Coming Later Tonight (hopefully):

Graduate Student Manifesto


UPDATE: Tired. Manifesto tomorrow. Deal with it.

ANGST ALERT, CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED

So, lately I've been wicked stressed about school, trying to finish my semester while studying for my comps. Simple solution? Push the comps test back to mid-May, graduate in August, Problem solved, less than three months difference, a world of stress lifted off my shoulders.

It also gives me more time for a real job search. I already have one job app out, to the Penn Museum archive, which is being reviewed as we speak. The posting only closed today, so it's not as though it's time to get worried about it. By the end of the day tomorrow I expect to have three more apps out to different museums in Philly, and by the end of the week another one out to the Naval Academy for an assistant archivist position at the Nimitz Library. I think at this point five applications is good, more to come if need be. I've scrapped plans for that job at the lawyer's office, I've decided I can't spend another year or more of my life doing something I hate. I already feel like I've wasted so much of my time at grad school, I can't stomach the idea of wasting even more time pushing paper mindlessly...

I guess the worry I have stems over the fact that I'm officially entering a new phase of my life. No more school to fall back on, it's time for a job, a real one, a career-track type job. I'm really looking forward to the opportunity, but of course it brings worry and angst, I can't help it. I mean, those of you who know me know all too well that for the last year all I've wanted is to be done with school and get a real job. Worst of all is the fact that the job at Annapolis is pretty much my dream job, it pays well, and the benefits would be awesome. The drawback of course is that it's in Maryland and C has a year of school left, and it would be awful hard to move to Maryland alone, seeing C and Dixie only on weekends, assuming of course that we both have weekends off. I suppose it's a bridge we'll cross when we come to it, but it is difficult to think about.

Oh yeah, almost forgot, all you PA readers out there, don't forget to vote later today!

So here I am in grad school... and this week, I've never felt more like I didn't belong. But as I sit here in class discussing, I find out that I'm not the only one. Let me explain:

For my Soviet history course this week we were assigned From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics by Slava Gerovitch. Let the record show that I read all 303 pages of this book... and was lost by page 40. One may ask, why would a Russian history professor assign a book about Soviet science, involving little to no history. Don't be fooled by the title, if you aren't a trained scientist, you have no hope of understanding this book. Hell, you may even have problems if you are a scientist, it's that confusing. As I sit here in class, not a one of us has a single decent thing to say about this monstrosity. I had to look up too many words in this thing to count them all, and even then, I had no idea what some of the words in the definitions meant! Sorry if this doesn't make any sense, I'm just wicked frustrated...

Update: Class tonight was a bullshit waste of my time. The professor called us all out for not understanding the reading like it was our fault... I hate grad school. If you're thinking about it, just don't. It's the world's most expensive book club.