. I can’t even afford to take time off now because I will have to start paying back loans.
I’m not a PhD student (and after only 1/2 semester of grad school, all thoughts of pursuing such have now vanished), but I am working toward a masters in speech-language-pathology, which is required to work in the field. BUT it sucks! I agree that the professors act like they are high and mighty, but yet, a few of them aren’t much older than me. The assignments are just busy-work (i.e.- read an article…try to make sense of it…then write down the main points). I’m a GA and an absolute NOBODY, yet I too have worked out in the “real world” and worked directly with every level of a multimillion dollar company. Now, I am sitting here venting on this blog because I just don’t give a damn right now about doing all the crap I have to do. But, I will soon start studying after finishing this rant simply because I must finish this degree in order to make enough $$ to pay back the freakin loans I took out to do this in the first place. Yes, Grad school sucks. It’s boring. It consumes your life. You gain weight because you don’t have time, money or energy to workout. And, interestingly enough, I find myself wondering if I will actually enjoy this as a career.
Thank goodness I found this website – I don’t feel alone anymore. I’m in my first semester in grad school and absolutely hate it. I’m a mature student and have worked previously. Thought I would do PhD – but not now. I’m doing first year MA sociology – its just so pointless. Trying to understand theories which are of no use in the real world. Do I really want to spend the next 20 years of my life having to ‘publish, publish, publish’? I don’t think so. I’m quitting at the end of this semester – not willing to waste my time feeling so depressed, anxious and lonely. Every morning when I get up I can’t face the amount of work I have to do – I even dream about theories! You get no reassurance that what you do is ok. I get top grades – A’s all the way – but still hate it! Thank you so much for helping me make the difficult decision to quit and not feel like a failure – because no matter how much you go over it in your head you still think that by quitting it is failing. It isn’t, there’s so much more to life than the world of academia. It’s not that I will stop life long learning – something I’ve always done – it just won’t be in the world of grad school.
I googled “grad school sucks” and all of this sounds like my diary. Im not a good student, I accidentally got good grades in my BA (only because the tiny bit i tried was more than my peers)… and I could not find a job. College is a pit of quick sand! I cant seem to get out! Is it so much to ask that I just get a job, go to work, come home and have time to MYSELF?? How does the world function? Why can’t I find a place in it?
Finally after years and years of torture, that darned degree is done with !!!!!!! Grad school for me started out with expectations of achieving a higher state of being/mind etc etc. What it later morphed was a very survival of my dignity and piece of mind.
At some point life caught up with me, I got married, got a job and left graduate school. I was happy. Then I made the super duper mistake of listening to my wife/parents/inlaws and put this idea in my head, that I started it and I might as well finish it! That led to having to do some “serious asskissing” to get my sorry ass back into grad school. I did that. Regret the second time around (I must’ve been glutton for punishment). I worked 40hrs a week and then sacrificed what measly measure of sleep that I needed to work on my thesis/experiments. Literally 1.5 years later I finally defended.
What is displeasing is that darned trauma that I’ve work to do after finishing my everyday work still lingers in my mind 2 months after graduation
I think it’ll take a while for me to mentally train myself that 5pm means done, and weekend means that I “really don’t have homework/thesis/experiments to conduct”.
What did I get out of grad school? I got my piece of mind that I finished what I started, but it’s still significantly scarred.
Think 10^10 times before you decide to goto grad school. If you love studies then by all means, but have realistic expectations.
I’m so glad I found this site. This too is my first semester, I admit I jumped into grad school right after UG because that’s what the “smart kids” do and I hate it. I hate the knots in my stomach, spending 15 hour days on campus doing work, and worst of all losing what I loved about my subject before coming in, and everything I enjoyed outside of homework. I break down crying every day, I feel like an outcast, the only joy I get from grad school is the class I TA.
Add to the fact I am doing a degree a little different than my BS and I’m only in one actual grad class (the other two are advanced UG to fill in the holes I had) and here I am, 3 in the morning trying to figure out how I’m going to not completely break down or succumb to the urge to drive my car off a bridge on my way home.
I just want to be me again.
It’s nice to know that there are others who are experiencing what I am going through.
Like circles, I went into graduate school because I assumed that it was what I am supposed to do, since I have a BS in behavioral science. To add insult to injury to myself, I went into something primarily for what salary I could make when I get my Master’s.
I broke down three times last week under the pressure of my workload. I am taking three challenging classes, a seminar, going to a conference in a week, and an officer in a student chapter our advisor wanted us to form. I am doing all of this to keep my advisor placated. I am starting to seriously consider that I am in the wrong program, if I’m not even supposed to be in grad school anyway. My stomach lurches when I hear about anything to do with the grad program I’m in.
Granted, there are people who do what I do AND hold down a full time job. While this should make me get off my bottom and work harder, it only makes me feel guilty for getting burned out.
It’s terrible, really. I feel as if everything I learned as an undergrad has gone out the window.
Graduate school can open doors, but I tell anyone thinking of graduate school to take their time (if they can) with it, and be damned sure that it’s what they want to do.
I wish I had read more about graduate school from more honest sources before diving head first so fast.
I too am in my first semester of a social science PhD and don’t know what the fuck I was thinking when I started. The only thing that seems more appalling than going to class for one more god damn day is the thought of having to write a dissertation! My ass is out of here… good luck to everyone.
