The Laursonian Institute

Every day is a new record low.

Being depressed about your work in grad school is a different kind of depressed.  I’ve been through my share of low spells – been on prozac and the whole nine yards – but this is different, though I think in a good way.  When I was a teenager, depression could eat my whole life.  I didn’t have anything to do, no responsibilities to live up to, and depression could occupy entire days or weeks uninterrupted.  Now, my life is so busy I don’t have time to sputter that long.  I can only acknowledge it, come up with some way to cope, and move on.  I guess blogging today is one of those ways of coping.

The heart of the matter is that I’m not entirely sure I can do it – that I’ve found the place where my willingness to do something is outstripped by the demands of the task.  Lewis and I often discuss what makes grad school so damned hard, and I always come back to stamina.  The pace of life is so unnatural, so unlike any other environment I’ve been in.  There are whole months of non-communication, weeks and weeks spent working for a boss who doesn’t exist, on a project of your own invention which will either be approved or not, and which will not be acknowledged by any but a handful of professors who mostly forget that you depend on their graces and would appreciate expediency and thoroughness.  I feel like I’m traveling to the moon and NASA forgot they sent me up.  The only payout is being safely ensconced back where I started, and a souvenir rock I can feel the pride in knowing I picked up myself.  This must be enough to sustain, and it is, in the big-picture view.  It’s the thousands of minute microsteps between here and there that sap the life from you.  Every time I set another foot down, the ground is so unsteady… and I’m getting so tired.  How do you keep going on?

In some ways, I want to spit out a bunch of facts about how hard I’ve been working and why I deserve to be this exhausted.  There are no numbers, though, and an enumeration of this type always comes off as some kind of challenge.  I’m not suggesting I’m working any harder than any other graduate student – or anyone else, for that matter.  All I know is that I’m working harder than I seem to be capable of sustaining.  I’m at the point where I’m banking on the idea I’ll burst into flame and be reborn of my ashes – suddenly a competent and knowledgeable neuroscientist.   You know, with a degree and everything.

At times I find the very act of living difficult.  It’s hard to keep forward momentum going.  Particularly things that should are basic, unavoidable necessities like cleaning, buying groceries, walking the dog, showing up at work…  the very act of going outside is hard.  It puts me in range of personal interaction, which is challenging when my brain is sucked in on itself.  Having appropriate conversation seems unlikely, so I’d rather remain inside, with my own self, which I can at least depend on me not to surprise me.  I have this same problem when things are going particularly well, too – my brain gums up and the more distant you are from my work the more difficult it is to find the right mind-space to have an appropriate conversation.  Lewis – easy.  Lab mates – decent.  Colleagues, cohort – getting more difficult.  Everyone else?  Seemingly lost.  I guess that’s an unintended apology to everyone who thinks I’m turning into an ass.  My brain stopped working a couple years ago and I’ve forgotten how to be a real person.

And somehow, I’ve only begun.  I’m attempting to write the first paper — just the first paper! — in a very long-haul program.  If I can’t knock a 40-pager out over the summer, how am I ever going to tackle the thesis?  I feel compelled to add that I’m already behind schedule.  This paper was supposed to have been done before summer started.  The second paper – the one that qualifies me to write my thesis – is already coming up due this Spring.  I try as much as I can not to think about that particular problem, but it looms.

I suppose at this point I’m obliged to get myself back to work.  If I’m going to waste every weekend indoors, I might as well try and accomplish something tangible in that time.

August 8th, 2010 | Tags: QP, suck, thesis | Category: school | Comments Off

Epic meeting with my advisor today.  He set up a regular weekly meeting with all his grad students, and I’m the lucky kid with the first meeting slot.  I thought this might make him less strung out than getting him later in line, but no.  As I should have expected, he had already bumped the meeting after me, and I was bookended by non-regular meetings which appeared to be a bit intense.  I do feel bad for the guy, but I guess when you’re hard to get a hold of, or are prone to forgetting required things, angry meetings do tend to crop up when you can be found.

Anyway, I did get my full hour meeting, and we talked over my research proposal.  Last night I dreamed that he was really disappointed with it and found it unprofessional and not the quality of work one would expect from a graduate student.  Today didn’t go as poorly as all that, though he wasn’t real excited about it either.  I think that’s his professional face, and I took it pretty well.  He made some changes to it that I am thankful for, like shortening the overall length and breadth of the experiment, and we hacked off even a good portion of the critical stuff.  So it will be a small, pilot-y type study, but it will give me the opportunity to do something quickly, without staking too much of my life on it.  And in the end, he thinks that we’ll still get a paper out of it, so what more could I want?  I get my free fMRI experience, and hopefully a publication.

The more interesting part of our meeting was the non-QP stuff.  Turns out all the leading questions he was asking me about the decisions I made in my proposal was so he could feel me out for a different plan.  He’s cooking up some sort of holy trinity of researchers and wants me to be the dedicated monkey/grad student for the project.  It’s entirely nebulous as of yet, but it involves liasioning with all three of the language researchers at the CMB and doing something that combines my strengths – sublexical phonology – with theirs (sign, music, fMRI).  It’s a huge undertaking, a thesis-level project for sure, and definitely more like the primordial soup which precedes creation than a tangible and easily managed plan. On the other hand, what better beginnings are there for ones PhD topic than your advisor waxing poetic about the clouds you could reach for and asking you if you would be the monkey/Moses to make something out of it.

To pat my own back here, I feel I must mention that he described me as someone comfortable working in a broad network of seemingly unrelated things and that I was able to think creatively and outside-the-box about things, and this is why he thought I would be the person to lead this effort.  It’s not at the zenith of complements, but coming from my awkward advisor, it was really nice to hear he thought well of me and had been thinking about my future.  Next up is a meeting with these three brains, and it’s going to be quite a trick to keep myself grounded in the fact that I know some things these researchers don’t, and have (am) the manpower they need, without feeling like I’m an inferior member of the group because they’re all brilliant tenured lab managers, and I’m just a dopey grad student unfamiliar with their work.

All-in-all, a very successful but grounded day for me.  And productive to boot!

January 12th, 2010 | Tags: future, lab, QP, research, thesis | Category: school | Comments Off