get my doctorate and become a professor

I am horrified to see that I have completed seven semesters. That’s 3-1/2 years, and I have nothing to show for it.

Last semester, I stopped showing up at classes. About midway through the semester, I stopped trying to keep up with the classes I was taking, but I kept up with the class where I was assistant-teaching. Through much exertion of willpower, I managed to get 40 hours of research in, about the same as in the previous two semesters. Considering that there are 640 working hours in a semester, this seems inefficient.

I am exhausted and angry. I am sick of the shuffled schedule, constantly forcing myself to stop whatever I’ve just started in order to restart what I forced myself to stop last week.

This semester, I didn’t teach or assistant-teach. I was given a stipend to help out with administrative matters in an office: a very light work load, to let me focus on classes and research. I paid my tuition myself rather than with a tuition waiver.

Well, I screwed up. The plan was to take just two classes and focus on research. I have to take qualifying exams this summer, though, so I thought I might need another class to prepare for them. I registered for four classes, intending to drop two of them. One was on theory of computation, a subject where I don’t have experience, and which I thought would be covered in quals.

It ended up taking me about two weeks to find out what quals actually consisted of. It turns out that quals in this program are highly individualized: you do some reading, and you write a couple papers, all on topics closely related to your research. That’s ideal! No wasted time. Unfortunately, by the time I found this out, I learned that if I dropped my extra two classes, I’d be out $1,400. This university does not like to refund tuition money; you only get a full refund if you drop a class in the first week. So, I decided to take all four classes. Three are closely related to my research, and the other one, while not necessary for quails, still meets a graduation requirement.

The courses:

• Mathematical Biology
• Networks of the Brain
• Intro to Modal Logic
• Theory of Computation

Bottom line, it was another semester of brain-scramble. The first two weeks, drunk on the idea of focusing on research, I did several all-nighters. I got some excellent work done, but I threw off my sleep schedule terribly. Mathematical Biology was an 8:00 a.m. class. I missed a lot of that class. Fortunately, the prof was pretty easy-going about that.

Another stressor was buying a house. Splitting my focus between that and school led me to maybe make a bad decision on the house. A perverse stressor: while I was buying the house, the university took away my parking permit. It turns out that, because of the unusual way I was being paid, I lose eligibility for a parking permit if I take more than two classes!

I ended up following the pattern of all previous grad-school semesters: a state of constant relentless hurry, relentlessly exerting willpower to switch from one project to another; progressively increasing agony for the first ten weeks or so, eventually reaching the point of yelling “Aaauggghhhh!” a lot when no one else is around and extreme inability to focus my attention; total shutdown for a few weeks near the end of the semester, where I stopped doing anything but showing up (and even missed a lot of classes, something I haven’t done in previous semesters); and finally, after some recovery, going into hurry-up mode during the last two weeks.

I thought that for sure I would get a very bad grade in two of the classes, but miraculously the lowest I got was a B. Grade-inflation? Maybe. In grad school, a B is considered low. But I got an A in the class I did the least amount of homework in, Mathematical Biology.

I did finally get some research done during the last two weeks. Doing some research, giving a talk about it, and writing a paper about it, was 40% of the grade in two of the courses. I got some research done by consciously abandoning all homework and just doing research almost as if I had my preferred schedule (“do research for several hours first thing each day, then attend to other things”). One prof said it was OK if I did some of the coursework after the semester; that lightening of my burden helped enormously. The Mathematical Biology prof really understood my research idea; most people don’t get it at all.

Omitting all details here, this semester’s research was an attempt to see if a certain nice thing would happen if I set things up a peculiar way. Previously, my numbers said, “It’s not happening: in fact, my peculiar set-up is making things worse.” Indeed there is a well-known result in the field that says my kind of set-up ought to make things worse. (Of course I’m exploring a twist on what that result was derived from.) I had noticed, though, while just eyeballing output, that the nice thing seemed to be happening. Right at the end of the semester, finally with some mental momentum, I noticed that my previous automated tests weren’t comparing the right results. I rewrote the tests correctly, and indeed the nice thing is happening, to a large and measurable extent.

