Is it normal to be MISERABLE in grad school?

I loved grad school. Beats working. Well, I did work really really hard, but I had more freedom and less bs administrative responsibilities than any other time in adult life.

If you find a job where you don't have to do busywork and deal with people who are a major headache, let the rest of us know.

thesis hell wrote:

Your experience is totally normal. First, graduate school tends to attract mono-dimensional idiots incapable of completing tasks outside their field of choice. Do not compare yourself to your idiot savant graduate student colleagues. Second, the professors are even more dysfunctional than the graduate students. They tend to be self-centered and abusive in their demands. Nevertheless, if you suffer through your graduate education, you will acquire the skills necessary to independently research a topic and provide novel insight. My advice is that you work tirelessly to research your thesis topic and abstain from socializing with the professors/students. A timely thesis defense should be your unequivocal goal.

BUMP!!

PhD Guy wrote:

thesis hell wrote:

Your experience is totally normal. First, graduate school tends to attract mono-dimensional idiots incapable of completing tasks outside their field of choice. Do not compare yourself to your idiot savant graduate student colleagues. Second, the professors are even more dysfunctional than the graduate students. They tend to be self-centered and abusive in their demands. Nevertheless, if you suffer through your graduate education, you will acquire the skills necessary to independently research a topic and provide novel insight. My advice is that you work tirelessly to research your thesis topic and abstain from socializing with the professors/students. A timely thesis defense should be your unequivocal goal.

BUMP!!

bumpity, bump, bump.

Grad students are often not directly informed that grad school is not really about receiving "direct" teaching. You're not there to "learn" in the traditional sense, you're there to read a ton on your own, get in with a lab or with a professor, and do what it takes to ideally "transform" knowledge through your own original work. Of course, this also fits in with professor's objectives to concentrate on their own work and neglect teaching, advising, etc.

Horatio Hornblower wrote:

Grad students are often not directly informed that grad school is not really about receiving "direct" teaching. You're not there to "learn" in the traditional sense, you're there to read a ton on your own, get in with a lab or with a professor, and do what it takes to ideally "transform" knowledge through your own original work. Of course, this also fits in with professor's objectives to concentrate on their own work and neglect teaching, advising, etc.

I understand that, and that is one of the reasons I'm so displeased: I could be learning a great deal more on my own if I wasn't required to be doing all this other stuff that is not worthwhile. The program requires a number of classes specific to the program that are about as useful as "let's sit in a circle and talk about our feelings for 90 minutes," so it's been pretty frustrating.

I would guess 50 percent of graduate students are unhappy, you tend to be happy in the beginning and towards the end. Being a grad student is a weird situation, most people are not fully treating you like an adult, yet you don't comfortable feel like doing the undergrad fun stuff anymore.

"Dealing with people who are a major headache"-- that's part of life son. It is not like an employer won't require that you spend MORE time in meetings and dealing with idiots than a university.

"Getting dumber"-- If you are actually taking classes in your first year and not learning things, you have a problem. Once you leave academia, it becomes significantly harder to ever learn a subject.

If you are in a Ph.D. program-- the whole point of the program is to teach you how to think/learn on your own. You are not going to get spoon-fed like an undergrad. You are going to have to chose a thesis topic, plan an approach for making a meaningful contribution in that area, and implement that approach. If you are bored/not learning, it is your own fault.

One of the persons I work with is the second most unpleasant person to work with of any I've ever had to work with ever. Another is probably near the bottom but not the worst. I have to take orders from these people, so it's not easy to just deal with it.

The classes they require me to take are a fvcking joke. This is one of the reasons I'm displeased with the program. Every day I go to these classes I feel like just banging my head against the desk because of how awful and useless they are. I never anticipated such a thing and have never experienced this before, and that is why I think it is THIS particular program that is the problem.

I have done research in the past. I know how it works. I'm in a master's program and have no intention of ever doing a PhD, so I will likely receive more guidance, but I'm aware I'm not going to be spoon fed things. That's not the problem. The problem is that I've been working 60+hrs/week ever since August and feel like 90% of it has been a complete waste of time. More than that, the work as been stressful and emotionally draining, so here I am, working my arse off, jumping through hoops, being miserable, and not even benefiting from the experience at all. Do you know how hard it is to work your arse off 12hrs/day for something you feel is not benefiting anyone or anything and then being harassed about your work all the time also? It's terrible.

So what is stopping you from reorienting your life around the work you want to do, cutting off the people you don't like, etc? I'm in grad school - PhD- and I love it. Tons of fun, learning a lot, feel pretty sanguine about job prospects. I think the really hard question is how much you perceive yourself to be forced into your particular path within school when there's no material costs to approaching the entire thing.

And people who complain about their very privileged lives with as much self-pity as your last post had remind me of th great xkcd comic about pick-up artists:

"You look like you're going to spend your life having one epiphany after another, always thinking you've finally figured out what's holding you back, and how you can finally be productive and creative and turn your life around. But nothing will ever change. That cycle of mediocrity isn't due to some obstacle. It's who you are. The thing standing in the way of your dreams is; that the person having them is you."

to approaching the entire thing *differently*. Basically, if you feel like you have no choice but to do things the way you're doing them, to work a million hours on classes you don't enjoy and hang out with people you don't like, how much that's just in your head.

What's stopping me from reorienting my life around the work I want to do while staying in this program? Well, I'm REQUIRED to take these classes and cannot be in the program without taking them. I'm also REQUIRED to work with the people I don't like and cannot be in the program without dealing with them. How would you go about changing these things? The program is what it is. Changing things is not possible without leaving.

