Becoming Unsure about Future Plans

RoaringMice
Tue, 05 Feb 2019 15:00:19 +0000

You don’t have to apply to PhD programs next semester. You can apply to them in a year, if you want to. It can be a good idea to have a pause between your undergrad and your PhD, anyway, so you can work for a bit, and figure out if a PhD - and in what field - is really what you want. This is the path I often recommend to students, because I see too many people enter PhD programs that don’t end up working out for them, and taking a year or so off can help bring focus. So an option is to take that pressure off yourself for now, and to not apply to PhD programs just yet.

You might also benefit by taking some action, going in a bit of a new direction. For example, you say you aren’t taking any women’s studies classes this term. What are you taking? If you don’t like your sociology major at all, you can switch to pure women’s studies. If you’re really missing women’s studies, you could consider doing something related to it as volunteer work or similar. You can drop the class you hate the most, to free up time and psychological space (you really can. And one W won’t hurt you re: grad school admissions.) You can speak to a counselor in student health services, because how you feel right now is quite common in college students, and they can help you figure out how to deal with your feelings. And talk to a professor in women’s studies at your university. Find out what is actually needed to get into a program in your field, because you may not be missing as much as you think you are.

And actually yes, I did feel this way toward the end of my undergrad. What I did to combat it was to change my major slightly, to something that gave me space to take more of the classes I liked, and which also shortened my time to graduation slightly, so I got done more quickly. I also started to very carefully research any of the gen ed/core type classes I had left to take, so that I took the better professors/more interesting classes.