First year, and my approach so far has been to search, find something relevant, download it, and tell myself I will read it. The folder now has around two hundred things in it and I have properly read maybe nine. When I…
Undergrad was a big campus and friends came free with the timetable. Now it is a small department where everyone is thirty plus, married or gone by five, and the two bars near campus are wall to wall undergrads. I am…
I have an offer for a 12 week paid internship at a research group outside the university, roughly the same money as a semester of TA work, and I have to answer in three weeks. The alternative is the guaranteed fifth…
Fourteen years in industry and I have an offer with a stipend that is roughly a third of what I earn now. My partner works and we can survive it on paper, but I will be forty three or forty four finishing and everyone…
I sent chapter three (about 40 pages, methods heavy) on 12 March. Two follow up emails, plus one in person ask after a seminar where he said it was on his list. Nothing since. My committee meeting is booked for…
Second year, humanities adjacent, and every senior student I have asked is on some combination of teaching, adjuncting at another institution, or a partner's income after year five. None of this appears anywhere…
I used to draft 1500 words in a morning during coursework. Now on a good day I write two paragraphs and spend the rest of the time rereading three papers and moving a figure around. It has been like this for about five…
Fourth year, social science. At every committee meeting one member asks for an additional robustness check. First it was clustering standard errors differently, then a subsample split, now he wants the whole thing…
Since January my stipend has arrived between the 12th and the 18th instead of the 1st. Payroll says the grant office releases the funds late; the grant office says payroll processes late. My rent is due on the 3rd and I…