I actually kind of like your last quote but don't think it pertains to me. I'm not some PUA schmuck. I'm trying to better myself through graduate school, and graduate school is not bettering me. It's actually making my life much worse and having a net detriment. Because it's not benefiting me, I want to move on to something that will. How is that mediocrity?

In grad school for economics, have hated my life since 2012. nothing is more miserable especially when you're a non-liberal in the humanities. You cannot show me a more miserable lifestyle than mine.

Reading your posts makes me miserable.

1) No one is forcing you to work for those two particular people except yourself.

If you are early in grad school (it sounds like you are) just start asking around to find a new advisor. It is not like you have invested 4 years on a thesis topic that has to be completed with the same advisor.

Believe me-- everyone in the department knows who the as___s are. It will not surprise other profs if you come knocking on their door asking to switch advisors.

2) As for the classes- you spend what-- 2-3 hrs a day in class? Sitting there listening to someone babble about something that you already know is not unduly burdensome if you are challenging yourself outside the classroom.

Once again-- most of the learning in grad school occurs outside the classroom. The classes are OK but they will soon become an impediment to getting your research and thesis done.

3) As for "you knowing how research works"-- with all due respect, I have never met an undergrad who knew how research works. Most grad students only "get it" around their 3rd to 4th year, which is why the final year or two of grad school are usually more productive than the first three or four.

4) As for working 12 hrs a day: on what? Since your classes are a joke, it must be your thesis. You may have been one of the unfortunate souls in landed in a lab where those sorts of hours are de rigueur, but that is the exception not the rule.

Once again, if 12 hrs a day is expected in your lab, then everyone in the department knows this and it should not be hard to find another advisor.

1) It's a matter of funding. There are no other options currently available

2) The classes I'm taking require ~20hrs/week of work outside of class. This work outside of class is just as unhelpful as actually being in class. It takes up time and mental and emotional energy, and thus strips me of my ability to learn things on my own along with the time commitments I have doing the work that brings me my stipend. The classes seemed to have been designed with the intention of simply demanding a great deal of time rather than actually benefiting the students in any way. I think this problem is specific to my particular program and not school in general as this has not been the case at other schools I've attended.

3) I worked in research for two years before entering a grad program. I'm not saying I'm an expert or anything like that, just that I understand the expectations.

4) You think you know my situation better than me? Interesting. My funding comes from a particular project that requires a great deal of time-commitment. I do this in addition to my graduate courses and my research and the meetings I must attend for all of these things. I'm in meetings alone about 6 hours per week.

1) Sorry for giving you the impression that I know your situation better than you do, but I have never seen a department where there is only a single prof with available funding. Academia just doesn't work like that.

How many profs in the dept? With how many have you spoken? Have you talked to profs in other departments? For example, sometimes a desperate physics prof will hire an EE grads student to do research.

Also, are you able to make up the lack of funding by TA'ing?

2) 20 hrs a week outside of class? Is this a coursework-only masters program?

Most of the time, the profs share a common interest in being able to milk their grad students for time in the lab and collaborate to keep the hours down. Of course, this goes out the window if you are talking about a coursework-only masters where the most of the students are paying tuition rather than on a research assistanceship.

3) Like I said-- most college grads take 3-4 years to "get" what is expected of them in research.

It is of course possible that you are god's gift to academia and that you have wisdom and insight that have escaped others in your position for several years.

However, in my opinion, it is more probable that you have a vague understanding of the requirements without knowing how to implement them.

4) Are the 6 hrs of meetings/week driven by the funding agency/company or the prof?

Stressed and depressed, sorry if 4runner and I sound like we're putting you down when you're already feeling down. Both of us are trying to make the point that you might not be as constrained as you think you are. You report that there's very little you can do to change the circumstances that make you miserable short of dropping the program. I'm very skeptical of this. I hypothesize you could probably start working 10 hours a week fewer for each class and no one would notice or care, or even if they did, it would have no impact on your long-term prospects. You counter-argue that we don't know the specific of your program. I would respond that I have strong priors about the way grad programs in general are set up and about uncreative people who don't see their way out of bad situations. Your posts make you sound like one. The thing about not having vision is that you don't have vision about the things you don't have vision about. We can't necessarily trust that you'd see a way to make the situation better if one were present.

Think long and hard about intermediary options for making the situation better.

It's okay. I'm open to discussion. That's why I started this thread. The thing is, I've been spread so thin from the beginning that I have already been doing B quality work at everything I do. I DID decrease the amount of time I spent on everything and am now doing C quality work at everything I do. I have also tried working with my advisers and my boss to try to work things out and improve the situation. My advisers have been helpful and have changed a few things, but overall the situation still stinks. The biggest problem is just that I'm not learning anything and am not able to study what I want to study in this program. It's a small program in a small school, so options are pretty limited. This is influencing my negativity more than the time commitment. It'd be like if you were in a physics department but wanted to study genetics. They're just not closely enough related to try to make it work somehow even if there was some way to study genetics while in a physics program (one that did not include any professors that do any biophysics work).

The pattern on messageboards is for responders to automatically assume the OP has no idea what he/she is talking about. I'm not necessarily accusing you of this, but I just want to point out that's the pattern every time and that it's frequently not the case.

How did you end up in such a crappy program? When I applied to grad schools, the coursework and expectations were all laid out pretty clearly. It shouldn't have been a surprise to you that you'd have to take these courses you dislike. Beyond that, it's just a Master's. You can finish in a year and a half, two years, and move on.