The first installment of a series
I think that many people are prone to diving into graduate school without making sure their eyes are fully open and permeated by a thorough sense of disillusionment. But even if your eyes are as wide as they can be and you’ve been steeping in disillusionment, it can still be overwhelming and certain situations make you feel utterly unprepared. (I imagine this is what parents must often feel like.) My first year of grad school did not suffer from many of the usual pitfalls that usually pepper these endeavors, but it did undergo significant setbacks.
The fall term was not an elegant re-entry into the academic atmosphere, especially an atmosphere like Michigan State University. It’s rarely a good thing to be the guinea pigs for anything, and being the guinea pigs for a MS program is no different. My main complaints here are focused on the primary faculty instructor who doesn’t really know how to teach (especially as he’s only in his third (!) year of teaching). There were frequent apoplectic fits caused by this particular protagonist. The fall term also saw my first ever statistics course, and my feelings about it can be summarised as thus:
But there was also sincere joy with the library’s rare books and special collections. Getting to keep that part alive and well-fed and making friends-in-classroom-only in strange settings was a quiet delight. As a result, I still maintain odd working relationships with an aged professor and rare books curator who will be (and have been) critical in building my staircase to a PhD.
Spring term is in stark, horrid contrast. A cold month of lulling, then everything being blown to smithereens with the mass shooting. I don’t know how to refer to it. “The Event” is too pompous, as is “The Disaster.” Only referring to it by its date, February 13, 2023, is too sterile. There’s truly no way to capture something so catastrophic in scale.
After, a lot of rhetoric popped up about “reclaiming the semester” or some fantastical bullshit. Reclaiming requires a particular object to challenge; how does one challenge ugly metaphysical things like loss? It seems like a useless and trite response. The rest of the semester has… existed. I think that’s all anyone can confidently say.
The spring term is now concluding with odd tasting notes. Profound disgruntlement with everyone losing their heads over ChatGPT when its underside is so dubious. Continued cursing of R and preference for Python. Continued cursing of the university’s board of trustees as they once again come up with some bullshit excuse to not release the long-requested Larry Nassar documents to the State AG. Continued cursing of the overly optimistic post-op recovery timeline of “three to six days” as it’s become “three to six months”…. I’m preposterously hoping for a cleansing of the palette this summer with sunshine and interning and getting to entertain small hobbies.
It is with trepidation and anticipation that I look forward to my second year of grad school.
