Grad school, part 500
Oct. 16th, 2007 10:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akashiverI woke up today to stormy weather and posts about snipers. Hmm. Must be October.
Despite having actually made progress on things, I confess to once more being floored by grad school anxiety. For those who don't experience this, it consists of a feeling of general inadequacy/uselessness and forebodings of imminent doom. I think there's slightly more justification for grad school anxiety in the English dept, where we look ahead to weak job markets and fear we will end up unemployed in Greenland, chewing our own arms off for sustinence and cursing our fates with large vocabularies.
There are many days (and this is one of them) where I would like someone to hand me a certificate guaranteeing that if I struggle through to the end of this process and get my PhD, I will, indeed, be guaranteed a decent-paying job teaching dusty tomes to glassy-eyed undergrads. I would like that very much. Perhaps I could get a job that paid me to analyze said tomes, and sometimes my Faculty Overlords would let me about of the library to breathe fresh air and run around in weak, excitable circles until my atrophied limbs gave out. I would like that too (the research part, anyway).
I would just like to know things are going to be ok, that's all.
But failing such guarantees, one has to plug away anyway, and so I am here, worrying over my students' imminent midterm and my own ability to explain the operations of sovereignty in the Antarctic.
Time to get on with things, I suppose.
Despite having actually made progress on things, I confess to once more being floored by grad school anxiety. For those who don't experience this, it consists of a feeling of general inadequacy/uselessness and forebodings of imminent doom. I think there's slightly more justification for grad school anxiety in the English dept, where we look ahead to weak job markets and fear we will end up unemployed in Greenland, chewing our own arms off for sustinence and cursing our fates with large vocabularies.
There are many days (and this is one of them) where I would like someone to hand me a certificate guaranteeing that if I struggle through to the end of this process and get my PhD, I will, indeed, be guaranteed a decent-paying job teaching dusty tomes to glassy-eyed undergrads. I would like that very much. Perhaps I could get a job that paid me to analyze said tomes, and sometimes my Faculty Overlords would let me about of the library to breathe fresh air and run around in weak, excitable circles until my atrophied limbs gave out. I would like that too (the research part, anyway).
I would just like to know things are going to be ok, that's all.
But failing such guarantees, one has to plug away anyway, and so I am here, worrying over my students' imminent midterm and my own ability to explain the operations of sovereignty in the Antarctic.
Time to get on with things, I suppose.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-10-16 05:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-16 09:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-16 09:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-17 02:43 am (UTC)And I'm going to guess that you got to this group via my profile! Or catoptromancers. Just medievalists here.
And a shout-out to my homies in the pre-one-six-cee. REPRUH-SENT.