Im a Microbiology student in a PhD program at a top 3 university. I am so glad to find this site…can’t believe how many other people are going through the same feelings of misery.
The classes are terrible, and my PI is a meddling micromanager. I’m intellectually not in the same league as many of the people here and I’m not sure I want to be! I spend much of my time simultaneously in awe of their smarts and annoyed by their tendency to dissect every single point down to the tiniest of minutiae. It makes me sleepy and passionless.
The first year was really tough, but I thought I could make it. Ive begun year two now, and can hardly take any more. I’ve put in applications for menial jobs so I can make a fast exit. Yes, I’ve decided to quit. No one knows yet. The only thing holding me back right now is the paycheck…once I get confirmation that I will have work, I’m outta here. I feel like I’m drowning every single day – they have me on two antidepressants! This is no way to live. So I’m cutting the ties to this prestigious place to save myself. It sucks to see a dream die, but I had no idea grad school would be like this. I’ve been through a lot of shit in my life, but I’ve never been more miserable.
I’m still in the wretched State U Urban Planning program…Life’s a bit annoying, the constant advise from my profs to “study more.” All I can say is “B**tch Puh-leaze. I’m not lazy, I just don’t care.”
However, I just figured something out: you don’t have to do well, just well enough. So, I’m going to eat well, excercise, go out (de-stress), take fewer credits (no more than 9) and tell the bastards what they what to hear–that they matter (when, truthfully, they don’t.
Eventually, I get a degree out of this mess…I’ll just have to hustle a little more.
Glad I’m not the only one…..
I’m 8 weeks into a fully funded Masters and am very, very close to dropping out.
The workload is insane. I’m so busy between TA’ing, classes, assignments, and my RA’ship that I have no life. Moreover, I’m stretched so thin that all my work is mediocre at best.
I absolutely loathe the coursework. None of classes have anything to do with my research interests and I simply can’t force myself to write the garbage I’m being asked to write. I’ve been at my computer for 5 hours tonight and wrote 1 line for an essay. I graduated with top honors in my undergrad and loved every minute of it, but for some reason I just can’t do it anymore. I’ve lost all my motivation and am completely jaded with academia and my discipline.
My department however is great and my advisor is a fantastic and supportive. Really phenomenal person. I did my undergrad at the same school and dropping out would make me look like a failure to my advisor and all the people in the department who I respect and worked with in the past. I fear I would ruin my reputation if I drop out which I think I will.
What a mess, I wish I never accepted….
This thread is amazing. I feel that we can all agree on that.
For the record: 3rd and final year MFA grad in top university. Hating every minute of it, but hanging in there as I’m over the hump. Can;t wait to exit from this cult.
This is the second time that I’ve been through these posts…thank you so much for your honesty!
I am finding grad school to be just out of my ballpark. Yes, I am intelligent and performed exceptionally well in my UG, and yes, I have real-world experience (through relatively prestigious part-time jobs). But this shit has made me feel inadequate, empty and left with zero drive. Why did I even start this? I am disallusioned with the propaganda that my UG profs spread (and continue to spread), and am burned out beyond belief. I haven’t had a break since the 3rd year of my UG, including 50 hours/week of work each summer with minor vacations, and absolutely regret thinking that I was ready to just continue on to do a masters.
Oh, and what the fuck am I studying?! Ridiculous theory which is all math… I loathe my coursework (and am not comfortable in math). I am not ready to throw in the towel but don’t have it in me to better the situation. Ugh I just want this shit to be over.
Thanks again for your posts. Misery loves company!
This website was a welcome relief after discussing dropping out of grad school with classmates and friends. They never understand, they always put it in terms of how much time I have left – 6 months to a year. Instead, its not a matter of time – its a matter of writing a bullshit thesis on a core area of linguistics. My original topic was the structure of the french syllable. How do I put this? “I don’t care.” That probably describes it best.
Since starting grad school I’ve gotten a job in an applied area of my field: I work in corporate america as a researcher in literacy. I feel like I’m actually doing something worthwhile there, and I even get to read lots of interesting articles and get paid for it!
Then I come home after a long day of thinking about real issues, to either read more articles about some obscure topic, or to feel guilty for going out with my friends instead, or even – god forbid – for reading a book that I want to read.
Linguistics has been ruined for me. Graduate school is for followers, not for creative thinkers, as someone put it on an earlier post. Professors (at least in my field) guarantee themselves a job by doing nothing more but criticizing the work of a few who produce it, and never come up with anything new. I find that my program only teaches one way of doing linguistics – and indoctrinates all of the students by forcing them to work under certain frameworks. Not explicitly of course, but the pass/fail thesis takes care of that.
Leaving grad school is so scary that even though I’ve been reading this blog for over an hour now and feeling so happy that others feel the same way as I do, I won’t leave. I have 1-2 semesters until I get my masters degree. Unfortunately, I feel obligated as I was hired with a masters in progress. I feel like it is expected of me. And I want that piece of paper – I want to have something to show for my time and everything I’ve learned. Some of it has been useful, but some so obscure that I need to justify it somehow.
