School work load frightens yet rewards grad student

Ever see a movie where the camera is placed in front of a runaway truck? The careening hunk of metal swerves right and left as your heart hammers in your chest and ends up hitting and covering the camera, with a horrific crunch and squeal, bouncing to a rest while you take a breath.

For graduate students, that’s the pace of a semester.
This is the part of the semester where I, and probably many other graduate students, have to grit our teeth and think about something else. In my case, this period allows me to reflect on the material gains and the intellectual gains I hope to make with this degree.

I suppose it goes without saying that I hope, some day, to be able to afford a house and a car.

I hope, at some point, to be able to pay my bills easily, and be able to afford vacations and insurance. Those are absolutely incentives; I’m looking forward to a professional job, if I can find one, and professional pay. I almost can’t imagine what that’s like; I’ve made $10-16 a year most of my adult life.

For the day-to-day discouragements and frustrations that are a part of graduate school, however, the far future doesn’t quite ease the toll for me. What does is the following set of small incentives.

First, I am actually quite fond of the material. This degree gives me the opportunity to read theorists I would not otherwise be exposed to, and the chance to see what I am capable of. The material itself, or at least some of it, is interesting and useful. As a student, I have access to millions of dollars in research, a privilege that people who are not students pay hundreds of dollars a year to have. I can endlessly satisfy my curiosity on any subject, at any time of day or night that I have Internet access, limited only by what I can understand. With a little work, what I can understand can always become a broader category.

I find that I am fascinated by certain sets of skills, and that I have a continuous set of little rewards just based on the act of solving tricky math problems, or trying to construct a model for a behavior or trying to use an intensely abstract model to talk about the potential causes for some behavior. The act of creating something like that makes me feel like I have accomplished something. It’s not a large feeling, just a sort of slow satisfaction. The converse is also true; when I don’t understand, it pisses me off. In response, I read more and try again.

I find that I am oddly grateful to be in the classroom. Perhaps, as a friend of mine is fond of saying, the ‘shiny’ will wear off.

Perhaps I will cease to be excited as time goes on and I settle into a routine, but right now I am grateful to be in the group I am in, learning and given opportunity to talk to people with whom I can get into interesting discussions.

I am grateful to be given the chance to be challenged, given a chance to see what I am capable of. I am grateful to get a chance to demonstrate how seriously I think I should be taken, though I am very aware that I cannot make anyone take me seriously. My ego is functional enough to know that much, and like many PhD students, I vacillate between feeling stupid and happy surprise when I ‘get it.’ I have actually done a ‘victory lap’ of my living room and punched the air in excitement.

The work load can be impossible, but even when I’m ready to toss my textbooks at the wall and take up waiting tables again, I am reminded of this by all of these factors: not bad, for a working class woman. I count the act of being in graduate school as a personal win.