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Perspective

Perspective

A week or two ago, I was going to post the secret that things are not as bad as I sometimes make them out to be. I complain a lot about not doing any work and letting my advisor down and so on. Lately, people have been responding to my complaints by encouraging me to think about what I would do if I dropped out of grad school (or got kicked out). At first, this took me aback. For all my whining, I hadnt seriously considered quitting, and my suprise and indignation that people actually believed that I might be at risk of being forced out suggested that I might have been exaggerating for effect. Or at least, I thought I was exaggerating. I always assumed that at some point I would stop being lazy and unmotivated and be the relatively productive student I like to think of my "real" self as (never mind the fact that that "real" me has never existed outside my head).

When I was thinking about writing that post, I was having a couple of productive days and it seemed like the problem was my representation of my situation. I decided I should stop misleading people about being on the edge of dropping out, since everything really was going to be all right in the end. Unfortunately, that confidence didnt last long and now Im feeling worse than before, because Im taking peoples reactions to my complaints more seriously. If everyone I talk to gets the impression I should be looking for alternative careers, maybe theres some truth to that view.

I wish I had a better sense of perspective. It would be good if I knew whether to believe my own Chicken Little-esque views, or my more optimistic moments, the post-doc who claims I have good data, or the well-meaning people who assure me that there is life outside academia.
I hesitate to include this, because I dont want to be making excuses for my lack of productivity, but I wonder as well how much of my pessimism and apathy is due to depression. Im nowhere near as depressed as I was a year or six months ago, but my motivation is still gone. Is it just laziness at this point, or genuine loss of interest, or will it come back?

I started writing this post as a comment to Orange Inas post about students who constantly let their advisors down. The posts about writing recommendation letters for mediocre students made me feel similarly guilty. This is the downside to reading academic blogs. Its all too easy to imagine the snarky posts my advisor would write about me, if she had a blog, and werent as loath to badmouth anyone as she is. Perhaps the disappointed and concerned posts I can imagine her writing would be worse.

Do the students their advisors complain about ever manage to become productive and get decent jobs? Im starting to imagine the half-hearted recommendation letters I might get (if I even ever make it far enough to graduate) and wondering if I should just give up now.

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