One of my roommates just disappeared. He owed me some money — not a big deal; I’m glad to be rid of him, honestly, so it’s worth the 40 bucks — but tomorrow is April 1, and our rent is due, and his 400$ *is* a big deal, even split between two of us.
Shit.
Well, who knew it. Thank you, Dorothea, but a quick pronoun fix? I’m a girl.
How funny. I always figured it was obvious. Apparently not. And it’s startling how *weird* it is to hear the wrong pronoun attached to you. (Which reminds me of transgendered naming conventions — it’s hard to use a pronoun that doesn’t *look* right, and also to change — it takes me years to go from a full name to a nickname, if I can ever even make the switch.)
The job is a little less interesting than it sounds, but getting me a good grounding in things. It also pays *well*.
My department is indeed being kind. I’m not sure why; I don’t feel I deserve it. But I have my advisor, who will be helpful enough, and two people back at my undergrad institution who continue to be incredibly helpful.
I’m getting out early, and under less stress than I could have been. Which, because I am insane, feels like more of a failure than stickign it out until it killed me would be. My department, though a little crazy itself, tries to do the best for its students, more or less. It’s been responsive — we asked to have a student voice on faculty meetings, and they let us a bit, we asked for a better orientation for new students (as opposed to none), and they created one. The requirements aren’t crazy, there are no qualifying exams to put arcane material on (what came before c-command?), the faculty is, if not open-door, willing to make appointments for the near future. It’s small, which has all the good and bad features expected. It doesn’t hire many adjuncts, allowing graduate students to teach the full courses. (Good while you’re in the program.)
It has its limits, and it has a number of bad points.
But they’re just not so much crazy that it was them killing me.
The absolute worst is that now I feel renewed love for the field.
I have told the general advisor I am leaving.
I did not tell the person I am mostly working with. Why? I don’t know. Fear, probably.
I get back to this email:
Hi. I was disappointed to hear from [advisor] that you have decided to leave with a terminal masters. I have always considered you a very promising student. You are not required to explain anything to me, but I am curious as to why you have made this decision. Also, I am supposed to arrange with you some sort of termination of your generals paper effort. I do have your earlier draft, which with a few revisions will do under these circumstances. However this is to end and for whatever reason you are leaving, please let me know what is to become of you.
Ohh. Guilt.
I feel worse about leaving, like it’s a bigger mistake. I keep wondering if it isn’t a mistake. I want to do linguistics! I just . . . want other things also. More. And I can’t seem to have both. I know myself; I will not be an occasional linguist. Oh, perhaps I’ll *intend* to. But days weeks months will pass, and it will all be buried.
I wrote back:
Hi [advisor],
I meant to tell you, but I wasn’t sure how to approach you. I’m leaving for a combination of reasons, but the primary one is the lack of a job market. I just don’t want to go around for a few years in one-year jobs in the hopes that eventually I will find a tenure-track position and be able to settle down. And if I’m not aiming for academia, why am I getting a PhD? (The answer, as it turns out, is that I’m not.)
I’ve been very conflicted about this whole thing, though I really feel I’m making the right choice for me. I’m regretful, too, because I love linguistics, and I love doing linguistics, but I don’t feel I can become a linguist without making sacrifices that I would regret even more.
I have a job at a company in [Canada City] — they do natural language processing and machine learning stuff — which will keep me until December at least; I also plan to get some programming experience (there are some good 1 year programs at schools in [Canada City]) and then, hopefully, get a full-time job as some version of a computational linguist.
Let me know when you have time to meet (Fridays aren’t so good for me). I would like to figure out what I can do to finish my paper and get an MA. I will be in Europe at the end of the month for a conference.
I don’t know what the hell I’m doing anymore. Everything seems like a bad choice.
Frogs and Ravens: How Many Data Points Make a Trend?
Blogging — I started this blog (though I had ones before) before I was seriously thinking of leaving. Or maybe not: I had decided last year to give it one more year because I wouldn’t feel content with giving it just the firt year, but was thinking “another year like this and I’m gone”. Of course come the year and I fought like hell against leaving.
But blogging certainly made it *easier* to leave. Sure, I know a few people who left my program. Last year, 2 of 10 people left (in their first year) my roommate’s class (math). But I had no sense of their leaving, why, what they thought. (Mostly.)
With blogs — I got to read Dorothea’s story. I read Rana as she was deciding to leave. I read IA and her comments. So I got a sense of people who left, what they did, what they felt — and THAT people left, and that it was okay. After all, my professors are all people who didn’t leave, and no one in my family has gone for a PhD (my father got his MEd just before I was born, and my mother just completed her MLIS, but those are rather different).
Amanda, in her comment, has a point: I have expressed many, many times my dissatisfaction with where I live. I have not expressed as often my dissatisfaction with my roommates; rest assured, it runs as deep.
I don’t know if I’d've left had I not been writing a blog. Possibly. But had I not read them? Probably not. This way I could feel like part of a community instead of the lone, sole loser, the one who couldn’t hack it. (Sort of. I still feel sometimes like a loser, but at least I can separate how I feel from what I think.)
I suspect that had this been pre-internet, I would have stuck it out, painfully, until I got myself seriously ill, and thrown good time after bad, as well as a long recovery period. Worse insanity, worse depression. Worse scars.
And I wish I were willing to stick it out, but, in the end, I’m not willing to give up what I have been giving up for the past two years. Yes, perhaps a Real Academic ™ would be, or would have to be. And it’s not healthy. But I still wish I were that style of crazy. Because, no matter what, I love linguistics. I love doing it. I can do it, and I can do it well. I just can’t make my life about linguistics. There are people in my department who can and do, and I watch them with a sort of awe. They will, if anything is at all fair, be successful. But it’s not fair, and that’s the rub. But they’re willing to adjunct, to move around, to give up anyone and anything. I’m not. I feel it like a loss.