This was the best semester yet, though still pretty scattered and miserable.

I dropped two of the classes I had registered for, and did only an independent-study research project and took one class. I also assistant-taught a class (the same one I assistant-taught for the previous two semesters).

Geometry: An unusual class, taught by an unusual professor (Douglas Hofstadter), focusing on triangles, beauty, clarity, and thinking. It covered much less material than a typical math class. I think that helped me get more out of it than a typical math class.

Research: I’ve had an idea about genetic algorithms and evolution for quite a few years now. I finally allocated some time to implement it and experiment. I made some real progress, and got some real things to work, but I can’t say I’m pleased with the amount that I got done. By industry standards, I’d say it was two weeks of work. It was endlessly frustrating, because every time I’d get my mind ramped up and into it, and write code for a day or so, it was time to switch to catch up with everything else. I met with my advisor every Monday. I’d usually hurriedly try to explain to him what I was doing, and I’d come away with some idea or plan for the following week, and then it was time to put my mind back onto my other responsibilities in time for Tuesday.

Assistant teaching: I think I did the best teaching I’ve done so far. I rewrote most of the homework assignments and did a nicer job explaining things than in previous semesters. (The previous experience helped.) I greatly enjoyed it, too. However, as one professor described it to me, “Teaching chews up your brain.” The relentless pace of weekly responsibilities left little time to get sustained momentum on anything else. I love teaching, but in grad school, you are rewarded for research, not teaching.

Even so, the lighter load helped a lot. My level of agony and agitation from too many things going on my head at once was much reduced. I doubt that I was bearable to be around, and I still had a lot of frustration with interrupting work and thought in progress, but I got some focused work in.

Next semester, no teaching. I am simply going to bite the bullet, waive my tuition waiver and stipend, and pay for a whole semester myself. I have some savings, and this is what it’s for.

Today I visited the cognitive science department, and officially enrolled in the Joint Ph.D. in Cognitive Science & Computer Science.

They gave me this T-shirt!

I read the Ph.D. requirements very carefully, and looked over the courses I’ve taken and figured out the courses that I need to take in order to get a Ph.D. in Computer Science. I basically need to take five more courses (specific courses; I have to take way more other courses, but I have lots more freedom in choosing those).

There are requirements for taking courses in different areas, and I picked a preferred course or two in each area. I looked into when the various courses are offered (they aren’t all offered every semester or even every year), and things look very do-able even if I take a light load this semester. I worked out a tentative schedule for the next three years, which covers all the requirements.

Then I wondered, how much harder would it be to get a Joint Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and Computer Science? I had previously shied away from that, because the basic rule is that you have to meet all the requirements for both Ph.D.s simultaneously: all coursework for both programs, even writing two dissertations if necessary. They don’t say, “Well, this is a joint Ph.D., so we reduce the requirements a bit in both programs because we know you’re trading depth for breadth.”

Well, it turns out that there is a huge amount of overlap in the required courses. Only four additional courses are needed beyond what I need for the computer science Ph.D. I found out today that one of those will be waived (a beginning programming course, not needed if you qualified for computer-science grad school), and very likely another course can be waived because of my background (a basic course on the kinds of math used in computers and in studying cognition).

After suffering for two years, the remaining coursework is starting to look manageable. And now I have a very specific plan.

Finished one paper last week, and the other paper yesterday. Hurried, shoddy work. Not enough time put in to do a decent job. Didn’t get to the late statistics homework.

The total amount of time in a semester is huge: sixteen weeks (four months). Each of these projects could probably be done in two to six weeks, at a patient and thoughtful pace, even. The trouble is the shuffled schedule: interrupting every project pretty much every day. I did almost all work by focusing on one project for two or three all-nighters while getting behind on everything else.

Calm has not set in. I still have the start-hurry-stop-switch rhythm in my head. Still losing my train of thought every few seconds. I feel sick, irritable, annoyed, and angry.

