Discover Top Posts Tagged with #grad skool

is uncertainty around doing a phd normal or is it a sign that i shouldn’t get a phd

now i am a master of the arts :3

#grad skool #well i still have to pass for the next two months but i passed the defense jghgjgjb

The cold pizza and energy drinks brought me back 👍

Because recent events in my professional life have triggered old work-related/existential traumas, I'm going to tell you all the story about what happened around the time that I started the Facebook page cheerful nihilism and why I started it.

Roundabouts 2016 I was in grad school for my fourth degree, if you can imagine. I already had a BS and MS in psychology, and then I had gone back to grad school after a brief stint working in social work because I got so burnt out. I got a master's degree in health behavior education, and went on to attempt to get my PhD.

Getting a PhD had always been an ultimate life goal, for me. I'd always gotten high marks in school, and been involved in honors and gifted programs. When I was applying for my PhD program, I noticed that a lot of the professors that I spoke to about getting a reference had some reservations about the mentor that I was going to partner with. No one would be direct with me and tell me exactly what the problem was, they would just say that she was "difficult to work with." This was true, all the collaboration that she did was with people who worked at other institutions not at the University that I was attending in Florida.

But I had grown up with a mother who can be difficult to get along with, so I thought I could handle it. I was also involved in a really abusive relationship, so people talking down to me or trying to make me feel bad about who I was in order to make themselves feel better was just my normal at that time.

I was unable to afford the trip to present my research at the American public Health association National conference in Denver. Imagine my surprise when a mutual who had no immediate connection to my advisor posted a picture of my advisor standing in front of a poster board presenting my research, without my name on it. She was presenting my research as if it were hers. It felt like a gut punch, I had kind of heard that these things could happen but I had never thought that it could happen to me.

I screenshot the picture and sent it to the dean of the college. That was a mistake. This initiated an investigation that would ultimately end in me not being able to find a new mentor because during the investigation my advisor blackballed me, wrote a letter to the fellowship funding committee that was funding my phd, and claimed that I hadn't done any of the work that I was supposed to be doing to earn my fellowship. I found this ironic because she was just presenting my work... But everybody just believed her. They just assumed that she was telling the truth, that I was insane. Even after a human resources investigation did find that she behaved and unethical ways, because she had tenure, she was just prohibited from taking on any new mentees for a couple of years.

I was told that I could continue in the program if I could find a new mentor, but at this point I was untouchable. I ended up dropping out. The craziest thing is that the department actually sent me a letter demanding that I return the fellowship funding for the last half of 2016. This was on the grounds that, according to my former advisor, I hadn't been doing any work. I sent them a letter with a good faith repayment of $1. I explained to them in the letter that if they disagreed with my explanation they could take me to court. They stopped bothering me after that, but they probably sold it to a collections agency.

While all of this was going down and I was being completely broken by academia, I started a meme page on Facebook. Because I had been unmored from everything that had previously given my life structure or meaning, I became very nihilistic. But it wasn't the depressive nihilism that I often see characterized elsewhere, it felt almost liberating to me. I had grown up going to Catholic school for 9 years, my father was career military, the belief in a judeo-christian God was a strong foundation in my family of origin and all of them still regularly attend church.

The idea that life didn't have any ultimate meaning meant, to me, that I was actually free to just create my own. I'm not staunchly atheist, I'm generally agnostic. What I have personally experienced/witnessed throughout my life characterizes a deity with a morality that I cannot understand or connect to in any meaningful way.

Academia broke me. I'm glad I broke, tbh, I lost a lot of the ideas about myself that were programmed into me by society and my family of origin. That was a good thing. It rapidly sped up the process of de-culturing. Instead of scrambling to put myself back together in a semblance of what I assumed society wanted from me, I just let myself reassemble in whatever way I ended up reassembling.

I started the Facebook page on a lark. Parasocial relationships are dismissed by self-help gurus, but they were the only safe way I could connect to other people at that time. Strangers on the internet were more authentic and genuine with me than the people I saw face to face.

Oh there's tons of trash comments, too. But interestingly, if you're visible to a million people and get hundreds of cruel comments you start to realize that the only ones that hit the mark are the comments that echo the voice of the inner critic in your own head.

#burnout #grad skool #digital diary