Why did it take me so long to admit that academe was never going to make me happy? Because I had been institutionalized, like Brooks in The Shawshank Redemption. He spent a life in prison and knew its rules, and his release into the outside world was just too much. He hated it enough to hang himself in a boarding house. I bet he wasn't happy in ( Read more... )

A study by Ramior Valdez at a northeastern school of social welfare found that, on a standardized scale where 200 equaled the amount of stress experienced by someone whose spouse had just died, doctoral students in their first year scored an average of 313 points. Only 6 percent of the students were considered to be "below crisis level," and the ( Read more... )