Colleges That Change Lives (CTCL.org) seems like a great effort at finding nurturing undergraduate schools. But I can’t find graduate schools.
Here’s some background explaining my search for “nurture.”
I am slow to warm up to things in life.
But I luckily developed a love for academics, particularly math & physics.
UCLA however, beat me down and smashed up that love for school.
Maybe because of the public school format, student-teacher disconnect, and lack of guidance in (yet high expectation for) technical skill.
Held steadfast to the faith that school is still rewarding to me. Drank more coffee to muddle through. Developed a chocolate habit to make up for the dying rush.
Worked 2 internships and 1 job (quit). Working generally put me in an unstable state of restless emptiness, leading to destructive behavior.
I’m now stuck in a place where hope for life is comical, like climbing out of a slippery well.
Depression psychotherapy has been ineffective. I’m not sad because my brain wiring is overreacting. I’m disillusioned because of an unfortunate mixture of nurture-lacking circumstance and a “slow-to-warm” temperament.
Once in a week or so, I inexplicably try climbing anyways.
Thinking about grad school is one of these attempts.
But I’ll need a particularly high amount of positive reinforcement (nurture) to allow me to get back to loving school, or at least back to having a reason to live.
Grad schools by nature are not so nurturing, and engineering isn’t a “nuturing” major at any level. I don’t think going to grad school is the answer for you, sounds like you are having trouble holding a job with an undergraduate degree. You need to figure out your psychological issues and learn to hold down a job before trying anything like an engineering graduate school program.
To expand on what @intparent said, graduate school, and in particular, engineering, is known for frequently breaking people. The stress level is through the roof and never truly drops to a healthy level.
Milk.
Point taken that engineering isn’t nurturing to begin with.
I am having difficulty “holding down a job” because the nature of engineering jobs seems incompatible with my preference to master tasks in a structured way.
Academics is the only place that offers me that structured routine.
I have tutored plenty and find it rewarding to come up with clever ways to communicate knowledge that has been dear to me.
So, I am considering becoming a professor. For that to happen, I need grad school. Hence, my first post.
Any help with this line of thinking?
Appreciate the comments. I’ve been moved to utter desperation and could really use any help “figuring it out.”
You may not realize that research is very unstructured and you have to find your own way. After the MS portion there isn’t much coursework and you have to come up with research and a dissertation. you have to be highly motivated and self directed. Many people give it up and even go a bit crazy and start to wonder what they are doing here. I have seen posts to that extend elsewhere. Read The PhD Grind, he did finish but it gives a good idea of one person’s journey: http://pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir.htm
I’ve found that only your family and close friends “nurture” you.
As for education nurturing you…I’d actually recommend a classic…“The Catcher in the Rye”. This book is many things, but part of it is about a messed up individual’s messed up experience in education. I love the following quote from the book. It is from page 2. Holden Caulfield talks about the fictitious prep school he was just kicked out of….
The point is do you even want a school, whether it is a university, grad school, or prep school “nurturing” you or “molding” you? Sometimes this “nurturing” can come off as insincere and do more harm than good. Is it really a University’s job to guide your growth? Do you really even want that? Why? Perhaps when I was much younger I expected something like this from a school, but I think it is a sure way to become depressed. This is because any type of educational institution has their own agenda. This is fine. It is just that a university shouldn’t pretend otherwise.
Perhaps something to think about. As I reflected on finishing a PhD, this was really a helpful book to read. It put me at ease with things and seemed to put things in perspective.
@bluebayou There is the monstrosity aspect of kids in grade school that I don’t feel appropriately inspired to deal with (you need to teach well, and you need to parent well). That said, I was shooting some hoops yesterday and thought about your post, and that it might not be a bad idea to coach and teach at a high school.
@BrownParent Thanks for reinforcing what I need to know, that the PhD path sucks in terms of nurture. May re-visit that grind website.
@jack63 Thanks, I’ll definitely consider picking up that book. The “other” English teacher at my high school assigned Catcher in the Rye, while mine assigned something different. So it would be a nice new read for me. Appreciate you going out of the way to get me that nice quote.
As far as whether I really want a school to nurture me? I guess I damn well really want one to. Back in grade school, I felt like I was living life on another level, because I was such a hard-working student and got the nurturing positive feedback from good teachers. I guess I’m currently experiencing sort of a withdrawal from that high. There seems to be nothing that can match the purity of working my ass off, sensing self-development, and receiving positive feedback. But the more posts I’m reading here, the more I’m convinced there is little hope in re-igniting that fire in graduate school.
You can’t go back to grade school by going to grad school, that is for sure. Nuturing is pretty much over at that level. No one is going to solve your problems for you. I’d look into getting certification in your state as a teacher and take a shot at high school math or science teaching.
You may find some graduate advisors who have that habit of giving lots of positive feedback, but there isn’t one single graduate program. It really comes down to the professor, and there is very little way of knowing a priori whether a particular professor is of the “nurturing” sort that you desire or not. At the very least, even with the ones that are that way, you will be expected to start paving your own path within the first several years of the program. The entire point is to become an independent researcher. Basically, as soon as the class portion of the program is over, PhD programs are essentially completely in any meaningful way other than the scientific method. The degree of any other structuring again varies widely by advisor, not by school.
