Done?

As of shortly before 4:30 pm Mountain time, my dissertation is written. The data reflect the most recent analysis, my advisor's final comments have all been addressed, the arduous process of revising my thinking based on one single new reference is complete. I even created a special committee copy, without the pages of of Tables of Contents and such required by the school. It's sitting there, a lovely .pdf of 116 pages (including references), in my dissertation folder. And yet I have not emailed it out. It isn't due until tomorrow, and I can't quite conceive of what it will mean to have submitted my dissertation to my committee. It is the sensation I have had several times since my defense was announced to the department, and people started congratulating me and/or wishing me good luck when we passed in the halls. It doesn't quite seem real. I can't really be this close to being done.

Mistaken For An Undergrad

The curse of the graduate student is the word "student"; most people I meet seem to lump us in with undergraduates, as not having real jobs, or incomes, or being adults at all. If I were a few years older, I would be pleased to be mistaken for a teenager; as it is, I'm usually amused at my ability to blend in.

On Tuesday, the second day of classes, I cut across the dorm lawns on my way to the administrative buildings. I blended in perfectly, just another person wearing jeans, t-shirt and sneakers, carrying a backpack. I doubt anyone thought I was a freshman - I overheard two upperclassmen carrying on the college tradition of being surprised at how young and/or tiny the freshmen looked - but I could certainly pass as a senior. My appearance hasn't changed much in the past four years; if anything, I probably look more like a college student than I used to, thanks to my recent rediscovery of denim.

That same afternoon, I was mistaken for either a high school senior or a college senior, I'm not sure which. I took three manilla envelopes to the post office, each containing the hopes and dreams of a job application. The postal service employee, noting the college addresses on each, asked if I was applying to school. I don't expect USPS personnel to recognize the subtle clues of packages addressed to "search committee", but I am going to assume that he was aware of graduate school, and assumed I was applying instead of trying to get out.

At some point in the next year, I shall have to decide what I should do with my wardrobe if/when I get a job. The faculty dress code is indistinguishable from the graduate students'; our department chair once caused quite a stir by showing up in a suit instead of his usual khaki shorts and socks-with-sandals ensemble. Faculty seem to rely on their extra experience to set them apart from their students, and I won't gain that much gravitas in the next year. I will either have to modify my wardrobe considerably, or decide that I don't care about blurring the faculty-student lines.

Grad School and the Economy

I graduated from college in a year of relative economic prosperity. But I was terrified of the job market, and one of advantages to applying to grad school was the security of knowing what I would be doing months before I actually graduated. So I can certainly understand why people enroll in grad school in times of economic uncertainty. I wasn't willing to go on the job market when times were good, so I certainly wouldn't want to be on the job market now.

Unfortunately, I don't have much choice. Unless something goes horribly wrong with my remaining two experiments (always a possibility), I have no excuse for not graduating next Spring. And I have many more good reasons to leave (running out of funding, wanting to get a real life) than to stay.

Actually, I don't think I have any good reasons to stay; I think the only arguments in favor of staying can be summed up as "fear". These fears are supported by the news. First there was article in the NY Times that started me reflecting on the likelihood of getting an academic position. Now there's an article on Slate examining the true value of higher education. This article contains a very poetic and potentially apt description of career prospects for recent and impending Ph.Ds:

"I am hurdling toward being the saddest type of graduate student—the one who has finished and is at a loss for what to do next. I'm going to be the one sitting on the front steps of that Ivory Tower with my elbows on my knees and my chin in my hands just begging to be let back in."

Unfortunately, the Piled Higher and Deeper comic strip offering advice on whether grad students should worry about the economic meltdown does not fit my situation (I can't decide if "I'm going to graduate and I want a real job" just applies to "real world" jobs only or also faculty jobs). I have no easy source of humor to turn to in contemplating my career prospects. I just have the knowledge that professors never retire; that the only news these days if of people who fail to find jobs because there's no funding for new faculty; and that my advisor's previous grad students, from many years ago, sent out over 50 applications before getting hired.

I'm trying not to stress out about my job search until fall. There won't be any postings about job offers starting in 2010 until the 2009 school year starts. But it's very hard to maintain any optimism in the face of all these stories.