It’s sometimes hard because there is one person in my year who — well — shouldn’t be there. But next year, he will be there, and I won’t, and I have to deal with that. It’s hard not to make this all about me. About my failure. About my just. Not. Being. Good. Enough.
Am I leaving because I blog? Yes, why not. It’s an easy enough answer, and true enough.
Mexico — Tulum, specifically, about 130km south of Cancun — was lovely. The sea was blue and warm, the sand was soft, the ruins were stone (adjectives aren’t my thing tonight), we got to bribe a police officer and had to beg for help when our car stalled . . . what else could you want in a vacation?
I woke up earlier than I would like, but I got to see this
so it was worth it.
The Mayans were clever. They built this (and others)
overlooking this
Off to the beaches for a long weekend. Indecision can be ignored entirely while I bask in sun and warmth until some time Tuesday.
A recent story of the day, from StoryPeople, called indecision:
torn between wanting to stay & wanting to go & worried it will be the wrong decision either way
(Brian Andreas who, alas, has yet to make the story I want into a print)
I spoke to a friend who had also left the program. It was — he seems a lot less conflicted about leaving than I am.
Now, he left a year ago, and I’m still disentangling. So I am still reconciling to the loss of a dream. Because this is certainly what it is. I am a good linguist, and I’m a good teacher. And I think I’d've been a kick-ass professor. (I’ll say something different in a paragraph or two, though. I can only hold up a feeling of actual competency for very brief periods.) But the dream was going to cost too much, with too little of a chance of coming true at the end.
And I know that, but it’s still a hard thing, and a sad thing, and something I don’t feel happy about. (I am happier, and relieved. But not happy about it.)
Although my family never pushed me into academia, they mostly all figured I would go there, because I am well-suited for it. Professors in various disciplines — high school teachers — all suggested it, implicitly or explicitly. My family supports my leaving, and as I said, the professors I had at Canada U all supported me as well. My friends do, too.
If I look at any of the external measures, I am good at linguistics. But I never felt that way, except for brief moments. I felt like a fraud. In all measures of my life — school was neither the first nor the worst — but still. I didn’t get any faculty here trying to be destructive; I also had no one being particularly supportive. My fault? Theirs? Perhaps no one’s.
The feeling like a fraud has been mentioned before, and will no doubt be mentioned again. But this friend of mine, who also left linguistics, *doesn’t* feel like one. He can say, for more than 12 seconds at a time, that he feels like he was a good linguist, who could have added to the field. I can barely hear it when I am told it.
I sent an email to my cohort. I am not sure what response I will get from them — if, indeed, any, before I see them next. I spoke to one person (on messenger), who mostly tried to convince me to stay. And I wanted to, a bit, because I love linguistics, I love what I study, and I will miss it. I do not know how good an occasional linguist I would be. I suspect not very.
Part of the wanting to is because, having decided not to, my mental health has taken a decided turn for the better. Less passively suicidal! Looking forward to things! Enjoying the field again!
What is wrong, when the only way I can enjoy what I do is to leave it?
Wow. I just got 42 comment spams in the space of no time. Wonder what happened.
A huge thank you to Dorothea, both for her recent comments and her story and straight talk.
I now told the general advisor. This is the person who you go to about all the stupid arcane rules and regulations, etc. I have not told my research advisor yet; I hope to look for him tomorrow. After this I will tell my cohort, I guess. I haven’t figured any of that out yet. I have to keep telling myself it doesn’t matter so much.
It went remarkably well with the advisor. I sat down and said something like “I’ve been thinking, and I would like to leave after this semester, preferably with an MA.” Because blurtiness is me.
And he didn’t blink — I mean this literally, cause the guy never blinks, my eyes get dry just watching him — and asked me why, though he said I was under no obligation to answer. Mostly I said it was the job situation, which I had reconciled myself to, but then with the incredibly low stipend, and inability to live on it, so I had to work while in grad school, which was difficult because I’m not American, I wondered what I was doing going for the PhD if not for academia, and I decided it wasn’t worth it. Which is true. I mentioned I don’t much like living here, but that had the other two not been a factor, it wouldn’t have tipped my hand.
Actually I think I said I hate living here. I can be discreet, but not about some things.
The response was “We’ll be sorry to lose you, but I can’t argue with your reasons”. (I should be able to get my MA as well.) He asked about my later plans, and seemed to think they were good plans, or at least fairly reasonable ones.
Altogether better than I had feared (most of the stories were about the previous grad advisor). I can’t imagine it having gone better, really. Not yet, while I’m tired and sad and unsettled.
I don’t regret having gone. An MA in two years is reasonable. I learned more semantics than I would have elsewhere. I got a free trip to Hawaii. I got a reason to visit Halifax. Soon I will have received 250 (just the price of the mini iPods! Tell me that’s not some god or another telling me to buy one) towards the conference I will go to in Berlin — also travel I would not otherwise have done. I got comfortable with public speaking (a huge change). I learned a hell of a lot about myself.
I’m glad I stayed for the second year; I think soon I will be glad I did not stay any longer.
With distance — and with a weekend on a beach coming up in 2 days — I will hopefully be able to write up a coherent response to things.
I need to tell my advisors at Canada U how things went. And my father, who just got very good news in a court case he was about to be involved in (and would likely have lost, because, really, he was in the wrong, through no real fault of his own), but who wasn’t phone-able, because he’s somewhere else. And everyone. My mother will get the joy of telling other family members on her side; my father the ones on his side.
I’m not sure I’m doing all that well. I am still constantly sick; I still do anything to avoid coming here (oddly no easier knowing it’s ending); I still am depressed. (But no longer thinking that a car accident would be a great way to get out of grad school. That was a sign.)