

The Agony of Grad School - bkovitz
http://false-epiphany.com/2009/07/the-agony-of-grad-school/

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timr
I feel bad for the guy, but I think his problem is a bit of a personal issue.
He should seek out help from a doctor on how to manage his attention disorder.

Lots of people make it through graduate school while teaching and taking
multiple classes. It isn't easy, but it certainly isn't impossible.

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codyrobbins
Yeah, I agree. The time fragmentation in grad school makes it a bit difficult
to put a lot of time and effort into any one thing, but I never found it as
excruciatingly impossible to concentrate as this guy. The environment is
definitely manageable.

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gwern
Does he officially have ADHD? I felt increasingly horrified as I read through
that post - everyone gets distracted but his level and inability to focus
seems to be way past normal and into the pathological.

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lutorm
The real agony of grad school starts when the classes are over and you have
nothing do distract you from working on your used-to-be-interesting-but-now-
not-so-much research project .all. .the. .time...

Plus it was at that exact time that my RSI hit. Classes had apparently proven
enough of a variation in tasks that when I started doing research all the
time, 99% computer work, it rapidly went downhill.

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jey
If you have a lot of trouble with deliberately directing your attention, you
should probably ask a mental health doctor to evaluate you for ADD ("Attention
Deficit Disorder"). It's possible that you've had ADD all your life and
covered for it with your high intelligence, but now that the demands on your
attention are much higher in grad school, your deficit in allocating attention
is becoming a problem.

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psyklic
It seems like this author is taking four classes and teaching an additional
one. So, he complains that he needs to task switch too often. (How is this
different from undergrad?)

He should just wait a year or two for classes to be over with so that he can
concentrate more on research ...

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philwelch
Actually, as an undergrad I find it troubling too. I usually pick out my
hardest class and pretend that's my primary task for the term and regard the
others as annoyances.

Summer session--where you only take 1 or 2 classes at a time for six weeks at
my school--always worked out better for me.

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zoba
I have had similar experiences, but only when I didn't have enough to do. The
more I have to do, the more crammed my time feels. The more crammed my time
feels, the more important tasks seem to me, and therefore the more likely I am
to do them.

Taking only one or two classes at a time kills me, because I have so much free
time I always think "Oh I can just do that later" and then never actually do
it. With a full load of classes I think "Geez, I better do that now so I have
time for the work I know I'm going to be getting later."

Lastly, I've heard that meditation is supposed to quiet the noise in one's
head. It hasn't worked for me yet, though I probably haven't been practicing
it as regularly as I ought to.

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keefe
The author sounds extremely stressed. To some extent, this is the big learning
of the PhD program that I learned a touch too late : be self directed and
manage your time. This line jumped out at me "I could not concentrate. There
was too much noise and interruption in my head." I think that there are a
variety of meditation techniques that could help you. There is a feedback loop
in the brain and I recently saw a talk from a stanford prof detailing how
certain kinds of meditation can actually reinforce the executive control
process in the brain. The basic types were concentrating on something (e.g.
breath) or concentrating on nothing... Here is the substance of the talk by
the same fellow : <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf6Q0G1iHBI> Good luck, keep
cool and find a good task management program!

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asciilifeform
Now try the agony of _not_ being in grad school.

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bkovitz
Did you find the work world even more time-fragmented than grad school?

Hmm, the post comes down to saying that grad school is run on the manager's
schedule rather than the maker's schedule.

<http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html>

~~~
asciilifeform
> Did you find the work world even more time-fragmented than grad school?

Precisely. (Though I know of grad school only through second-hand accounts, it
still sounds like Valhalla when compared with nearly any kind of ordinary work
I can think of.)

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apu
Once you get past the initial 2 years of classes, grad school (PhD) is the
exact opposite: virtually no interruptions, with vast blocks of time to manage
as you will. I often go a few days without having a single interruption -- no
meetings, no phone calls, no other annoying tasks to break my concentration.

This is one of the greatest things about grad school, and I think unique among
most professions -- I'll miss it once I graduate and have to find a "real"
job.

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ch101
Grad school for me is like this: class, sleep, write, and no social life. I
question some of the assignments, but find the content interesting. I just
wonder sometimes what other people (ladies) my age are doing. I assume
marriage, dating, or having children. I do not think of myself as abnormal for
not taking that route, but instead realize I just do not have time for these
things at the moment.

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caffeine
I feel similarly. But I worry that I'll wake up one morning and be 50, not
having stopped feeling that way.

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edw519
What makes OP think that it's any different anywhere else. Every single thing
he complained about, I have experienced in the work place.

If you have a problem with time, space, noise, others, whatever, you need to
find a way to solve that problem. With one big difference: there are no
"incompletes" at work.

The problem isn't grad school. It's OP. I sure hope he finds a way to solve
it. If he can't hack it there, he surely won't be able to hack it here.

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rawr
I concur. With the title of your blog.

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bkovitz
The title of the blog, or the title of the article?

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jokull
Yes I also thought school was utter bullshit.

