#mashtar

Oh gosh, I’ve been thinking about this post for a while, trying to come up with a good answer, and failing that, trying to come up with an honest answer. The best I can do, I think, is to say that in my experience there is no “this-is-what-I-want-to-do-for-the-rest-of-my-life”, or at least if there is, it puts so much pressure on you that it can chase you away from something you love. If you’re fixed on the idea that this is what you’re meant to be doing for the rest of your life, when you inevitably start to hate it a little bit, you’re also kind of going to be hating yourself, because what’s wrong with you if you can’t do this thing that defines you? 

That’s a big problem in grad school, believe it or not, because for all the snarkiness and PhD Comics “this is the worst” attitude that grad students have, from what I’ve seen almost everyone kind of stumbles into it out of a place of (sometimes self-consciously buried) love and ambition, and it’s easy to feel betrayed by yourself when things don’t quite measure up.

So my advice to the question you’re not asking is: life is long. I grew up with a strange perspective because both of my parents had pretty darn full lives in their twenties and early thirties: establishing careers, pursuing hobbies, getting married. But they were both pretty miserable, they both wound up losing their jobs and getting divorced from their then-spouses, and they both rebooted by going back to school for something entirely different in their mid-thirties, which is where they met and fell in love and eventually had a couple of kids. They’re retired, now, living in a little apartment a short drive from the ocean, and despite some rocky times, they’re wildly happy with their decision to reinvent themselves, and with the benefit of perspective they don’t regret having tried and failed in their twenties if it meant setting themselves up for where they are now. 

So I’ve always grown up with the notion that it’s okay to try new things, even if it means fucking up, because even decades of “lost time” aren’t lost if you can stack up and clamber over all that crap to get to the next big thing. It’s not going to be easy to switch, by any means, but life is long and you’ll have enough time for a do-over if you really need it. I’m only harping on this because that crisis is so familiar to me, and because what I’ve found is that it’s vital to learn how to reduce the weight of “this is the rest of my life”, because otherwise that weight will crush you the first time something goes wrong. This is your life now. The future is a big ol’ question mark. That’s okay.

More practically, here are some things that I have found to be helpful traits in graduate school. These are things that can be learned.

Everyone talks on their resume about how they’re a “self-starter” or an “independent learner”. I think part of this needs to be true and part of it needs to be bullshit. You’ve gotta learn to be self-motivated in the way that somebody who does NaNoWriMo is self-motivated: if you really need to, can you sit down and churn something out even when you’re not feeling it? Can you push past a block? There is a bit of hand-holding in graduate school, if you have a good adviser, but in the end nobody is going to be as invested in your future as you are.

This goes into the bullshit part of independent learning: depending on the culture at the institution you attend, graduate students may be competitive or pitted against each other. It is essential to push back against this tendency, because snapping out of that pointless competition leads to some of the fiercest and most protective friendships you’ll ever find. There’s a lot of bullshit in academia, and the worst part is that sometimes it can be a big neon sign flashing “BULLSHIT” and you’ll still squint at it and go, “maybe that sign says ‘EVERYTHING IS GREAT’ and I’m just reading it wrong.” Being able to sit down with people who are capable of pointing at the sign and going “that reads bullshit”, and for whom you can also do a bit of pointing, will make the whole thing so much more manageable. Trying to get through it alone or without helping anyone else is putting yourself at a major disadvantage.

On the topic of bullshit-meters, it’s also very important to take care of your mental health the way you take care of your physical health. If something starts to feel off, most universities offer at least the ability to go in and get it checked out for free. That’s so important.

Do you enjoy what you’d be studying? It’s difficult, but try to consider this question outside of the context of “enough to make it the sole thing you pursue for the rest of your life.” If you like something, if it genuinely gets you excited, it doesn’t have to be the only thing in your life that makes you happy. You can still love your hobbies more. But if you genuinely enjoy what you study, you’re more likely to be able to reject the really tempting and super-cool apathy that’s built into the culture of some graduate institutions.

