Graduate school and the girl

I worked for several years as an admission counselor at the small liberal arts college from which I graduated. I used to tell prospective students that the difficulty of the college was so bound with the difficulty of growing up that I couldn't really parse one from the other.

Now I'm in graduate school, and I'm still growing up.

My husband has a retail job and we are often surprised at how the issues he faces there are similar to the issues I face in graduate school. The examples that come to mind are wrestling with time management, learning to be assertive with authority, and finding, exactly, what it is about our work that keeps us happy and motivated. Perhaps most importantly, I see that we are both, in our own ways, learning to trust our background and training and that we are starting to see that there are no external expectations for our lives. That, cliche as it sounds, our lives are exactly what we make of them.

Graduate school is pounding this lesson into me. At times, it feels as if it is pounding this lesson out of me- forging me into something that is a different shape, made of different letters. As an undergraduate, I pushed hard. I had an ailing father to make proud of me, and an advisor that I admired (continue to admire) to distraction. I felt that both of them were people that I could not disappoint, and that the best way to avoid disappointing them was to work myself ragged. In some ways, I think i worked to keep my father alive. Well, my father died anyway (I apologize for being glib, but it's true), and, though my insane work habits did not disappoint my advisor, he was also the one who sent me home on more than one occasion while chiding me to get some rest.

So, here I am. Still doing science, but now, for what? My first two years were a struggle, my anguish over my perception of the irresponsibility of my current advisor and the unfairness of academia appropriately dramatic. But now, I'm starting to see that perhaps the best way for me to find success is to refashion my notion of success. Unlike my experience at my undergraduate institution, the pieces of my life tell me that the lesson isn't that I must identify with my work to be successful, but that I must keep my work in perspective. I know what I think is good science, all I have to do is do it. My committee will talk it over with me, I will show them how I think about things, and I'll get to learn a lot of techniques and a lot of different ways to approach problems.

I'm losing the thread of this post as it gets later, and perhaps I'll put in some revisions in the coming weeks. For now, suffice it to say that putting my work into this kind of perspective lets me see that I'm good at it, that there are things I love about it and would not easily give up, and that the only way this could be a waste of time were if I were entirely miserable-- and I have some control over that, after all.