I’m almost done with my first semester of an MA in Museum Studies and I’m tired of it already. I had a project that I’ve been working on all semester (which I thought was pretty good) torn apart publicly today, with a week left before it’s due. All of the “critiquers” involved knew what I was doing the whole time and yet waited until now to tell me that I just can’t do a big part of it. How am I supposed to come up with something else in a week when it took me 2 months to do that??
MAYBE I could have done more research so I could have some back-ups if it wasn’t for the insane amount of reading in this and other classes, most of which we never discuss so I wonder why I wasted my time. Not to mention the random trivial essays that take more time.
I’m almost at the point where I don’t even like museums anymore. My undergrad degree is in archaeology and I really enjoyed my time in that program, but I realized I didn’t want to be a professional archaeologist, so I went for an MA in a related field. I doubt I would like an MA or PhD program in archaeology any better. The problem is, most jobs that you can get with only a BA in arch. are very low-paying, not enough to live off of. I don’t know what to do now. I guess I will have to stick it out for at least another semester and see if I can find a decent job with what I have and can get health insurance (I would lose that if I dropped out now; I have a pre-existing condition so I couldn’t get it or afford it on my own).
I guess the worst part is the blow to my self-esteem. I was an almost-straight A student all through school including all 4 yrs of undergrad and I took some pretty tough courses. And now to have my projects which I’ve worked so hard on torn apart like that with the high probability of a C in my classes is downright demoralizing and I feel very depressed over it. I cried my eyes out in the car after class tonight, and that wasn’t the first nor will it be the last time that happens.
I am humbled and grateful for the wisdom in the anecdotes presented here.
Anon09, there is no shame in admitting that your particular graduate degree wasn’t suited for you. (It isn’t just a matter of your “not being good enough.”) The criteria by which academics assess new academics has built-in flaws and blind spots. I remember once in graduate school I wrote what I thought was a brilliant and unconventional paper and the teacher ripped it to shreds. I was infuriated (and I wrote her a pointed but civilized rebuttal), but by then I had seen the big picture. Each professor teaches one way to analyze problems, and this teacher did not want to see it the way I did.
That said, if everyone in graduate school had free tuition and expenses paid, there would be more freedom to pursue intellectual interests. That would be utopia, but it would prevent you from valuing intellectual endeavors appropriately.
By the way, I would be curious if people who posted earlier who come back and then tell what happened 1, 2 or 3 years later — to show that life after graduate school is not a grand tragedy.
Now is probably a hard time to be looking for work. But you are young and educated and talented. If you love archealogy, you can always find a way to channel it into another productive area (although it may not happen immediately).
(By the way, what ever happened to peace corps or Teach for America? I finished peace corps and it changed my life).
“Grad school is a volume-based business. You better be able to crank out a lot of essays and reconcile yourself to the fact that a large percentage of it will be mediocre or ultimately unimportant.”
Oh my God..this is so frigging true!! I am a second- year grad student in journalism, at a very reputed university. Even tho I’m in a friggin professional track, all I am doing is submitting reams and reams of papers, and getting really low grades on them because I just can’t write anymore!! All I wanted to do was get some hands-on experience in reporting but I seem to be stuck in a research-based course!! Why are papers given so much importance that failure to submit even one results in a F grade?? especially since we are expected to write at least TWO 15-20 pages papers for EVERY course! and they call it a professional track. I came to grad school knowing that i DO NOT want to get stuck writing lit reviews and research papers. and now tht is exactly what I am doing! And they call it the professional track.
Oh thank God I found this place. Honestly, I really believed I was totally alone in hating graduate school. And you know, it only took me two weeks into it to size up the situation and clue into my feelings on the topic – ie., the hostility of my advisor, the stupid, witless feedback I was getting, etc. – I was ready to drop out, to be quite honest – not because I felt demoralized, but because it was like – okayyyy – I just had a clear reading of the whole dynamic and knew, knew, knew it was not for me. What got me was the power-tripping authoritarian crap my advisor was laying on me, after “safely” luring me in…I think he finally felt confident enough to treat me like shit, and seriously expected me to take it and lick his boots. I remember my third meeting in, giving him the devil stare – and he actually got up and moved to a seat across from me, because I really think I intimidated him. I have worked in my field. I am pretty street smart, and I knew exactly what I had gotten myself into. The only reason I didn’t quit – because I seriously thought about it – the second week in – was that I had a TA ship and funding and it seemed wrong to “leave a job” without proper notice, etc.
Things have not improved, I’ve just adjusted my expectations accordingly – as in having none. What else am I supposed to do? Delude myself into believing I”m going to have some kind of useful, purposeful, productive “mentoring” relationship with an asshole? I feel really burnt out however, and I’m losing energy. I decided I was going to finish this thing – but I’m really going to have to start taking care of myself. The whole experience is so isolating and demoralizng – its like being a battered housewife. Pathetic, really. I’m glad to have found this place. I’m glad I’m not alone, although I sure don’t wish my experience on anyone. My Education. What a fucking joke. What I’ve “learnt” is that I fucking hate this discipline.
I know I started my MA for the wrong reasons. I’ve always thought that the route to money and prestige was through obtaining degrees.