The last couple weeks in the semester are strangely better than the rest, because classes stop meeting and it’s easier to focus. Here’s what’s left to do.

Today:

• Grading: two homework assignments, two labs
• Statistics: do three (late) homework assignments
• Artificial Life: finish term paper (4 pages done so far; terribly rushed)

Saturday:

• Grading: one homework assignment
• Statistics: gather data for my experiment (call friends and have them do the experiment with me on the phone: 20 minutes per friend)

Sunday:

• Statistics: gather more data if needed, start writing a paper about it

Monday:

• Statistics: write paper about the data
• Artificial Life: review session for final exam (optional)

Tuesday:

• Grading: grade final exams
• Statistics: submit paper by 4:00 p.m.

Wednesday:

• Artificial Life: final exam (optional)

Today looks like a horrible rush, but starting Saturday afternoon I’ll have two and a half days to focus on one thing. I’ll probably skip the final exam in Artificial Life. My scores on everything else in the course are high enough that I should get at least a B if I skip the final.

I’ve been completely ignoring my research project (my top priority) for the last three weeks or so. I’ve put about 1-1/2 weeks of work into it over the semester. Looks like I’ll work on it over the summer, without the distraction of school.

There are a little over two weeks left in semester #4. This semester has been much improved over semester #2, but still horrible. (I’m comparing #4 with #2 because they’re both Spring semesters. Spring semesters seem worse than Fall semesters, I think because you start Spring already exhausted.)

I made one big change: I took an “independent study” class, which would actually allocate some official time for research. Also, my research advisor is my favorite professor, who’s off on sabbatical in France. So, theoretically, I get some time to focus.

Before the semester, I made a daily schedule, where for four days each week, I’d have three to four hours in the morning allocated to my research project. Whatever you get to first in the day, you’re sure to get to! The first day started off wonderfully: I got three hours of work in. In the evening, I visited a friend, who asked me why I seemed so out of it. I hadn’t really noticed, but switching between three other things in the afternoon had in fact left me pretty loopy. I only had one another day when I got some focus in the morning. I was too drained and scrambled.

Theoretically, my assistant-teaching would be much less of a burden this semester, since I was assistant-teaching the same class I assistant-taught last semester. Unfortunately, the professor teaching it was teaching it for the first time. I ended up putting a lot of mental energy into the course: more than last semester. I put a lot of energy into rewriting some of the labs, to fix problems discovered last semester. I also put a lot of energy into arguing against things the prof wanted to do, which I felt strongly about. After a while, I finally wised up and just let it go.

Even after jettisoning my emotional investment in that course, I never got into a good working rhythm. It was another semester of “spend two days forcing myself to get my mind back into this class, do about one day’s work, and then switch to some other thing.” Just like the last three semesters, I’m finding it difficult to read more than a paragraph or hold a thought more than a few seconds. My mind mentally interrupts itself every second or two (though not as much as previous semesters). Most of my time, I have the feeling of being in an overwhelmingly loud place, even when there’s total quiet around me.

My waking life is almost total agony. My dreams are usually pleasant. Then I wake up, and there’s about half a second of non-agony, as the “Aaaaaauuugggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!” feeling of grad school sets in. My heart is pounding most of the day. A lot of the time, I wish I could fall asleep, but the high-energy feeling of being overwhelmed by (non-existent) noise keeps me up and unable to relax.

Some days or nights, away from anyone else, I’ve yelled in agony every five minutes or so, as loudly as I am physically capable of. (It’s really loud!) The intensity of the agony feels like it boils up and into my head. Yelling and cussing probably doesn’t accomplish much, but it feels like it drains off a little of the energy. After a few hours of yelling, I am finally “all yelled out” and able to sleep.

In the middle of the semester, as in semester #1, I took a three-week break from doing any work. During that time, I cut classes a lot and just slept a lot, without forcing myself to do any work, even the work I want to do. That helped quite a bit.