Productivity vs. The Blizzard

My plans to be productive over spring break worked great for the first three days: Data was (alright, were) collected, proposals and papers were written, lessons were planned. Then Thursday brought a blizzard. What I'd last heard of as 3-5 inches expected turned into 8 inches by the time I woke up Thursday morning, to a text message telling me that the university was closing at of 10 a.m. due to the further 8 inches expected that afternoon.

This is one of the few times that might make it worth it to shell out for internet access from my apartment. After all, severe weather doesn't mean a break to the grad students. There were certainly some things I could keep working on, but almost all of my plans for Thursday were tied to being on campus. So I gave up on work and read novels (yes, plural) all day. I can't decide if I should be frustrated at the loss of productivity or grateful to have an enforced day or two off. I might not decide until after the conference, when I find out whether I'm behind or still on top of everything.

Sick Days

Graduate students don't get sick days. But, no one wants to catch whatever it is you've got, including your advisor, so we do get days where we can be off campus and skip meetings. I should consider myself fortunate that I haven't had to rely on sick days too often. I caught strep throat my second week of graduate school, and I was getting over a cold when I "defended" my first-year project, but my rare colds have all coincided with days I didn't have to be anywhere anyway. Until this week.

I should still count myself fortunate in the timing. I didn't get sick until I'd met my teaching obligations, the two group meetings I had to miss wouldn't miss me, and by the time I had to miss my class I was too tired to care about whether my professors noticed. I had two writing projects that let me feel productive when I was feeling okay, and nothing so high-priority I had to stress out when I was feeling drunk on decongestants.

And hey, I should be recovered just in time for the weekend....when the lovely warm weather is supposed to turn into snow.

No-Work Weekend, All-Work Week

Last weekend I took the entire weekend off guilt-free, because I had absolutely nothing to do; my e-mail inboxes were empty, any research tasks were in the hands of collaborators, and I was three weeks ahead in my lab planning. I had a normal life for two and a half days.

This weekend, I still kind of took the weekend off, but with plenty of guilt. There were any number of things I could have been doing, should have been doing, but I was seduced by a sale on the "Chuck" Season 1 DVD, and couldn't quite pry myself away from my TV. I still got something (one, tiny thing) done, and I'm not behind - but I'm not ahead any more, either.

Much as I said in my response to ScienceWoman's poll on taking time off between semesters, and in the graduate school survival kit I gave to a friend, I refuse to stress out about my failure to get work done. I have no home life, and can make up for it by just working 10- to 15-hour weekdays. And even if I don't make it up, there's no point fretting about it now.

Still, I do need to develop a strategy for getting work done on days when I have no meetings or classes or any reason to leave the apartment. That's the downside to a studio apartment; it's impossible to have one productivity area set aside.

Holiday Grace Period

I was vastly amused by the latest PhD comic, on the holiday grace period. Possibly because I took advantage of this implicit grace period, skipping my weekly progress report the week after Christmas on the grounds that it was better to tell my advisor nothing than to tell her there was no change at all, not a single paper read in the previous week. I spent Monday morning in a whirlwind of email activity, so I would be able to say I had "followed up" with various people (mostly other graduate students who had obviously also been taking advantage of the grace period).

In my defense, I did have real progress to report on my comps paper. It's just that I had taken a slow, thoughtful process to the new sections, which involved reading a few papers and letting them germinate in the back of my mind for a week. This looks completely unproductive, but actually makes writing much easier, because the papers have had time to get to know each other before they must be connected on paper. So I spent Friday afternoon churning out the new section, and most of the past few days rearranging the entire comps paper to fit these new arguments. I swear, I don't think more than 3 paragraphs out of 35 pages have been left untouched.

It pains me to admit it, but the revisions are actually growing on me. I have become obsessed with the safety of my work, backing up changes to a flash drive every night and bring it to my bedside table. I am determined to find a way to make this a practical dissertation topic, just to make all this effort worthwhile. I've even, almost, begun to see how the topic could be considered interesting. This hasn't been the case since I proposed my comps some 9 months ago, and marks the real progress. All of which is only possible because I did very little work over the last few weeks, allowing my brain to recover from burnout.

Countdown to the End of the Semester

Welcome to the last week of class. In the next week, I have only 2 things that truly need to get done: 1) write a 7-9 page term paper for my thankfully nothing-to-do-with-my-major class, and 2) grade 21 research proposals. The term paper is due Friday or Saturday (my professor is lax, as he should be, since it's been over a month since I turned in the last paper and I still haven't gotten it back); the graded papers have to be finished by Monday afternoon so I can offload them to my students at their final exam.

