Entering my fourth year of graduate school, I just don’t
know if I can do it anymore. I look at
the draft of research questions I wrote for my project, and the lines mean
nothing to me. I stare at words on the page and they stare right back at
me. They seem to have discovered the
secret invisibility of ink so boring you won’t notice it is there.
“What am I doing?” I think to myself. Why am I still here?
I’ve wanted to drop out of graduate school since I
arrived. My first day of class I was
late, and showed up unprepared having not done the reading. To be fair, it was a surprise. My department likes to start classes before
the official start date of the semester, tacking on an extra session because “a
semester is just too short to get it all done.”
I thought I was coming for orientation, but got a surprise lecture on
epistemology instead. (Side Note: surprise epistemology, episiotomy, why are
the words and their meanings in that context both so painful?)
I’ve always been the reluctant graduate student. Maybe that should tell me something.