I have a very interesting semester project in one of my classes, which I found a way to dovetail with my independent-study work. It’s an idea about evolution that I’ve had for years, and this is finally a chance to do something with it. The prof in that class is excited about it, too. Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to do much work on it. I spent a couple days two weekends ago and made a little progress. Then I had to put it aside to catch up on other things. This weekend, I’m ramping up again. The deadline is nine days away, and not looking good. Might have to do with something much less interesting, but I dread trying to switch my mind to something else yet again after spending most of the semester trying to build some momentum on this.

A happy thing is that I’ve been meeting every Friday with a few other grad students who are also fans of my favorite professor, and we talk about various research projects. Conversation, at least when it’s focused, seems to ratchet down my agony. Office hours for the class I’m assistant-teaching have also been a pleasant relief from the agony. Lots of students have shown up every week.

Yesterday, I learned that my systolic blood pressure is 150. That’s up from 126 last summer. Coincidence? I do feel like I’m about to burst.

All in all, this has been the best semester ever: I probably got about 40 hours of work done, and I can probably get more work done this week. The agony was not as bad as previous semesters, but still intense and nearly relentless.

I’m now two weeks into semester #3. I changed a whole lot of variables, and this new experience has indeed been very different than the previous two.

I transferred from the Math department to Computer Science. I crashed the orientation of the Informatics department and found that their subject matter actually does fit very well with my interests, so I chose my classes on the assumption that I am getting a Ph.D. in Informatics. I went on a lab tour, and met two professors who are doing work that might be a perfect fit with what I want to do. This semester, I’m taking only readings courses, where you read a few papers every week and write reaction pieces and that sort of thing. I’ve also been sitting in on a course about translations of Eugene Onegin, which is a refreshing departure into art and language.

My current frustrations:

1. Still an awful lot of context-switching. I want to focus on something, and the academic schedule chops up attention. Each topic requires immersion and sustained focus: say, a few days or a week. Breaking this focus a couple times a day is agonizing. I feel like my creativity and intelligence are shut down, and I’m getting a bit crabby. Nowhere near to the degree of last semester, happily, but it’s still frustrating. The rhythm of my life here does not fit me.

I notice the focus-chopping even in the lab where I am an assistant instructor. Each lab gets 50 minutes in the students’ schedule. That’s not enough time to get very far. The students are thus pressured to hurry. These labs really require several hours, but the students have many other demands on their time. I learned programming by writing tens of thousands of lines of code, in hundreds of little projects of my own design, all very patiently, in sessions that usually lasted many hours—sometimes a couple hours just making notes with pencil and paper, sometimes many hours at the keyboard. Come to think of it, I actually dropped out of high school in order to get the time to do this; even high school had too much of a hurry-up-and-do-something-else rhythm.

2. The classes mostly consist of lecture and discussion. The discussions are mostly unstructured semantic arguments. Someone says something, someone else objects that a word could also mean something else: “But isn’t (blank) also a kind of ‘realism’?” This kind of word-splitting at the expense of substance is what gives the academic world a bad name. Deservedly.

I want to do actual stuff. Discussing and arguing are certainly worthwhile things, but only in small doses, and only with some structure. Real learning happens mostly by doing, and it’s most fruitful with a mentor who can help you get unstuck when you run into problems, or show you an approach you’re missing. I’ve seen some of this in college, but not a whole lot.

An observation: In one class, a very broad term came up. The handout said that the first thing we need to do is make a definition. What? The first thing is to look at some interesting concrete examples that motivated people to distinguish something that they thought worthy of a name. Starting with vague definitions of a vague term just led to vague semantic arguments with no real substance. I think this is the basic trap of the academic world: predefining and pre-arguing and preparing, but not doing.

Running through the major literature and writing short reaction papers to the readings does strike me as a very good use of time, though. It’s getting me up to speed on what sorts of ideas “go without saying” in this community.