I am 2 weeks away from finishing my first course and I already realized that this is not what I want to do. I hate writing research papers…grading is so subjective and it really sucks the joy out of learning. I was learning a lot, but I realized that I don’t have to be in a degree program to learn.
I’m going to follow my gut and say adios after this class is over. And I feel oh, so relieved.
I have never felt so inadequate.
I googled “I hate grad school,” and this site turned up. I am now in my second semester of grad school in a neuroscience PhD program and I am giving much consideration to dropping out and going back home. Since starting, I have met quite a few disappointments and it seems as time goes by I become even more disappointed with my decision and the program. One thing people don’t tell you (by people I mean professors and others who advise you to attend grad school) is that some programs don’t allow you to work. The program I am currently in falls under that category, and I didn’t even know about this “minor” detail until after I made plans to move. I accepted this fact because my stipend was pretty decent (at least I thought so at the time), and had planned a potential budget. When it was time for us to receive our first payment, however, someone had messed up on the paperwork so we didn’t get paid (they said someone “signed in the wrong place”). No one seemed to care about this, either, which further infuriated me. Our payment finally came a month overdue, however, we didn’t receive the amount we were supposed to. After we received our second payment, a classmate and I realized the gross amount was less than promised in our letters of acceptance, which had been updated with a higher stipend amount upon our arrival for orientation. We questioned a woman in human resources who didn’t understand why we were being paid a completely different amount from what was promised, and upon furter consideration, my classmate and I decided to drop it and move on.
One student didn’t know that we weren’t allowed to work and once the chair found out she was working, he more or less threatened her by saying she signed a contract (she didn’t and the first letter of acceptance said nothing about working, I only knew because I asked if they thought it was possible time-wise to work and go to school). At the time of this confrontation, we had still not been paid. Needless to say, she wasn’t very happy and when she told me about their “talk” I was even more pissed off that he would approach her like that. If I had even thought there would be such a screw up with our money, I would have kept my job, too.
The classes are also very different from what I expected. Of course I knew they would be more difficult than undergrad courses, but…wow. One of the classes from my first semester was an introductory course, so we all figured there would be some teaching on the instructors part since some of the students had never been exposed to that particular material. Instead, we would all read a chapter, come to class and there would be a discussion among the students. If someone asked the professor a question, he would direct it to the other classmates as if we were qualified to explain the topic in question. The class quickly became an opinion course when it was supposed to be about scientific facts about the foundations of neuroscience. The only knowledge I gained was from my own reading, from which most of my notes came. I am now in a class in which the professor constantly says, “Come on, you guys should know this, you’re in graduate school.” I should point out that my program is in the biology department. As a psychology major I didn’t have to take many biology courses (I took 4, more than most of my fellow psych classmates probably), so I knew I had to work a little harder than some of my classmates. I was comforted to learn that some of those students hadn’t been in school for a while or like myself graduated with a major in something else (chemistry). I was told upon visiting the campus by some members of the faculty that I should take a few biology courses in order to prepare myself, and by some that I should be fine as long as I did the work. I decided to try out the first semester with all grad courses to see if extra undergrad courses were necessary. I was satisfied with my performance at the end of the semester and got good grades, so figured I should be fine this semester. Now, the class in question is completely different from what anyone expected. Even tbe people who have majors in biology don’t know what’s going on.
My biggest problem is the fact that the professors in the department more or less expect you to just sit around and wait for them to come up with something for us to do, whether it be a seminar or some random meeting they just decided to have. Last semester, someone didn’t pay attention when they scheduled the class times, and as a result one of our classes took place at the same time we were all supposed to go to a seminar at a school an hour a way. These trips occurred weekly for a month on the same day and time. The professor of this class was not happy, and later on in the semester when he needed to reschedule a class he said “It’s time for you to accomodate me,” as if we had asked him to reschedule the previous times because of one of his colleagues mistakes. There were events that were deemed “voluntary,” however when only a few people showed up, the heads of the department would get upset and send out angry emails. These events are now mandatory, and there will even be sign-in sheets. I understood coming in that I would have virtually no life as a graduate student, but at the same time these people need to realize that we do make plans based on our schedule, whether it is important or not. I constantly have to check my email in case one of the professors decides we should meet or if something departmental came up all of the sudden.
There was a time when I loved neuroscience. I couldn’t wait to have a career doing research, making my own scientific findings, curing diseases, and all those other cliche dreams. I enjoyed reading about it, talking about it, going to conferences to hear from great researchers that I aspired to be like. Now, I am completely uninterested. I hate my classes and I keep thinking of things I would rather be doing. I have always been a procrastinator, but now I do something that is well beyond procrastination. As far as stress goes, I’m more worried about whether or not I’ll be able to pay my rent and other bills on time or at all than I am about getting all of my work done. The department made a huge point about providing funding so we didn’t have to work and could pay more attention to our studies. Ha!
At first I felt bad about wanting to drop out, but little things keep happening that further assure me I should just get out while I can. I feel I have no reason to stay. If I’m going to be away from my family and everything I’ve ever known, it has to be for something far better than this. When I would tell people what I was going to school for, the first thing they would say was, “You’re going to make so much money.” I don’t even care about that. I never have. What’s the point in having a lot of money if you are completely unhappy with what you are doing and have no one around you that you care about to share the experience with? I am definitely leaving.
