I should preface this by saying that this next paragraph is going to sound really snooty. But, I wasn’t really expecting grad school to be hard. Ok, hard maybe. But not haaaaaaard, like the omfg what have I done, I’m seriously paying for this abuse, kind of hard. You see, up until my world started to fall apart in 2007 (a story for a different day) I was a near perfect student. My GPA was 3.98. I got a C in college algebra my first semester in school. Every grade after that was an A. My junior year I was the Dean’s pick to represent social sciences in the Phi Kappa Phi honor society. I won the alumni association senior merit scholarship. Before life got messy, I was pretty damn good.
Of course, a lot happened between then and now. I saw just how low that GPA could go. But even as I was struggling, I always felt like one of the smartest students in the class. I always felt like I truly understood the readings. And while I knew deep down that my success was largely due to hard work not natural intelligence, after years of affirmations from professors and friends, I came to believe that I belonged in academia.
No longer. Two weeks ago I started what will likely be the longest two years (oh, who I am kidding? Two and HALF years) of my life. And it is remarkably different than undergrad. Notably absent are quizzes and other small and easily accomplished tasks than can improve a grade. Most scales seem to be made up of:
-Research paper: 40%
-Other time-consuming project: 30%
-Exam/presentation/additional paper/other form of torture: 30%
There is no room for redemption. I can’t mess up project one or paper two without messing up my entire semester. That is scary. It’s not that this set-up is entirely unexpected. What’s unexpected is that I have only a few chances to prove that I know what I’m doing and I HAVE NO CLUE WHAT I’M DOING.
I feel comfortable and at home in fiction writing, but in literature and linguistics I feel like I’m drowning. Even when I do understand what’s happening, I don’t have the proper vocabulary to express it in class. I am now very aware of the disadvantage of my not english undergraduate degree, and I hate that I thought for a second that the transition would be easy, and even promised the program director in my interview that it would be no problem. Because it is a problem.
On the first day of linguistics the director (who is also teaching the class) said he very rarely has to pull aside a student and tell her that she sucks. As he was explaining this I had one of my premonitions in which I saw myself, sitting uncomfortably in his office, in the same chair I sat during my interview, promising to work harder, and apologizing for not living up to the potential I swore I had three months again. No. no. I thought. You’re just psyching yourself out. I shrugged it off until I opened my book later that week to discover sentence diagrams, and suddenly I was back in the chair. On the second day of class, my brain tripped over the word “sibilants” so many times I skinned my knee.
Heading into week three I am still thinking about my vision as I chug along at homework that’s due at 8am. It’s hanging over my head like an inevitable conclusion and I wonder if I’m not setting myself up for a self fulfilling prophesy. Do not skip over S–>NP+VP like it’s a math problem you don’t understand. Read it. You have to reaaaad it. Make sense of what it says, dammit. An when it’s not the chair, it’s graduation, two years from now, something that makes me feel even sicker. Because the only thing that follows success in this pursuit is a PhD program, and four more years of linguistics.
I went through the exact same thing when I first got in to grad school. I had an undergrad in print journalism and I was going for a Master’s in the Science of Education, with an English emphasis. When I interviewed I was all like, “I took some English courses while getting my undergrad, and my degree was PRINT journalism–basically English, so I’ll be fine.” Haha, then I got to Literary Criticism. Ugh.
I was rushing to get my degree in just over year so I was taking an absurd number of courses at once. I nearly dropped out in the middle of Lit Crit. I too missed quizzes and little assignments. It was all “read this book by Friday and this book by Monday. What? No I’m not going to quiz or test you on them. You’ll just need to know this stuff for your super massive GPA altering project.”
Tie all that in with the fact that people in grad school DON’T get bad grades (actually had a professor tell me that–all the C and below students stopped with their undergrad) and you’ve got some serious pressure.
I feel your pain, and all I can say is stick with it–it’s worth it in the end. In two years time, you’ll be able to get a marginally better paycheck because of this degree. Then you can start paying off the extra student loan debt you got into when you decided to educate yourself some more. Hooray!
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