Those of you who have been through the doc experience: a question...

[Writer]

I'm in my first year of doctoral work (social sciences), and my entire cohort has gone through a very difficult mental and emotional experience. The volume of reading coupled with high expectations has been very difficult. (Our required theories class absorbs nearly all of our available time with anywhere from 300-500 pages of reading weekly, and we have two additional courses to handle on top of our assistantships.) A few of us regularly medicate ourselves (with legal and illegal drugs), and we're starting to "act out" in class in ways that I don't think are appropriate for doc students (passing notes, throwing paper airplanes... I'm not kidding.) Just to let you know, I try to avoid this kind of behavior, but I believe the reason for this petulance is the enormous amount of stress we're all experiencing.

Did you experience the same level of stress during your first year? Is this unusual?

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. Law school was like that.

Some students got pretty squirrely that first year. A fair amount of drunkenness, petulance, obnoxiousness and other kinds of acting out. It's awfully stressful and people do weird things under stress.

[Writer]

6. Yeah I see...

that's how we've been. Punchy and a little off-center.

:crazy:

[RoyGBiv]

2. That stress is not unusual ...

It's pretty standard, in fact.

[Writer]

3. Off topic: I love your Baldur's Gate reference! n/t

[RoyGBiv]

5. Thanks!

I love it when people get it. :)

As to your original question, I just thought of this.

I once was driving down the road with a first year at a very difficult school, having perfectly normal conversation, and something in her just snapped. To this day I don't know whether it was something I said or just a random neuron firing. She began screaming, rolled down the window, removed her clothing, threw it all out in the street, and then kept on screaming for another couple minutes while I was trying to navigate the vehicle to a place less public where no one was on the streets that would hear this madness and think I was raping her.

When she stopped screaming, she invoked _The Breakfast Club_. "Tension breaker. Had to be done." Then she asked if I had a blanket in the back somewhere. Thankfully, I did. I pulled over and got it for her, took her home, and she passed her comps last year.

[Writer]

8. WOW.

Yeah, that sounds like a breakdown.

I had a rather odd experience in the early part of last fall where my brain literally went into a loop mode (I kept repeating the same phrase) then shut down. It was nearly impossible to speak a full coherent sentence. It took a couple of hours for my head to "reboot."

I feel her pain... and I'm glad she passed her comps!

[RoyGBiv]

10. Too Many Penguins

A professor I know who runs a graduate program refers to this phenomenon as "too many penguins on the ice." When the penguins get too crowded, they risk sinking their little ice sliver and madly start running around in circles trying to push each other off.

When he forgets something he says, "Well, guess that penguin got dropped in the ocean."

[Writer]

7. Thanks.

Given what I'm reading from others posting here, it seems to be the norm.

[Aristus]

4. I'm not pursuing a Ph.D, but I am in a very intense medical course right now.

We're in our Third Quarter of the didactic year for Physician Assistant School. We're all ragged. We're all doing just the things you mentioned: acting out in class, turning five-minute breaks into ten minutes, ten-minute breaks into twenty, doing perfunctory minimums on our written assignments, saving all our energy for mid-terms and finals. One of my study partners, normally tanned and athletic, is pasty-pale and looks like he's gained twenty pounds. I had to give up coffee, because I take a lot of sugar in my joe, and I was taking on too much joe and too much sugar to be healthy. So I try to get through my days on a single can of Coke Zero. Just enough caffeine to prevent headaches.

We'll see how the rest of the quarter goes...

:hangover:

Hang in there, Writer... :hi::hug:

[Writer]

9. Thanks, man.

I've read your threads concerning your tests, and it seems amazingly intense. People do seem to get very whacked out by the process.

Good luck with the rest of your quarter!

[leftyclimber]

11. I'm a second-year doc student on the verge of comps

(with an M.S., so I'm not straight out of undergrad; YMMV)

The second year is worse, at least in my program. I cry a lot. I'm on antianxiety medication. I take about a billion milligrams of Vitamin B every day to try to calm myself down more than the antianxiety crap, which has given me 40 "bonus" pounds I'm struggling to lose and is causing havoc on my arthritis (osteo). I have tried to quit smoking about 60 billion times, and my doctor has told me NOT to quit right now because I won't manage it right now, which is all well and good except that I have an ulcer that is not healing. And I drink too much.

I don't know how in the hell I am supposed to work on my classes, fulfill the 20 hours a week of my assistantship, be ready for 5 comp questions in one week, and be ready to defend a dissertation proposal a few weeks later, but apparently this is supposed to happen about 8 weeks from now...

But I will be done in 18 months and I will be a college professor. It's only 18 months. I will sort the rest of my shit out after those 18 months are over. At least that's what I keep telling myself.

Remember this: the smartest people in your program may not be the people who get the Ph.D.s. It will be the people who grind it out to the finish. This is the ultimate hazing process into the ultimate college fraternity (with all of the gender issues the word implies). It's whether you're willing to take the shit in order to get the job that counts, not whether you're actually competent to take the job.