I apologize for the long rant. It’s been a long week and I just needed reassurance that I’m not making a huge mistake by ducking out early. This website did it for me.
Candace,
First, I fully and completely understand your position. My program (in urban planning) is also staffed by the grossly incompetent…That being said, perhaps the answer isn’t abandoning your dream, but simply finding another (better-run) neuroscience PhD program? I’m one to talk, but it’s just a suggestion…
What a bunch of whiners. Sheesh. Grad school was one of the best times of my life. Yeah, I was broke. Yeah, I had to learn some things that were pointless later. But afterwards, it got me a lot of work and even a little respect. The degree can help you stand out from the crowd. Boo-hoo, it doesn’t fit with your busy schedule. Then don’t go!
Whiners. Exactly. I’m sure you will succeed marvelously in an easier profession like medicine or law.
My experience with graduate school was mixed. In my MFA program, there were all sorts of politics and misbehavior and narrow-mindedness. But I also felt a strong sense of community, produced a good body of work, and learned a hell of a lot. I also landed a tenure-track job. Lots of these complaints about no tenure-line jobs are focusing solely on graduate/research institutions and there are plenty of undergraduate/teaching institutions out there as well.
By contrast, my first attempt at a Ph.D. program (in education–sort of) was an experience of indoctrination into Marxist thinking, with surprisingly narrow-minded professors and their disciples who created a thought-police-state that was too extremist for me and tolerated little dissent (even though dissent was the M.O.).
My second attempt at a Ph.D.in education was worlds different, but problematic in that they put through many people (students and faculty) who had no business being there in order to build a new program. Ultimately I decided to quit at ABD stage and there is a strong cultural pressure to feel that I “failed” somehow, even though the two experiences helped shape my thinking dramatically and even though I successfully completed many different courses and two comprehensive exams. In fact I used to feel that way myself. Now I am content in that I have a secure job, I enjoy my students, and the interest I pay on student loans goes to help other students attend college. (I feel my student loan debt has more to do with my lack of skill in managing money than anything else).
I also think that there are many positive experiences in graduate school and many people here are making the mistake by assuming their experience is representative. It is not easy by any means, but I was willing to endure it to be a bohemian with health insurance and a retirement account.
Graduate school is definitely NOT the continuation of undergraduate school—there is a whole new level of professionalism and higher standards and also politics and gamesmanship. And of course it is hard. If it were easy, everyone could do it.
My advice to anyone who is spooked by this page is to SERIOUSLY investigate the institution you might think about attending (talk to students, talk to professors, read the work of the professors, find out the truth about funding), examine your motives for attending, do some real research on your intended job market (for academics, read The Chronicle of Higher Education, look at the job postings there, etc.). Realistic expectations are in order.
My final words: Graduate school sucks. And it doesn’t.
I am in the 3rd year of a PhD in Economics. And I am very pleased with it so far. However, I realize that my being pleased with it is a result of a few factors:
1) I didn’t stand a chance being satisfied with a “real job” immediately after graduation from my BA, nor even my MA (in a different field — had to start from scratch with the PhD).
2) With economics as my discipline, I know that my options outside of academia are pretty good, so I’m neither worried about being stuck in academia nor worried about not being able to become stuck in academia — the other stuff I can do with the degree looks good.
3) I have already had doors opened to me that would not have been without the program.
4) Crucially, I have considered it my job to work round-the-clock as much as possible and thought that way even in undergrad, so there was no transition of losing “a life” — I didn’t have much of one to begin with. Well, at some point I did, but that was a very long time ago, so long ago that I don’t feel its absence anymore.
5) Faculty have been generally supportive (I have been fortunate enough to not have had a horror story occur, like I have seen other people suffer).
6) I have even learned something!
7) Again, #4 really tells most of the story. The first two years of courses and prelims and such were incredibly boring and unfulfilling, but that kind of didn’t matter, because I wasn’t expecting to be doing anything more interesting with my life anyway, so I was content with it. And nowadays, I know that if I worked less, I would quickly fall out of favor with the profs, and I see how miserable some of my colleagues are, but doing all that work is fine with me, because I’m still content to at least partially sell my soul, at least for another few years. I’m just not sure what I would do in the evenings and weekends right now if it weren’t for work. I used to love the social life I had, but since I lost it so long ago, I don’t really have anything left to lose.
Grad School has very little to do with reinforcing norms. Well, it does, but it has much more to do with the intellectual insecurity of the tenured profs. Every year, the profs get another crop of best-test-score, most-accomplished, super-enthusiastic kids. All of whom have great opinions of their intellects.
There is the real possibility that one or more of them could actually show the professor up. They need to be shown their place. They need to know who’s in charge and to toe the line. The whole idea of higher learning is meritocracy, but it’s really about people having undeserved sinecures keeping them. More than anything, that’s responsible for academic orthodoxy.