I understand what your are saying; however, it really is a PhD advisor’s job to give you both accurate negative and positive feedback. There is this website “100 reasons not to go to grad school”…I could argue with most of the reasons, or say that they are not applicable to engineers. A couple are relevant though…
You don’t want your adviser to be too “nice”. An adivsor must give you negative feedback.
When I say I don’t want school to “nurture” me, this is what I mean. It relates to the role of a university…similar to the role of a PhD advisor. I wanted an advisor/college/gradschool/university/etc to “advise” me. For the most part, I did not want them to “guide” me. This is fundamentally because I saw the education as “my” education. I met the minimum requirements to graduate and used the time and opportunity as I saw fit. Too often I think education looks as a student as fitting the “mold” or not fitting the “mold”. For example, some profs may think “If he does not fit the mold, he is not worth my time”. The students lose ownership of their education when that happens. The point is if you want education to “nurture” you, that’s fine. I think if you expect education to guide you rather than just educate you or give you solid professional advice, you are begging to be disappointed, burned out, and led to make bad career and educational decisions. Every university, professor, and university staff member has their own agenda. This is fine, but you must go into school with your own agenda too.
@jack63 So where did you get that sense of “ownership” of your education? Where did you get an idea of “your own agenda”? My situation is that these senses of purpose themselves were critically inspired by school nurturing combined with personal diligence. My UCLA experience lacked nurture (partly my fault: bad choice in school, bad choice in major) - and essentially made me feel like I am denied life’s joy and left in the dust.
You can’t look to schools or programs to give you “life’s joy”. Particularly in graduate school and in academia, you have to derive intrinsic pleasure from the work. So much of it is thankless, and often you won’t be recognized - or even when you do produce good work, you might get a pat on the back and that’s it, move onto the next thing. It’s not like elementary school where you get a gold star. Increasingly you will have to learn to evaluate the worth of your own work. To survive graduate school, you have to be the kind of self-motivated person who can pat your own back and not wait for anyone to do it for you.
So if you want a program where people are going to pat you on the head and tell you you are special - I don’t think any top PhD program is like that. If you already have mental health problems, particularly with depression, grad school is not the place to get your therapy. It’ll just make it worse. Grad school isn’t designed to make you love school. In fact, you might hate school when it’s all said and done (I know I do!)
Furthermore…graduate school is about learning how to do research, not learning how to teach. While many people come in with the end goal of being a professor, you have to love research enough to do want to do it for 5-6 years while you earn the PhD (and potentially another 2-4 years after that, while you do a postdoc). If you love communicating information and reaching out to people, then I agree with the recommendation to think about teaching K-12 (particularly elementary school - young kids need a lot of nurturing and could benefit from someone with strong math skills). You might even seek employment at a private or independent school, since they won’t require state certification and the caliber of students would be a bit higher. You might consider applying for Teach for America.
I certainly was never inspired by the vast majority of professors in my undergrad or grad experiences. The only prof who has ever really inspired me was my PhD advisor. However, nurture is just not the word I’d use. He said something to the affect that you needed to stick you head out there with the understanding that you would be beat down, and you needed to learn to defend your ideas and ambitions.
Personally, I think you need to reflect on experiences on your own and not care how others believe you should feel. This has helped me form my own agenda. Sometimes the worst thing you can possibly do is listen to others. I guess you need to listen selectively.
I’ve had a few professors that you might consider inspiring but none that anyone would consider “nurturing” that I can recall. Nor would I want them to be nurturing. As an example, I am very, very thankful for the person I had as my PhD advisor, but he is very much a blunt, tells-it-like-it-is kind of person, and I think that, as a doctoral advisor, that’s a far superior quality. The entire point of a PhD (particukar in STEM fields where I have my experience) is to learn to become an independent researcher, and that means you need someone who is going to hold your feet to the flames and expect a lot of you, not someone who will coddle you.
What if I title-changed to “where can I find a positively-reinforcing engineering graduate school?”
Maybe that could simply mean a less competitive school. One in which I could take my time, maybe 4 years, to get a masters.
All I want is another chance to live happily, developing competence in some field. K-12 allowed that opportunity. If you put in the time and diligence, you mastered cursive. You mastered grammar. You mastered algebra. You mastered history. Spanish. College robbed me of that opportunity, that joy. After K-12, you get by if you are a natural genius or you are OK with the chronic state of being half-competent while pretending to be fully competent. I am neither. Is there nothing left for me in this world?
First, finding somewhere to get positive reinforcement is going to be difficult because that’s not based on the school or the department. That’s based solely on the personality of the individual professor you choose as your advisor. That’s difficult to know a priori.
Second, if you are trying to work diligently to master something, that’s definitely something you can do in graduate school. However, throughout graduate school you are working your tail off only to learn, just as you had that “Aha!” moment, that there is so much more you don’t know beyond that. There is always more to learn and get better, and that can be very frustrating at times. You never feel finished yet at some point you have to know where to draw the line and publish. If that is something you think would perpetuate your feeling, then that could be a deal breaker.
Finally, no professor is willingly going to let you hang around for 4 years getting a master’s degree. That’s a waste of their funding and it implies you will be working very slowly, which makes you even more difficult to fund and more difficult for them to write new proposals. In the end, if you want to stay that long, you are much better off putting in the extra year or two and working at a more acceptable rate toward a PhD.