Looking back at the semester does not make me feel in any way successful. Let's review.

Study #1 - At my advisor's insistence, I continued to collect data on a project after the initial data analysis revealed that the manipulation wasn't work. Final data analysis shows exactly the same pattern, and the additional data points didn't make anything more significant than it had been. This project is a complete wash for anything except doing a follow-up, and I probably won't do that because it doesn't fit into my dissertation.

Study #2 - The downside to collaborating with my advisor and her husband is that they both go on baby leave at the same time. Delays in getting responses to emails and a shortage of programming resources in our lab means that I barely managed to program the experiment, and am squeaking out a minuscule amount of pilot data before the semester ends.

Study #3 - My senior thesis student collected all the data for this project. The follow-up to an early (under revision) project is mixed; the replication is only marginally significant (pending massaging of data), but the expansion is significant in ways we don't know how to interpret yet. The thesis data (another of my ideas, with my student's help) turned out to be a wash, just like every other research project I've conceived myself (except my master's, which was just unpublishable).

Comps - Completed the review paper, reading approximately 150 journal articles, writing 10,000+ words (final draft), and answering every question I outlined in my proposal. My committee decided that I should have asked two additional questions, and instructed me to add these questions - which essentially means reorganizing and probably rewriting the entire thing.

Corrections Draft - My advisor has been sitting on this for almost four months, so I have been unable to make any progress. I'm close to losing my faith in research ethics over this; we found out that the published results were inaccurate almost 10 months ago, and still haven't told anyone. I set a firm deadline for getting revisions back, lest I lose all self-respect.

And...that's my semester. There was teaching a class, and some "lead" teaching activities, and helping out my thesis student - but as far as my "real" activities, demanded for research, the only thing I've managed to completed (Study #3) was really completed by an undergrad; I've just had to do the data analysis. I can't even count my two accepted conference posters, because they were submitted in the summer, and it just took this long to get the acceptances.

Yet another semester at graduate school, with nothing to show for it.

Real Life vs. Research

For the most part, my real life doesn't interfere with my research - there isn't all that much of it, really; I read, I take pictures, I workout. Recently, as my "workout" karate has progressed closer and closer to black belt (a much more achievable goal than the PhD, since I started karate and grad school at the same time), the risk of injury has increased.

First I sprained my finger. It sounds like a completely ridiculous injury, which it is, but it's been 7 weeks now and it still hasn't healed. The doctor's estimate was six to twelve...months. Fortunately, I only had one week where typing was problematic, so it's more a minor annoyance than a real hindrance to research progress.

Yesterday, I banged up my knee. Karate again - the same person's shin making unfortunate contact with a fleshy part of my anatomy, actually. The knee joint is fine, but a specific portion of my right quadricep is bruised, swollen, refusing to assist in extending my knee, and otherwise whining.

Naturally, this occurred the morning of the day I was going to spend the afternoon on campus programming, and instead wound up spending the afternoon in bed communing with an ice pack. Naturally, this occurred the day before I have three hour-long events back-to-back in completely different buildings on campus, one of which is a teaching presentation to the graduate teacher program that my faculty mentor (not the same person as my advisor) will be evaluating. The facts that I volunteered to do the talk and have it evaluated are not helping, and are in fact making it worse.

I see workouts as a vital means of combating a sedentary research lifestyle, relieving stress associated with comps and the rest of graduate school, and feeling like I do something with my life that doesn't involve staring at a computer. I'm holding on to the belief, completely unfounded (it's not my area of research), that the long-term benefits of my more active lifestyle are worth the short-term costs of injuries that impair my research progress. All the same, I think I should write off any productivity for the rest of the day following a karate workout.

What Economic Crisis?

The latest PhD comic might explain why I don't see a financial crisis and oppose the bailout bill. After all, I have less than a thousand dollars in stock-based savings (quite lot less than a thousand than I had a few weeks ago, I do admit), I'm nowhere near to graduating and needing a new job. I have plenty of reason to take the extremely long view, which says the Great Depression only lasted a few decades and I have four or more to go before retirement.

