Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Despair

Tonight, the happiest thing I can imagine is dropping out of grad school. But, I can't think of anything else to do with my life. I don't even feel like I can breathe a happy breath right now. What do I do?

10 comments:

daisy said...

Become a librarian?

Rufus said...

I think it might be headed that way. I'm sort of getting fired as it is from TAing, which is pretty much unheard of. I'm also not careerist enough for higher education.

Anonymous said...

What happened to cause this?

Rufus said...

It's a long and complicated story. I didn't actually do anything wrong, although one problem is that I am still too meek and introverted to really teach well. It was actually that I seemed to the people around me to be caring too much about the job.

Rufus said...

Which is fair actually. I talk about teaching as much in life as I do here, and that doesn't really make any sense for a crappy TA job. However, it was handled about as poorly as can be imagined. I may blog about it, and explain the whole thing. Still smarts a bit though.

SecondComingOfBast said...

Man, sorry to hear about that. Maybe you should just get away for awhile, if it is at all practical and possible, someplace where you can think things through without being surrounded by the problem. Don't let yourself get too down though.

Rufus said...

Well, four more weeks and I'm out of here, hopefully to Nantes. I think I can look at teaching in a more philosophical way- it's just getting information across to people, and then they can do with it as they will- and that might make it easier to do.

What will probably happen is I'll just be shifted to TAing for American History. I hate that, but if I can do better there, I'll be able to stay.

autogato said...

I shall share with you a bit of advice that helps me through: graduate school is the ability to endure crap and write a check.

I've been there, baby, been there. I've adopted a new policy to getting through it. It's called Striving for Mediocrity.

http://autogato.blogspot.com/2006/02/striving-for-mediocrity.html

autogato said...

oh crap
striving-for-mediocrity.html was the end of that URL.
I can't figure out how to insert links into these comments.

ARG!

Rufus said...

I found it. Very entertaining!