graduate school angst

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I got completely enraged today after spending three hours trying to get the syntax working for some stupid function that I wanted to use. It’s for my homework project that’s due soon. The online documentation for the function was completely discombobulated and worthless. After I noticed I was expending most of my energy merely trying to repress urges to burst into profanities, I had to give it up.

I asked the other students how they did it and they all just told me they used a more basic function. However, that particular function was really clumsy/cludgy and didn’t have a really nice feature that I was excited to include. After that my whole day felt completely pointless. I don’t think any NT can understand this feeling. It seems NT’s can always sacrifice the quality of something just to get it done. I simply cannot work that way.

I’m not emotionally rewarded by working on a task just to get it done and out of the way. I become extremely apathetic about my work when I can’t do it in a way that pleases me. If I’m forced to have something half-assed it just feels completely unrewarding and asinine, like a silly chore. Yet that’s what life is about I suppose. We’re all supposed to be little obedient lemmings that go through the hoops in order to get through the system as smoothly as possible.

I also notice that though I tend to procrastinate much more than the average person when getting started, once I get going on a project I also tend to put much more effort and time into it. Yet this extra effort doesn’t afford me as much when it’s merely on homework assignments and not actual research. I can’t even get started on actual research because I’m either procrastinating or too involved in the damn classes I have to keep taking. I have yet to get started on anything research wise.

Am I really just making a mountain out of a mole-hill here, or is there something much deeper to this? It’s such a constant theme in my life as of late that I’m thinking it’s the latter. It makes me hate the things I’m supposed to love. The worst part is that I feel like I have to constantly repress my irritation because others might find my complaints silly. I think this is the root of my deepest depression and overall dissatisfaction with life.

(Marshall - I'm writing this under the assumption that you're in the early years of a doctoral program. I'm sorry if that assumption is off-base. This is probably good advice for anyone who is starting, or thinking of starting a doctoral program in the sciences.)

I'm a grad student in mathematics (about to start my sixth year), and while I can say that things may get a little better when you reach candidacy (depending on your program, how it's structured, what coursework is required of you, etc.), they don't get a lot better.

I had some very similar frustration about prelim coursework in the first two years of my program (especially the first year). Basically, our profs would assign really long problem sets, and the idea (which was never explicitly stated) was that you were supposed to get together with other grad students to try to solve as many of the problems as possible. That really flew in the face of both my personality and my training - I was trained to try to do things carefully and slowly and understand them as well as possible on my own. And of course, my Aspie-ness made it hard for me to socialize with the other grad students, so I was never really included in the work sessions (though a lot of that was by my choice, not theirs). So I always had weak performance on the homework. Thankfully, I've always been very good at taking tests, and my profs usually tended to ignore my poor homework when I did well on their exams. And I didn't have any trouble passing the department's prelims (something that gave other students a lot of stress).

But yeah, I always got pissed off that other students got better grades than I did (at least on homework), for solutions that largely weren't their own. As I mentioned before, I grew up in a mathematical culture (namely, a summer math camp) where we were supposed to feel like we had ownership of what we did, even if we weren't the first in the history of mankind to do it. The whole culture of getting together in groups of six to ten and "sharing" (copying) solutions was pretty repugnant to me. I wasn't having any of it, and as a result there are several professors who probably don't have the best opinion of my work ethic (though there are many other reasons for that).

As I said, things get a bit better when you reach candidacy, but don't count on them getting a lot better. Success or failure in research is determined 25% by skill and natural ability, and 75% by enthusiasm and determination. If your classes are preventing you from spending any time whatsoever on your research, that's one thing. But if at times you're just procrastinating, you need to make a serious assessment of whether research is something you can be enthusiastic about. It may be that you don't yet have enough direction to start doing research - this depends on a lot of things, such as whether you've picked an advisor, whether you've picked a good advisor, whether you've spent enough time just perusing the literature to see what's going on in your discipline, etc. Eventually, you'll need to come up with a project that you can enjoy working on - or that you can at least force yourself to work on (as I'm doing).

Unless you're lucky and have a semester when you're on fellowship and don't have to take any classes or do any teaching or other assistant work, you're always going to have to multitask and find a way to fit "school"/"work" and "research" on the same plate. Having a research project that you love will make it a lot easier for you to do that.