"It was quite a bumpy ride. I the end I was proud of myself for having completed it, but sad I'd put so much effort into something I didn't really love. "
How I did it: Took GREs
Application
Not a very competitive school, so getting in was easy
Then came all the slogging and dragging myself through.
I failed what was meant to be my final class in the program.
This summer, I took a make-up course in another department which I was allowed to do because my department was just so eager to be done with me! Turned out this work was work to which I was better suited. So I ended on something like a high note.
Had my last final exam last night. Pretty sure I aced it :)
Lessons & tips:
You have to keep telling yourself to do one thing after another, and this goes on for a long, long time. It'll go on for an even longer time if you're ambivalent about what you've chosen to study. In fact, it'll feel like HELL. If you're like me, thinking, hmm, maybe I don't know what i'm doing with my life and should go do this practical thing because sure, okay why not...
Give it a little more thought. Maybe there's something you really KNOW you're good at. Maybe that thing will take you a little longer, but you KNOW for a FACT that you are GOOD at it. You know that you were good at it in 6th grade and 8th grade and 10th grade. And maybe you don't want to start a whole new career from scratch in your 30s and you're trying to be practical, so you don't want to go back to thinking about what you know you were good at all along as a child, or what you loved, or any of that B.S.
But, seriously... doing a graduate degree in something practical, for which you have no affection... it's no day in the park. Only you know yourself. Don't get yourself into that kind of thing unless you know you're up for 2 years of being straight up unhappy 24/7 and questioning the meaning of life every time you sit down at your desk.
ALSO, I had to take a few incompletes. Finishing those were MURDER. If you can manage it at all, just get a blood and sweat stained paper in at the deadline. Taking a C is better than putting yourself through the purgatory of knowing you still have to finish an assignment after the course is all done and everyone else, including the professor, has moved on to other more important things.
Resources: The NOW Habit - Niel Fiore, was kind of helpful for about 3 minutes. My procrastination problems seemed to be too much for the book, though. I also read Breaking the Habit of Adult Underachievement which had some nice stuff that seemed to make sense, but I couldn't get it to work on me.
It turns out that if you're miserably unhappy and you're forcing yourself to try to do some kind of graduate study as a solution, books probably won't make you a better student. In the end, the only thing that really helped was taking a class that made me feel more competent, and getting a better therapist with a different approach.
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Aug 04, 04:15AM PDT
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