3. I met Douglas Hofstadter. We had some conversations in which it became clear that our interests overlap extraordinarily. Well, this is not such a surprise, given that when I was 16, I immersed myself in Gödel, Escher, Bach (back when I had time to get immersed in things). I also really liked the cultural vibe of his research group: warm, slow-paced and absorbed, thoughtful, genuine. Tuesday, we had another long conversation, in which I asked how I might convert some of these interests into a project that would yield some sort of result. That is, I want to move past “thinking interesting but vague thoughts” and make something: a research paper, a computer model, or something, since I don’t yet have a feel for what academic research really is. I could not seem to get the idea across to him. He seemed to think that I was pushing some dismally careerist approach that would make certain that I’d get hired as a professor after grad school. Maybe I misunderstood him; maybe he’s been criticized for doing work that doesn’t fit the standard “metrics” of academic productivity and he heard my request as pressing on a sore spot.

At one point, he said, “Last week, I was thinking you might be a good fit for my research group, but now I’m not so sure.” I sent him a long email a couple days later, telling my frustration. Haven’t heard back. Maybe I’ve just ticked him off some more. I’m worried that I’ve just blown the best opportunity in academia to pursue my quirky set of research interests.

On the positive side, he expressed his doubts about whether I belong in his research group when it came out that I had only read parts of his book Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, which tells exactly what his research group does, how they do it, and even the software architecture that they use to do it. I’ve been reading it, and my jaw drops at how relevant it is to my interests, how enlightening about matters where I’ve gotten stuck, and how it opens up new lines of thought for me.

Second semester was hell. Horrible difficulties concentrating most of the time. “Noise in my head.” One of the most unpleasant experiences of my life.

The good: I’m surrounded by interesting research, and I’m taking classes that I find very interesting, all taught by professors that I like.

The bad: Time-fragmentation. Each of my classes requires thought—the kind that can’t be rushed. At least, they require large blocks of time. My day, though, consisted of going from class to class, with occasional one- or two-hour breaks. I pretty much never found time to sit down and really work. I still haven’t found a comfortable place to work.

Each week, noise in my head started to accumulate. By Thursday evening, I was hearing the din of a restaurant in my head wherever I went. One night, I sat in my car in total silence all around, and just listened. I heard the restaurant din, a cicada-like buzz that slowly increased and decreased, and my mind kept jumping to something else every second or so. This “jumping” went on relentlessly throughout the semester, making it pretty much impossible to concentrate.

Real Analysis: I managed to complete one homework assignment the entire semester. I studied a bunch before the final, and somehow got an ‘A’.

Programming Languages: A great class. Each class session, the prof tells you a super-hard problem, of the sort that made history when someone first solved it. In some cases, no one had ever solved it before. It’s not enough to get a right answer; it must also be beautiful. Whichever student has the shortest answer gets to explain it on the blackboard. I completed three homework assignments. One of those, I did over the break. Another one, after the semester was over, on an Incomplete. Doing homework during the semester was just too hard, due to the noise and non-stop mental interruption.

Machine Learning: Another excellent class. I got to write the first draft of my main research idea—a chance to try it out and see where the difficulties are. I got it done, but I didn’t do nearly as much as I liked. This is the sort of thing where I need to spend a week or so working on it eight hours a day. Not compatible with the grad-school schedule.

The algebra class I taught was also demoralizing. That might have done the most to destroy my concentration: lots of noise and interruptions. Also, it was simply demoralizing to be around people so lacking in curiosity, so unwilling to approach the class in good faith. The class was an unpleasant fight between me and the students, for the most part (there were a few happy exceptions).

I find myself pretty much unable to think. I can’t stand to read anymore. I can’t remember new names and words and facts anything like I could before I started grad school. I can’t speak nearly as well as I used to. Now I struggle to find words that used to come easily. I can’t focus my mind or follow a train of thought. I feel like I’ve been knocked semiconscious by a steel girder. There was almost no joy or pleasure in my life during this semester. I was unproductive. I was no fun to be around. It was a bleak, rotten time.

I find myself doubting whether I want anything to do with the academic world. College classes are a really stupid, ineffective way to learn. The time-fragmentation schedule is insane. The research, though, is great. Being part of the community of people who care about understanding for the sake of understanding is great. But can anything this relentlessly agonizing possibly lead to anything but more agony?