On the other hand, it's also possible that trying to live on a graduate student budget with a minimum in student loans means that I have a greater appreciation for fiscal responsibility than most 20-somethings or Congress in general. I'm trying to accept arguments that letting go of credit can't happen at once, but it can be very hard to see why people despair of lost credit cards and mortgages when I've manged to live fine (in my single, childless, practically lifeless academic way) on a relatively meager budget with no reliance on and minimal use of credit.

That minimal use of credit does include student loans. I'm trying to figure out if that makes me a hypocrite or not. But student loans, and whether or not they're worth it, are a complex and lengthy matter for an entirely different post.

Negotiation "Vacation" Time

Making plans for the semester break (also informally known as "Christmas break") can be a tricky business. Graduate students are both students (it's in the title) and employees. Students get non-semester time off; employees get that day or two off when the university is closed.

As as student, especially one who didn't take a "real" job before graduate school, I am accustomed to several weeks at home for the holiday season. I certainly have no compelling reason to be on campus; there are no classes for me to attend or to teach. As an employee, my advisor expects me to be producing research at an increased rate during a period unencumbered with coursework and teaching requirements.

I have had family reasons to be gone for the past three years, but those no longer apply. The student part of me still sees 2.5 weeks at home as a short and entirely reasonable period of time for December/January, but the employee part of me understands it might seem excessive. I've heard from other graduate students that my advisor is does not generally approve of such "excessive" time off.

But, this is the age of computer technology. The only real reason I need to be on campus, in a time when meetings and classes are on complete hold, is for data collection, and my data collection is literally impossible during the holidays when campus is shut down and the population at large is hectic and uninterested in contributing to science. Everything else I need to do simply requires my laptop and, for communication with my group, an Internet connection. This is where going home actually makes more sense.

I do not have Internet at home; the campus bus I usually take will shut down during the winter break; and the "winter" break will almost certainly consist of snow, ice, and below-freezing (possibly below-0) weather not at all conducive to walking to my office. I could stay in the state, but I wouldn't be answering emails more than once a week and I wouldn't be able to do any lit searches. On the other hand, I could go to my father's house, where my productivity would go from business-hours-only to 24/7 high-speed Internet acces. It doesn't matter how many house chores and family events I let take up my time; I would be exponentially more productive in a different state with the world encased in my laptop, than in the home state with myself cocooned away from the snow.

It remains to be seen whether my advisor will buy this. I have no intention of mentioning my travel plans unless the information is specifically requested; it's not as if my advisor can generally tell whether I'm in the state or not, she's on campus so rarely. I can always challenge her to name exactly what it is I need to do over winter break that requires a physical presence on campus.

Besides, it really has the following effect: I have to defend my comps by December 17th, or be late and defend them in the Spring. And then I can go home and recover...

New Year Career Crisis

Two weeks ago, I was not entirely successful in my struggles not to cry in the middle of a presentation directly relevant to the current section of my comps paper. For most of the past week, I have had an intense urge to either put my head down and cry onto my keyboard every time I have received the latest draft of four of the five papers I'm co-authoring. Diagnosis can go one of three ways:

1. Depression is rampant in our society, and every member of my immediate family (except maybe one sister) has been on medication for depression or manic depression at one point or another. I msyelf have a dubious diagnosis of depression hanging over from my freshman year of college. Perhaps it is time for professional help in regards to regulating neurochemicals.

2. Workaholicism also runs rampant in society and in my family. The pressure to get two abstracts submitted by Friday, two papers submitted before Advisor's impending delivery, help a student with her paper before that deadline, and get through a huge hurdle of my comps paper before Advisor's impending delivery, while attending two major multi-day conference/workshop sessions in two weeks and organizing the new TA orientation, has created an overabundance in stress. I spent too much of the past week and weekend working (i.e., pretty much all of it, aside from ~2 hours of exercise or leisure reading each day), and have no reserves left from my day at the beach in San Diego. I need to take a day away from campus, email, my work laptop, and reading in general.

3. What the fuck am I doing in graduate school? Progress is stalled on my comps because I have no interest in tackling the huge theoretical debate I have to tackle, but everyone else finds this interesting and worthwhile (it was the participant debate that set me off at the presentation). Endless drafts and post-review revisions and trying to write three papers on the same research is what academia is all about, so I should be thrilled to have so many studies worthy of submitting after the dearth of worthy reserach my first two years. Obviously I'm not cut out for this. Perhaps I should consider a brand new career path, maybe flipping burgers.

