For whatever reason, time works differently in grad
school. In high school, weekends were
the best thing ever; you spent time with friends, hung out by the river, played
video games, whatever.
Things changed a little bit in college, mostly because there
was no parental supervision to keep stupidity in check. In college, you could go out any day of the
week, you could skip class without any immediate adverse consequences, and you
had the most freedom (with the least amount of responsibility) that you were
ever going to have again. Weekends and
breaks took on a whole new level of importance because now you could go places and do things and, most importantly, you could do whatever you wanted to do and your parents never had to
know.
When you start work and have to stick to a basic 8-5
schedule (or, in my case, you get to do 8-5 plus about 10 hours a week of extra
events or travel), breaks no longer matter. Summer was just another season for
me, spring break had little or no significance beyond all the parking spots
around work opening up because there were no students around. However, my
evenings were a newly discovered blessing.
I remember that the first week of work I was too tired to do much other
than make dinner and then go to sleep.
After that first week, however, I found myself asking, “What do you do
in the evening when there aren’t any assigned readings or other homework?” It was like magic.
As a recent college graduate with a degree in social
science, I almost inevitably found myself facing unemployment. This introduced
an entirely new concept of time to me.
Evenings were no different than mornings. Weekends and weekdays were identical in every
respect. Time meant nothing. I am pretty sure that there were about two
months of time that I didn’t actually know what day of the week it was or the
date.
It was like the strangest time limbo ever. It wasn’t the same as a break from
school. Breaks from school have a
distinct end date. That means that you
have to have some concept of day/date/time.
Unemployment was like wandering a desert or being stranded in the middle
of the ocean: it didn’t matter what I did or in which direction I wandered
because it was just going to be more of the same.
Throughout the next few years, I yo-yoed between employment
and unemployment like the most ill-conceived financial diet in the history of
poor dieting decisions. To solve this, I
decided that the best thing was, obviously, to go deeper into debt and start graduate
school. Why break even when I can just keep myself in debt for another decade,
right? How could this possibly go wrong?
Now that I’m in the last third of my first year, I am
discovering that time functions differently in grad school in a way that I’ve
never experienced before. Unlike undergrad
when I had a lot of flexibility in selecting classes, thus ensuring that I
always had at least one class that was “fun,” my entire graduate program is
already laid out for me.
Taking a combination of economics, program evaluation,
policy analysis, and statistics makes time move at a vastly slower pace inside
the classroom, but makes all deadlines hit one week sooner than it says on the
syllabus. You think, “Okay, two weeks
should be plenty of time to do this project.” Then, two days later, you realize
that it’s due in 24 hours and you have barely started. Where did the other 11 days go? Nobody knows.
Those days just disappeared into the ether.
If you look through your notes from class, you discover that
in the last two weeks, you have been attending classes and have been doing
readings, but somehow you don’t remember any time actually passing between the
announcement of the project and the deadline for said project.
I am really beginning to identify with Schrödinger’s poor
cat. I’m neither alive nor dead. I’m a grad student: the ultimate level of
time limbo.
Theoretically, I only have about a year left before days of
the week, what month it is, or what date it is will once more function
linearly. Until then, well, I guess I’ll
just exist.
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