Can someone please help me?

juillet
Thu, 07 Nov 2013 12:53:34 +0000

Yes, it’s actually illegal to discriminate against you in admissions because of mental health issues. Although I wouldn’t disclose it because unconscious biases can arise on the part of the admissions committee - plus, there’s no need for you to unless it’s impacted your work to date, and then you can just say you had medical issues. I actually have had depressive episodes before graduate school (which caused a really bad semester in college, hence my 3.4 GPA) but I had a better handle on it when I started graduate school.

Usually year 3 marks the transition to independence for doctoral students. Your first 2 years are essentially like undergrad on steroids - you’re taking graduate level classes, but you are still doing most of the same tasks you did as an undergrad - going to class, writing papers, sometimes taking exams. You also may be working as a research assistant, but you’re not really expected to have independent projects yet, so you’re often doing higher-level versions of the same tasks you were doing as a senior undergrad. So there’s not a lot of role mismatch for you - you do the same things you are used to.

However, by year 3 or 4 you usually have finished most or all of your coursework. That’s when you start taking qualifying exams, and when you are expected to be more independent in your research - maybe starting your own independent projects, collecting data for your dissertation, writing a proposal, presenting at national conferences, etc. If you’ve never really worked independently before - and especially if you are coming directly from undergrad, like I did - it can be a system shock even if you think you are expecting it. You have to manage your own time now - nobody’s managing it for you.

It can be very solitary and isolating, especially when you are studying for quals. Studying for qualifying exams (also know as comprehensives or comps) can be brutal, depending on your department; mine weren’t so bad, but they still took a LOT of time. And all of it is unstructured - it’s up to you to schedule it yourself, and if you aren’t used to scheduling your own time - and I mean ALL of your own time - it can be daunting. The semesters in which I took my writtens and orals I had no classes or I was only TAing one class, so the rest of the days I had to decide when I was going to study, when I was going to prep the classes I was teaching and when I was going to relax. It’s hard to do that when you haven’t before, and inevitably grad students schedule too much work and not enough leisure time. It can lead to feeling overwhelmed and depressed and/or anxious. It gets easier once you learn how to do it.

Also, years 3 and 4 is when you start thinking about your future, building your CV for an academic or research position, and checking out the job market. I went through a period in those years when I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do. What I thought I wanted changed and morphed a lot in my second and third years - I came in thinking I absolutely did not want to be an academic and then I started liking it a bit more than I expected. I thought I would hate teaching and I actually really like it. So I was really confused, and trying to figure out my life. I was also just burned out - I had already done 4 years of undergrad and now 2 years of grad school and I was tired! I just wanted to be finished.

So you’re dealing with all this at once - the transition to independence, scheduling your own time, trying to figure out research you want to spend the next 7ish years of your life on (usually your tenure-track research grows from your dissertation research), studying for your qualifying exams, and trying to figure out what you want to do with your life. You also may be TAing a class or even teaching your own section of a lab or intro class, which always takes much more time than you expect (they say 15-20 hours a week but that is a lie, at least at first when you are just learning. I’ve spent 4-5 hours just preparing a single 2-hour lecture, although now I’m much faster). And usually you aren’t taking enough time for yourself - you’re trying to work around the clock to get all of this stuff done in the 24 hours you have each day, and the days seem to pass faster and faster the less you get done. No wonder so many grad students have a break down!

By the beginning of year 5 I had a come-to-Jesus moment and realized that I was running myself ragged and I needed to slow down, so I decided to take an extra year to finish (6 instead of 5) and I slowed down considerably. I started making more time for myself; I began to say no to things I didn’t really want to do; I made more time to spend with my friends and my husband; I started reading books for pleasure again; and some days I literally lay in bed and stare at the ceiling for a half hour because I want to do absolutely nothing. I also started exercising and going to bed at midnight no matter what I had to do (and sometimes earlier). It made a tremendous, tremendous difference in my mental health and my desire to continue in the field, and not only was I a lot happier, I realized that I really loved my research and liked academia a lot. It reconnected me with why I wanted to be a researcher in the first place. And slow down doesn’t mean I did nothing - I won a second fellowship, defended my dissertation proposal and worked on two papers (1 first-authored) in my 5th year. I got the same amount of work done, I just reorganized my life differently and I was far more productive!

Haha, so now you all know my life story. The moral is: don’t lose yourself in grad school, and don’t lose sight of the reason you’re doing it in the first place.

But my point is that all that stuff absolutely would NOT have been worth it if I didn’t love my research and really want to be a researcher in my field. The only thing that kept me from quitting in my third year, and again in my fourth, is that I really really really love my field, love my research and wanted to do jobs that required a PhD more than anything else. Once you get to year 3 or 4 and you hit that wall, if you don’t need to do the PhD you’re going to start wondering why you are torturing yourself this way. And then, it’s emotionally difficult to leave because you’ve invested so much of yourself into the program. Even if you do manage to leave, you wonder why you spent 3 or 4 year being unhappy when you could’ve done something else.

I should write a book, lol!