You’re not gonna love it all the time, and that’s okay. You’re gonna feel guilty about being in a relatively stable situation studying something you love and still not enjoying it, and that’s okay. Graduate school is a long commitment, in a lot of departments, and it’s normal to fall out of love with something for a bit if you’re focused on it for so long. Just like relationships go through patches where they’re less about passion and more about having to buckle down and just do maintenance work for a bit, sometimes your project’s gonna feel lackluster. If you can push through that, if you can do the work even when you’re not feeling it, you can find that love again–or if not that particular kind of love, some harder-edged and sturdier version thereof.

Start training yourself to translate humblebrags (almost always coming from dudes) like “I worked 80 hours this week!” into “I have poor time management skills!” Don’t legitimize the expectation that this job will eat your hobbies and the things you enjoy about life. Sometimes that means setting a hard cutoff time beyond which no work is ever done, even if you feel like you just need one more hour to finish it. Professors get swamped, too, and will often understand if you’re honest and up-front about your limitations. If they don’t appreciate some reasonable level of self-awareness in their students, they’re probably not worth listening to. I have also discovered with the benefit of perspective that it is very, very hard to do something completely unforgivable in graduate school.

Grad school differs strongly from undergrad in that you lose a lot of the instant-validation moments you used to get with things like exams and classes. You might go months or even years without hearing whether what you’re doing is acceptable, much less exceptional. All this means is that sometimes you have to seek out that validation actively. Ask your adviser point-blank what you’re doing well and what you could be doing better–they’ll probably reply with a deer-in-headlights look, but if you keep asking they’ll keep getting better at it. Get friends together and read each other’s papers. Find other avenues for validation in your life–write fic, create fanart, celebrate your victories on an online blogging platform. Go ahead and scratch that itch. You deserve to know when you’re doing well.

There’ll be a transition period where you might have to consider being someone else for a bit. For me, in the first few months in a new place, my rule of thumb is to not say no to any invitation. Someone’s gotta go pick up nails at a hardware store? I’ll ask if they want company. Someone’s got an extra ticket to the volleyball game? Okay, sure, I don’t know from volleyball but we’ll do this. Someone I don’t especially like is having a board game night? Fine, let’s go. Astronomy club filled with freshmen? Awkward, but sure, let’s go just to go. I’m usually pretty darn happy on my own, and doing all that social stuff can be exhausting, but it’s so important to establish some sort of support network early on. 90% of those tentative ties will fall apart on their own, but the last 10% can be absolutely unbreakable.

Cut yourself some slack, is what it boils down to. I’m pretty aware that it takes me about three years to feel like I’m competent at something, so for those first two years and 364 days I’ll use that as a mantra to remind myself that it’s okay to be in the middle of the pack, or even the one sickly pack member who’s lagging behind the rest. Grad school often means surrounding yourself with all the folks who were top of their class in undergrad, so it’s okay to suddenly find yourself bringing up the rear. I had the lowest grade by far in the graduate class taught by my adviser. Now I’m publishing papers on the topic. Find as many ways as possible to be patient and kind with yourself.

This is all as honest as I could make it, because graduate school can be a terrible place if it’s a bad fit. Personal experience will also vary a lot–I can preemptively feel the winces from some of my grad school followers as they read through this. This is my experience, and I cannot emphasize that enough.

But I love it. In practical terms, I learned that I love teaching and research and mentorship, so I now feel confident that pursuing a career in academia makes a whole lot of sense. I’ve had very, very bad times in grad school, but I’m now at the point where some nights I legitimately have trouble falling asleep because I’m so excited about what I’ll be doing the next day. 

I hope that if you go for it you can have a wonderful time with it, and even if you go for it and things go wrong, you can remember that life is long and use this as a way to climb to bigger and better things. 

It’s @mashtar‘s birthday today, and I’ve been wanting to draw Nia, the cutest cleric in the universe, forever and now I finally got a chance to! :D

No matter what happens, you’ll always have your true friends to love you and support you and we’ll all keep each other safe and be as happy as we can be even through all the shit that might happen. <3

emerald-dork replied to your post: I hope you're doing better friend. Wishing you...

We love you Angle! I get honestly so excited when I catch one of your streams or see you in Russ’s! You make my day better without fail, and I’m so glad you’re around

Thank you thank you thank you ;_;

I LOVE YOU GUYS SO MUCH. GETTING ME SO EMOTIONAL.