Tag: grad school
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Fear is Not an Acceptable Excuse
In the aftermath of my decision to quit grad school, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and seeking out advice. I called Julie from Escape the Ivory Tower, and we talked about whether it was possible to write a thesis alone, and my fear that if I switched schools I would just fail again,…
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Dropping Out
I wrote the post Being Human at around 5am having stayed up most of the night to get my edits in for the deadline. I don’t normally work like that – I think I forgot to tell my co-supervisor I was in the UK. Oh well. I never really made it off Canadian time whilst…
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Shipping
To mark my 4 week anniversary in Kitchener, I didn’t have a party (as suggested by AY), I instead had a week long crisis. I think AY had the better idea… It was a number of things. Moving. Change. The stress and difficulty of dealing with the appalling Goodlife (there’s some deep irony in that…
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Finding Your Cognitive Surplus in Grad School
Image via Katie Weilbacher It is a truth universally acknowledged that graduate school will take over your life, if you let it. The trick is not to let it, but if that were easy the biggest drug expense for student insurance would not be anti-depressants (I have it on good authority that this is the…
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Finding Balance and Doing Less
Back in March, I had a really terrible week. My paper got rejected and I realized I wasn’t going to be able to finish this semester, and the following day, my boyfriend and I broke up. It’s not uncommon for a paper to be rejected, however, frustratingly, the comments I got were mostly aspects of…
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Why I Can’t Wait to Escape from Grad School
On Monday, I took what will be my last exam for the foreseeable future. I remember things best when I write them down, so I went through the course notes and typed all the key points into a document. I was going to hand-write it (better retention) but I started and my hand started cramping…
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Down Time
I think how you choose to spend your free time says a lot about you. Some people train for a triathlon, some people play video games, some people watch excessive amounts of TV. I knew a guy who seemed to think he could live life vicariously through the characters of TV shows. That made me…