The Agony of Grad School | Hacker News Reader

The Agony of Grad School

false-epiphany.com

22 pointsbkovitz23 comments

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.

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.

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.

I agree. The default first year for many students requires 3 core courses, not to mention prep time for a qualifying exam or two. I've increasingly noticed that I can only handle 3 activities in grad school: 3 classes and no research, 1 class and some research, 0 classes and lots of research, or 1 job, 1 class, and little research.

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.

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.

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 ...

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.

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.

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!

Now try the agony of not being in grad school.

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

> 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.)

Feels pretty good over here.

Well, you studied CS and he studied comp lit :)

You know I think I shall always wish to be a student.

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.

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.

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

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.

I concur. With the title of your blog.

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

Yes I also thought school was utter bullshit.

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