I have to say, in contrast to a lot of the other posts here, that what I hate about graduate school is NOT tied to the petty politics of my department, the mediocre ass-kissers who monopolize all the plum jobs and study-abroad positions, or the coursework and reading that I’ve had to do. I have been able to avoid department politics by re-shaping my research interests based on which professors I could identify as decent human beings (mind you, I had to switch from sub-Saharan African francophone literature to Renaissance francophone literature, but I still did it). What I hate about grad school is the shitty career prospects waiting for me on the outside, and the fact that the ass-kissing and inside connections are what determines, for the most part, who will get good jobs. The chair of my PhD committee is a big-time scholar, and he could probably throw me an OK job at some institution in the United States. The only problem is…I don’t want to live in the U.S. after I leave school. I’m half Belgian and when I was a kid, my siblings and I all planned to live over there for at least a while. Now that I’m grown up, my brother and sister have long ago abandoned that dream, while I’ve gone to graduate school essentially because I didn’t see a better way to go on improving my French and Dutch to the point that I might be able to function as a Belgian. I’d love to work at ANY Belgian university, with or without tenure, but people keep telling me how no European university will hire me, no matter how good my work is, because their employment is even more of a patronage-based system than ours. FUCK!
A. Fox who posted above is Professor Aaron Fox of Columbia University (see here: http://music.columbia.edu/user/afox).
Feel free to send him your feedback concerning his opinion that you’re all “whiners” at aaf19@columbia.edu.
[Note from Robert: I am neither going to confirm or deny this. However, I will say that nothing about the comment as expressed here would confirm this fact.]
For proof of A. Fox’s identity, go to the metafilter discussion of this post at http://www.metafilter.com/88612/Misery-meet-companygrad-school-style.
Aaron Fox’s username is fourcheesemac. He called everyone who comments here whiners and babies several times, just to make sure everyone got the picture.
A quick search of his previous posts on that site will confirm his identity.
I left a comment around last October, and I’m still chugging away in grad school.
The thing about all these comments is that it allows people to feel that it is okay for them to gripe about what they are experiencing. Spilling my guts here alleviated much of the psychological discomfort I was experiencing and allowed to get on with what I needed to do. I couldn’t do this anywhere else–not even with people I consider my friends.
I think that’s what most of us here are doing. And it’s okay, as long as it helps you get on with life.
What-the-deuce! Well, I’m not sure who the above poster is, but I am still in the (loathesome) State U Urban Planning program. Unfortunately, the same group of despotic personalities persist…I’ve finally rationalized that these people are archetypes…They won’t go away, they won’t change. They’re two-dimensional and rather predictable. As such, I’ve rationalized that I should simply ignore them. Happily, my lack of interest seems to be causing a considerable amount of “psychological discomfort”–on their part.
In short, I’m doin’ grad school my way. If I want to procrastinate, I procrastinate. If I don’t want to deal with the sophmor-onic, ego-stroking, I don’t deal with it. Bottom-line I’m paying for the education (and the salaries). It’s a state university, the profs suck, the students (present-company excluded) are mediocre–whadda I care what they think or do? No apologies. I’m sure the above poser, er, poster shares my sentiment ….:p
Wow, so glad I found this article and comments, thanks to everyone who took the time to write.
I received an MA in 1979 from a prestigious university. It was very hard (linguistics), but not in the way you guys write about, it just took a lot of work, but not soul-sucking work. I was an RA and enjoyed that for one year, and the second year, I got pregnant (was married), but the department was supportive and I finished the MA and found it to be a really great experience in most ways. Except…I was voted out in a tie vote as far as passing my PhD prelims, apparently I was borderline. So no chance to continue on, at least not there. At the time I felt somewhat mystified, as I knew I was smart and could do it, and all the profs seemed to like me. The cohort I was in was also pretty close, no politics to speak of. No idea why I was deemed unfit to continue, but in retrospect, they did me a favor.
Anyway, I also felt relieved, hard to explain, on an instinctive level. So, I carried on with my life working in a well-paid high-tech profession, then changed careers and became a consultant in economic development. Neither were related to my MA. Fast forward to now, I’ve always loved film and photography, so I applied to a very well-rated MFA program and was accepted, a very small class of 12. I was elated. I remembered my first MA and what a good experience it had been, for the most part, and was happy to be getting back into a formal setting where I could learn from people who had real-world experience (this program required that of their profs, many had Emmys and such).
I went to one class, spent an hour after class asking the prof how studying Woody Allen films had anything to do with nature photography and didn’t receive an answer, he was lost in the ozone of film theory. It was an agonizing decision, but that one class, plus discussion with some former graduates from the program (who told me basically it was a worthless degree), made me decide this was not where I wanted to be. Three years of this would drive me insane (that’s what the program required, three years).
I limped back home, dropping out before tuition was due (this would be on student loans), all the time feeling like a loser. This was last fall, and I’m still on the email list for my would-be cohort, so I’m getting all the scuttlebutt about what’s going on, and it ain’t pretty, half are ready to drop out. All the same issues you’re all talking about.
Reading this has really confirmed what I did was right, as well as the emails I’m getting from the other students. I either got really lucky the first time around or grad school is nothing like it once was. But what my cohort is going through is a repay of all the things in this thread and some are sounding very depressed. Me, I’m having fun hiking and taking photos and setting up my own stock photog biz, webpage, and also writing a nature photography book.
PS If I had it to do again, even though my first MA so long ago was a partially rewarding experience, I would have quit after undergrad and NOT gone to grad school. It was a big waste of time, in all honesty. I could have spent that time doing something I truly enjoyed and not had the humiliation of being refused entrance into the PhD program for unknown reasons (they said my prelims score wasn’t quite there, whatever that means, I had to spend a very long weekend analyzing the Japanese language).