Deeper consideration suggests it can't just be #3. I'm giving myself a pass on my comps problems, because the huge theoretical debate is addressed in my comps only as a stumbling block: "if this take is correct, we can look at this cool manipulation; if not, well...". I would be totally into my comps if they would have just let me say #(*% the debate, it's not going to get resolved, and the evidence in favor the useful take is convincing enough to proceed. There are reasons I'm stuck with four drafts on the same idea (revisions to a publication I wasn't even part of are half of them) that are unlikely to repeat at any other point in my career (please!). There has been an ongoing career crisis in that direction for the past year or so, however.

Addressing the work overload is difficult. Thanks to comps, there's always something that needs to be done pressing on the back of my mind, so it's a matter of just ditching work rather than getting to a good stopping place. Re-evaluating assorted commitments means Friday, and probably Saturday, are now Grad Student Skip Days. My newly re-validated bus pass and I are taking off for anywhere not here. I am turning off the computers, ignoring the books, and either getting some sunshine or getting some expensive sugar.

Addressing the career crisis is less difficult. A very timely email has pointed me to a "Turning Points" career workshops just for graduate students. I will totally pay $60 for a six-week course on figuring out what I want to be when I grow up and how to be it. (Mild paranoia that three more people won't sign up to meet the 10-person minimum is adding to my stress load, however). And, I've enrolled in an entirely irrelevant education course I know nothing about (the title is probably Religion, Spirituality & Education, but abbreviations make it diffiuclt to tell) becuase I'd already maxed out tuition and fees anyway, so it's free!. Technically this adds to my workload, but the possibility of having non-optional chores with absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with my research is well worth it.

And, this day is ending early. There is absolutely nothing I have to do that is better off being done today poorly than tomorrow (hopefully) rejuvenated.

Job Flexibility

Graduate school has the reputation of being a time sinkhole: 40 to 80 hours a week spent on work despite a 20-hour stipend, Friday nights spent analyzing data rather than going out. To a certain extent, this is true, although I personally don't push my time much past 40 (of real work, not of browsing the Internet from my office). The upside to the time sinkhole is that it doesn't really matter when you work. My advisor doesn't care if I show up to the office at 9 a.m. or at all. There are offices out there that work 10/4, or take every other Friday off, or treat Saturdays as required work time. My schedule can do any of these, depending on my need. It took my advisor three days to notice that my computer clock was accidentally set 12 hours ahead; who notices whether a grad student sends emails at 3 in the morning, unless it's three in the morning tomorrow?

The upshot of this is that informing my advisor that I would unexpectedly be out of town and out of contact for a given weekend is more of a courtesy than a necessity. I'm not entirely sure it would be noticed if all emails went unanswered for a four-day weekend. Normally I'm not in a position to think about, let alone take advantage of, this flexibility. Impulsive trips to Cancun are not in the graduate student budget. At the moment, however, I have reasons to be thankful for this flexibility, as I plan to ditch research to attend my grandmother's memorial service.

My first semester as a TA, I received some advice about dealing with students who request extensions or make-up tests on the grounds of attending a grandparent's funeral. I can't remember exactly what the advice was - I think that it would be okay to request some proof of needing to attend a grandparent's funeral, but to accept a parent's funeral without question as if they're lying they're going to hell anyway. I never experienced the request from a teaching standpoint, although I did have to put up with any manner of other excuses. From a student standpoint, on the other hand, I got to make the request - my mother had a heart attack the last week of classes, so I missed an exam and a term paper deadline. I much appreciated the fact that the teacher didn't request proof. I even more appreciated that my advisor had no problems with me vanishing for a full four weeks; no one else in my family had that option.

Now again, I am the only member of my immediate family with an easy time attending this service. Three can't get out of work, the fourth is trying but has an even tighter budget than I do (yes, it's possible, especially if you have a house and two kids). Any time I think about leaving academia for the "real world", I think about how much more difficult it would be to drop everything; professors can cancel class, or call for guest lectures, but in a business there are bosses to appease and hourly wages to accrue. I have yet to decide whether this time sinkhole-flexibility trade-off would be worth it on a more permanent basis.