Thesismonster

I am exhausted. Maybe it's the sum of all my sleepless nights, and maybe it's the emotional toll of the past weeks, but I can hardly keep my eyes open and sit up straight in my chair.

I'm struggling to find a tone for this that won't automatically disqualify me from any career opportunity, should a potential employer ever read my blog. I am very bitter right now and struggling hard -- but I have not always been this way. Before grad school, I was good at almost everything I tried. Can you imagine? In industry, my harshest, pickiest coworkers took me aside to tell me how competent I was. Before that, I was the kind of teacher who inspired kids to look at their world differently -- in some cases, to even study science in college. As a student, I got great grades, had friends, had fun. I played the violin proficiently (if not "well" by violinist standards), I loved to draw and paint, and even though I was bad at sports, I was still captain of my diving team. I don't even relate to that more confident adept self at the moment. Grad school has taken a lot out of me.

My thesis is weighing heavily on me, at the moment. I'm a few pages into my last chapter. The closer I get to being finished, the harder this is to pull myself together. I have a complicated and toxic relationship with my research, my department, and my thesis. Writing this up is anxious and disappointing. It is neither an easy nor a gratifying task. It looms large and it looms long. I have been working on it for six months already, and have been sent back to the lab twice -- all for a masters! I don't even believe they'll ever let me graduate, anymore. I've been let down too many times before.

But here I am, at my desk at work. And here I have been, for the past weeks grieving over Lauren, and for my past months suffering my miscarriages, for my past years, adjusting to my new life as a mom and facing the kind of egos and attitudes that make life miserable for anyone who tries to put family first. Here I have been for four years, feeling grossly inadequate.

What have I learned? In order of importance:

1. That academic culture, research, and engineering are all terrible fits for me, so I really, REALLY don't need that PhD
2. That I was (and still am) passionate about teaching
   
3. 10,000 very good reasons to keep your BMI low
   
4. How to fix an ailing LCMS, HPLC, Autoclave, etc. etc. etc.
5. Mad microfluidics skillz
   
6. A whole lot of stuff about drug metabolism and the liver that is not easy to summarize into a 30 second elevator spiel and still leaves me helpless and pathetic at cocktail parties when kind people ask me, "So what is it you study?"
   

What I still haven't figured out:

1. How to read a scientific journal article efficiently
2. Why the hell technical writing has to be so impenetrable
   
3. How to work hard and well when I feel intensely negatively about myself and my task
   
4. Why engineers are so antisocial (no offense)
5. Why grad students have to cut each other down all the time -- we'd all do much better if we helped elevate and support one another
6. What it is that makes professors hate each other so much
   
7. Why grad students aren't protected by any of the labor laws outlined by our society or by any of the student guidelines afforded undergrads
8. How to finish my goddamn thesis
   

I'll never solve most of these mysteries. If spite and misery were liquids, they would flow from the taps of my building, and maybe that would explain some of the interpersonal misery that goes on around me every day -- spiteful, contaminated misery water. As for the students' rights, I've been working on that for months and months, and I think I finally bugged the right person. They're getting us an ombudsman. That is a small start. At least now there's someone to talk to when you observe gross abuse of a fellow grad students.

The one mystery I absolutely need to solve is #8. And I'm pretty sure it starts with

1. STOP PROCRASTINATING!