If I had it to do again, I’m not even sure I would’ve gone to undergrad school. I could’ve made quite a bit of money in the 6 years the whole educational experience cost me (I came out 5k in debt, but this was in the 1970s dollar), and it wasn’t hard to get into decent jobs until relatively recently (last 10 or so years). My real passion is in photography, and you don’t need a degree for that.
Educated [Winner], you’re my new hero.
what_again_and_again
Thanks, made my day!
Nice story, educated!
Thanks, made my day.
Again.
I am glad I found this site. It helps to vent and whine sometimes. I am currently in grad school, and I despise it with a white-hot, burning passion. I am truly miserable. I had NO idea what I was getting myself into, and if the economy was good and I could find a decent job in my old field, I’d be there in a New York Minute.
I am willing to bet money I am NOWHERE near as smart as the majority of you. I really am not very smart at all. I have ALWAYS hated school, even as a little kid, and I always made poor grades. I was fortunate to find a really good, supportive undergrad environment with a relatively easy major. But grad school is the opposite. I am in *WAY* over my head and I can see no way to escape. The only reason I went back to school is because the economy crapped out and I couldn’t find a job. And socially, I feel like most of you–grad school has pretty much consumed my life. I can no longer hang out with friends, take dance classes or attend parties or events. Sometimes I’m at school for twelve hours a day. What’s more, my particular program is in flux, and is really disorganized. I have dealt with depression in the past, and grad school is TOTALLY not helping the situation–I feel myself slipping down the black hole of despair. I got some ADD meds from my doctor, which help a little (but keep me up all night when I take them).
The ONLY decent thing about my program is the camaraderie with other students–there’s sort of a “We’re All In This Together” mindset, and students are willing to help each other and keep each other afloat.
Anyway, thanks for listening.
I hated graduate school too. I was driving back and forth to campus on a crazy highway an hour there and an hour back and due to face time when I didn’t even have classes, until I told my second supervisor, forget it, I’m staying home to work on my dissertation. I say second advisor as my first advisor/supervisor literally ended up in a mental hospital (no, I don’t think I put him there), my second supervisor “fired me” via the chair, didn’t even have the decency to have a conversation with me (she’s now a dean of grad studies elsewhere–I shudder at the thought), and my third (interestingly, from another department) was a professional with high standards AND compassion and without her I would NOT have completed my PhD. And I felt I had to do so. It wasn’t just about me. It would have been one year of my mother and mother-in-law doing childcare a few days a week, and my former husband working for a number of years as we struggled financially while I got to go to school –I felt responsible to finish THE DAMN DEGREE. The graduate school experience was brutual, it was deadly. All my hair fell out. I went on anti-depressents. Yup. Pretty fucked up. However, this is where my story differs. I did finish. And I got lucky and got a job only 6 months after I graduated in my home town. I love what I do. I can’t believe I get paid to do this job. Yes, there’s lots of stupid committe work and ridiculous departmental politics, but I like teaching, I like working with students, I like writing. I can’t believe I get a sabbatical. I am very fotunate. In a world full of hellish garbage, of people dying in coal mines and children who are soldiers, I am fucking lucky and I appreciate my good fortune every day. Yes I went through pathetic shit to get here. Maybe that makes me pathetic. But as a single mom I am bloody happy to have this income and I job where I have some flexibility and even get to think sometimes–and be critical of things out loud.
I won’t sit here and whine/cry/belabour the point about how grad school is an unfun thing to do, because that’s kind of obvious by now, and moreover it’s been done, but suffice it to say it’s been very helpful to read a few of these anecdotes.
I’m one of 6 new grads in my (fairly small) department and after asking around, nobody seems to be having as hard a time as I am. Everybody has better grades. Everybody’s been doing better/more successful research. And nobody so far has had to come in every single day to work, including weekends, as I have. If I have a problem that is any other than simply not being cut out for this environment, then that problem insofar as I can see it is that a) I came from a different background and lack a fairly crucial component, b) my time management skills aren’t the best (though they’re no worse than anybody else’s here, I just have more to learn is all), and c) I’ve been making some bad decisions in course choice.
But with respect to c), it’s all retrospect and at the time of actively choosing, it’s a gamble on my part. Should I take course X or course Y? I only find out months later that I really should’ve picked Y instead of X. Bit late for that. Should I drop course Z and audit it because it’ll make my life hell if I stay in and try to scramble for a 70% which I may not even get? Only figured out much, much later that I should have. That totally wasn’t apparent at the drop date, or even during the exam. Not that I’m looking for someone to blame, but at this point, I don’t see whose fault it could be. It’s just the way the cookie crumbled. This makes me feel dejected and useless and even more like a failure than I already am.
Anyway. Don’t worry about being the stupidest poster here, Special Guest, because that’s me. I too feel like I’m the stupidest person in the entire school, and the only reason I was accepted is I fooled everybody, and someday soon they’re gonna track me down and find me out and vote me off like Survivor. I can’t go back home after that. I think I’d rather die.
