zoloft and graduate school
The Chronicle of Higher Education recently had an article on failure and graduate school [1]. I don't think any of my friends lying outside of this myopic enclave of intellectual boot-camp-style socialization can understand the endemic uncertainty and fear that pierces through the hearts of my fellow kin [2]. And me.This holds true not just at UCLA, but in other campuses as well:
Perhaps such figures help explain the recent finding that "depression and other forms of mental distress" were a serious problem in a study of more than 3,100 graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley. According to the study: "Nearly half of all survey respondents (45 percent) reported an emotional or stress-related problem that significantly impacted their academic performance or well-being." Another 67 percent reported feeling hopeless at times, 95 percent felt overwhelmed in graduate school, and 54 percent said they had felt so "depressed that it was difficult to function." About 10 percent had seriously considered suicide, and one in 200 had actually attempted suicide in the last year.
I don't know yet if I'm in the 54% group [insert pregnant pause] yet -- I hope not -- but I certainly lie in the 67% and 95% groups.
Anyway, this article is depressing and I have to admit, at times, as the article so dramatically spells out, so is grad school. And I don't think the pursuit of knowledge should be. Sometimes it's important to remember why we came to grad school, and not lose the forest for the trees [3]. I'm not sure how reform would or could work, but something needs to be done to change academic culture in some way. Either that or market Zoloft to me. I'd probably buy it.
[1] Thanks to Delayed Reaction for pointing it out.
[2] Most of my fellow kin. I just remembered that there are cocky people out there. Sometimes their bravado masks uncertainty and fear, but sometimes, sometimes, it doesn't. Those are the annoying ones which we don't like. We don't envy them either, because worse than endemic uncertainty, we recognize, is the folly of constant certainty.
[3] I know this is wishful thinking with my qualifying exams looming. If they were a tree, they would certainly be the most gianormous redwood in all the land. But once they are over, maybe I can climb the redwood and see the forest? Okay my metaphors are getting longer and more nonsensical. On a totally related and yet wholly unrelated note, I recently mixed metaphors in an email: "Ben is flaky, where we'll spend a bunch of time hanging out and then he'll sort-of disappear. But I do that too, so I am not calling the kettle black when I'm throwing stones gathering moss in glass houses."
posted by Sameer @ 7:25 PM
6 Comments:
Me, I'm just at the stage in which grad school is very, very dull. At some point, the infantilizing, connect-the-dots professional training turns into a sort of let's-all-watch-the-paint-dry kind of exercise: Oh, fun, another historiography essay. (Run, Jane, run.) It's vocational school with pretensions. If you love something, and don't want to love it anymore, study it in grad school.
I can't possibly be the only one to feel this way.
And then let's just go ahead and ask the amusing causation question: Are so many grad students depressed because they're grad students, or are grad students because they're prone to depression?
Hmm.
And then, after my oh-so-provocative comments that no one noticed or felt the need to comment on, I had a great day today. And kept thinking, "Hey, I really love grad school."
And no, I'm not actually manic-depressive. Well, not officially.
I think maybe you ARE manic depressive. Either that or bipolar. Officially.
If you love something, and don't want to love it anymore, study it in grad school.
touche!
I loved undergrad. I loved learning, I loved the academic environment, I loved the social element... life couldn't be better.
Then I went to grad school. The passion for my chosen field, which I'd spent 4 years in undergrad carefully (and successfully!) nurturing, withered and died in a few short months of grad school.
I endured 4 mind numbing years of an M.A. and then a Ph.D. before I finally realized that my sanity was far more important than any piece of paper and managed to escape to a completely unrelated but thoroughly exciting job in the entertainment industry. It's amazing how quickly my constant misery and depression reversed into a state of constant near-euphoria.
5 years later, I'm still giddy. Those years of grad school were like a black hole in my life - there's clearly something wrong with the system.
That is halfway comforting, halfway depressing.
But hooray for you! You aren't involved with (a) Gilmore Girls, (b) Alias, (c) Veronica Mars, or (d) the O.C., are you? If you are, then you are my hero.
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