Everything they say about grad school is true

[karabeau]

I have no life.
I have no money.
I sleep all day and work all night.
I'm working harder than I've ever worked before, but if you asked me what I'm doing, the answer would be "reading and writing."
I'll alternately love and hate the same text in the same day.
I'm losing my mind.

I don't want to be a student any more, but I don't want to be an adult

Comments

[ozzmit]

Do you know what you are going to do after you graduate? Is going for a PhD out of the question now?

I wonder if part of the difficulty of not "having a life" is due to living in a relatively unfamiliar country. I am thinking of applying to a school in Australia myself and am wondering how alienated I might feel living there. I will of course be broke unless Philip comes with me and works his tail off so that I can live in less impoverished conditions.

[karabeau]

I don't know what I'm going to do after this, but getting a phd is not one of them. maybe someday in the future, but not right now. i'm tired, i want to do something else.

the having no life thing is partly due to being in an unfamiliar place, but is also because i have so much to do. it's also difficult because the relatively low class-time in this degree, so most social interaction is left up to you, and i'm just bad at that.

i will say that moving to another country is amazingly isolated, more so that just moving away from home. even though this is just England, there is some culture shock. it's been good for me to live alone for a while, but it's also made me realize that for the long-term, i don't like living alone.

[ozzmit]

Are there any gamers around there? A lot of universities have clubs for either role-playing or other kinds of games. Joining a club like that might present you with a good way to kill time and possibly make some friends. I mean, that might work out if you don't get too caught up in it, since you don't have a lot of time to spare.

If I had known about the possibility, I would have definitely joined a gaming group while I was at Humboldt (if they had one). Living in Northern California was a lot like living in a foreign country for some reason. Sometimes I felt like I didn't even speak the language.

[karabeau]

I can imagine.

I don't know if there is a gaming group, but there are lots of societies. In the fall I did join the International Society and the English Society, which is how I met most of the people I know now. It really is this semester for some reason--last semester I had more time, but now it's just all piling up. It's exhausting, but I won't complain too much, because it's building to something (hopefully) good. But I just know I'm ready for a break from academia after this.