To astronymous:
Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you for your post. You have no idea how much it helped me to realize that someone feels exactly the same way I do. I just finished my first year of grad school and it was HELL. But what made it worse was that it seemed like I was the only one in my program that was struggling. Everyone else could complete assignments quickly, get good grades, understand the material easily, and excel in their assistantships. I was pulling a minimum of two all-nighters every week, getting mediocre grades, and missing deadlines in my assistantship. I felt like I couldn’t turn to my cohort because I didn’t want to seem stupid, and having no one to confide in made it so much more difficult.
I understand where you’re coming from by thinking you’re stupid and a failure; I feel that way everyday. Last year at this time I felt like I was capable of accomplishing anything so long as I tried hard enough. But now I feel like I am incapable of accomplishing even simple tasks. I want to quit but I can’t because I feel like I would hate myself the rest of my life. My program is only two years long, so I just have to hang in there another year. When I started grad school I really wanted to learn and conduct research; now I just want to get my degree and get out. I really identify with your last few statements. I often feel like I’m just an imposter and I don’t really belong here. I worry that I was accepted for only one reason: when I applied to grad school I was 19. Sometimes I feel like the grad school saw that and immediately accepted me without really looking at my application. The problem is, that’s the only thing that’s really special about me. I didn’t have higher GRE scores, I’m not a particularly good writer, and my research ideas weren’t especially clever. I’m just a young grad student. It’s only because I was homeschooled, not because I am smart. At first, people seemed to expect big things from me, but now I feel like I’m just an email away from being kicked out of the grad school. I feel like the other students look at me and wonder how I got accepted, while the faculty look at me and wish they hadn’t accepted me.
It makes me feel so much better that there are so many people that feel the way I do. I thought there was something wrong with me. I wasn’t sure how I was going to be able to go back and do it for another year. But honestly, just knowing that I’m not the only one gives me a little more strength to keep pushing on. I do not regret going to grad school, but I do regret is going at 19. I think taking time off between undergrad and grad school is really important (regardless of one’s age). I took a year off between undergrad and grad, but it was not enough. I’m currently planning to take an indefinite amount of time off between my M.A. program and a PhD program. I’m not even sure I’ll go into a PhD program, but that’s a decision I can save for later.
I feel inspired to add my own experiences. Thank you so much for these posts.
I applied to grad schools for a few reasons that were mentioned as positives, plus a few that weren’t: 1) to get away from the east coast intelligently, without going into debt or ending up with the wrong crowd (I have a brother who took off and ended up homeless and on drugs), 2) I had been working at a coffee shop for years and was sick of it, life felt tiring, I wanted something new 3) I had always felt like it was OK to be slightly eccentric at school– freedom of expression, right?– nobody minded tattoos or torn pants as long as I had creativity, intellect, and good work ethic, 4) I missed being near intelligent people, 5) I wrote poetry and short stories endlessly and had the hope that if I get a few more degrees, maybe eventually I can publish without paying for it myself, 6) of course, I love my field, which falls into an in-between Humanities and Sciences category, depending on which area you pursue. Linguistics. Yes, I love it.
However: 1) I now spend my life in the library or trying to catch up on sleep– might as well be in my old city or another planet for that matter. I love this town– wish I could actually get to know it. 2) I got what I wanted times ten. Trouble in my family decided to happen just as the first term was starting– this has been the most difficult year of my life on all levels. It’s all new, everything, and it isn’t fun anymore. And I found out my old coffee shop closed down in the meantime, though, so I guess going back is not an option (hah). 3) Nobody said a word, ever, about dress code, and yet…I now own slacks, button down shirts…and the tattoos stay covered. Something about professionalism. 4) I miss being near artists. 5) I don’t have quite as much time to write poetry…can’t publish if you don’t write. 6) Well, the love is still there–I do love my field, and my department– what makes it all worth it is going to amazing classes and working with these very beautiful people, but the cost is greater than I knew it would be.
I’ve always hated the educational system, since middle school. But I’ve always loved school, as in, learning, teachers, reading, writing, thinking, being still, being respected for my mind. It’s always been a war in me. Grad school is more of that.
Hey, I just read your piece on grad school and although I did not read the entire page to the bottom, comments and all, I have to say I have not heard a better rendition of grad school and its bullshit in a long time. I can relate with everything you said about grad school and it feels great to know that more people feel this way. Grad school does indeed suck big time and I would rather get a 2nd bachelors degree any day. In fact I almost did that and would have if I did not take some time off to just bullshit around for a while and not think about grad school. My whole problem is that on top of everything else that sucks about grad school, I chose to go to grad school in the UK where they hate Americans, especially our writing style and I spent two years being verbally abused by my professors and ultimately failing the whole dame degree anyways because I could not write a “British Dissertation” or at least that is what they said the reason was. I even know another grad student in the UK who had to hire a lawyer to get a pass. But seriously, my field has become outdated while I have been in it and my professors laid off after 30 years and with tenure because of budget cuts. Forget getting a job in Medieval Studies, that will never happen…leaving me saying “what the hell am I doing this for?” I am poor, living on financial aid, haven’t had a relationship in like… forever, and now I am not sure when I am ever going to actually be successful after all this work. I am going keep at it but I am not sure why, I guess I love it and that probably makes me a sadistic but oh well… what the hell else would I be doing anyway?
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