Should I Go to Grad School? by Jessica Loudis

Author:Jessica Loudis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

Alexander Nagel

My only experience of depression was during graduate school. I don’t mean I was down or drinking too much or getting up late. I mean I was unable to do anything. I would find myself at social events without the capacity to open my mouth. I experienced an entire interview for a postdoctoral fellowship from above: I was looking down on myself saying incoherent things to a jury of world-famous scholars. I cried a lot. It was my last year in graduate school and I knew it. I knew it because I had received a finishing grant, which meant I was to complete my dissertation (about the origin of the easel picture in Renaissance art, at least that was the idea) and leave the program by the end of that academic year. That was twenty years ago, yet I have never in my life felt so old as I did that year.

For five months I sat at my desk, or just lay down, and did not write a word. At some point in December, I approached my adviser to explain that things were not going well, really not going well at all. This was a miserable capitulation, as I had always been pridefully independent, only ever going to him with some good news or focused question or accomplishment in hand. His jaw hardened and he shifted around in his seat. The department has just been allocated these finishing grants from the Mellon Foundation, he said, fixing me with his cold blue eyes; successful performances during this first round will ensure that the department will retain the grant and, thus, will be in a position to offer it to students after me.

I nodded, left his office, and continued not writing, or doing much of anything. By that point it had also become completely clear that there were no prospects for teaching jobs in my field for the coming year—except, that is, for one job, in Kansas, and I would rather starve closer to home than move there. So there I was, on a terminal grant, hurtling toward unemployment. Maybe not writing was my lame gesture of resistance in a wind tunnel of futility.

By mid-January, inertia was accompanied by a gentle but constant hyperventilation. Desperate, I remembered a technique my adviser had described in another context: When your back is up against the wall, write two pages every day, no matter what. Even if you know they are terrible, write them out. I think that is how he put it: Write them out. So I started. I was pretty much writing “la la la,” but I did it. And then I did it the next day. And the next. The thing about this technique is that the first two months are an uphill climb; the more you climb the more you tire, and then you realize the hill is also getting steeper. It is fairly easy to write two pages on any given day, but it is hard to do it day after day, harder to get to ten days, and harder than ever to get from ten to fifteen days.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.