I'm a fellow social scientist, but not necessarily in the same field (mine is multidisciplinary, and I'm more than happy to discuss details with you via PM). Try this for the time being -- read the beginning, read the end, and skim the middle. With EVERYTHING. Try to get as much from abstracts as you can and gloss over the rest. Keep an annotated bibliography of everything (not necessarily a superdetailed one, but something that lets you know what's in what you read), and try to categorize it appropriately to the various theories of your field.

A lot of people recommend PhinisheD as a great support system, but I find it whiny and petty. I'm almost 40 and their members tend to be younger, so it may be generational. YMMV.

OTOH, if you're dealing with theory issues we may have things in common (assuming you're dealing with some of the critical theorists). Outside of Derrida, whom I find completely opaque, I'm pretty solid at critical theory. If this is the case, PM me and we can bounce some ideas back and forth and maybe both of us will understand the theory better.

Hang in there. I feel your pain.

[mix]

12. stressful

i finished my PhD in history in 2006, the whole process was stressful--getting in, getting money to do this or that, teaching, workshops, getting along with other students/professors, finishing & finding a job... but there were moments of calm and pleasure, especially the research, the traveling, the teaching, the writing, and the friendships that crop up...i hope you stick with it...your description of grad students acting out hit home...in my case, and probably yours, there were finite department/division funds and thus intense competition, which too often led to weird public behavior...hang in there

[leftyclimber]

13. Kick for Writer

and because doctoral programs are evil and cruel.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

14. Stress is part of the whole experience

There's the stress of adjusting to a new environment, the stress of work, the stress of older students trying to intimidate you ("What, you haven't read XYZ? I thought everyone read that in high school"), the stress of being part of a small, isolated band of colleagues who may or may not be congenial, and the stress of losing perspective.

The worst period was second year, when I took my comps. We had studied old tests, and the tests appeared not to have changed much in the past ten years--a two-hour essay on each of four areas one day and then a problem that we had the whole weekend to solve.

So we show up that Friday morning, and our test is totally different from anything that has ever been done before. I see immediately what the faculty are doing: They want some of us to pass and some of us to fail, so they have geared the test toward the interests and coursework of the students they like. Then the weekend problem seems to have no answer. It's like one of those solitaire games where you could win if you could legally move a certain two cards, but you can move only one of them.

Then we wait for our results. A professor tells his undergraduate class that half the second-year grad students flunked the comp. Professors are heard mumbling sentences that contain the word "comp." Requests for information bring a tight-lipped, "We're working on it."

Five weeks pass. FIVE WEEKS. I have visions of going home in disgrace. One night, I go out to a play at the Yale Rep with some friends, and on the way back to the graduate dorm, I start getting stomach cramps. By the time I reach my room, I am locked in a bent double position. The campus police take me to the Yale infirmary, where doctors determine that I'm not having appendicitis or a tubular pregnancy or an intestinal blockage. They give me a sedative injection, and I gradually unfold. After keeping me overnight for observation, the doctors conclude that I was just suffering from stress.

Finally, we are called into the chairman's office individually to learn our results. I have passed.

Third year has its own stresses. My adviser requires me to take classical Chinese after just one year of modern, an absolutely insane suggestion. I'm in the class with native speakers and people majoring in Chinese, and I spend hours each day trying to keep up with a class that's not in my major. It comes time to take the first-semester final and I completely blank out. I can't even remember the meanings of the characters that I should know from Japanese, much less how to put them together into a sentence. I'm totally blank. (This is an instructive experience for any future teacher to have by the way. I never doubted students who came to me on the verge of tears, claiming to have blanked out, because it was usually the conscientious students who did so.)

How did I handle it? What helped the most was to make sure that I had a life outside my department. Graduate departments can be jealous. (I had a roommate in the sciences whose lab partners made her feel guilty for taking Thanksgiving weekend off.) But I didn't care. I attended the many cultural events on the Yale campus, joined musical groups, and was active in a chaplaincy. Technically, I didn't have time, but in fact, I worked better and harder when work wasn't the only thing in my life. I could tell myself, "I have a rehearsal at 7:30, so this reading has to be done by 7:15."

I'm a great advocate for having a life outside one's work.

[leftyclimber]

15. Thank you for this, Lydia L.

I wasn't sure if I'd completely lost perspective on second year, so it's nice to hear of someone else who was in the same boat.

I got injured last summer and am still waiting to get things fixed (surgically). Not having the ability to do things outside of classes (I'm a jock, so not being able to exercise is pretty much the end of the world for me) and preparing for the whole out-of-class examination experience at the same time has made things a lot worse for me in terms of coping. I should have the problem ironed out over spring break, but that means I will be coming off surgery and going into comps.

Thanks for the input. I'm in a program where most of the faculty thrives on the energy of doing everything in a panic at the last second whereas I tend to develop year-long Gantt charts and work off The Plan, so I'm in a total freakout over comps because I'm two months out and my advisor just decided I should retool my committee to people he's comfortable with WRT his personal experiences with them versus people I'm comfortable with WRT managing the content of the diss. This, of course, means I can expect comp questions I haven't been preparing for.

It sounds like this kind of thing may not be abnormal. I'll just assume I will get through it. The alternative is to go completely and clinically insane.

Thanks again. Please, other folks who have been through this, weigh in. For those of us in dysfunctional programs like Writer and I are, we can use all the outside support we can get.

[Tangerine LaBamba]

16. You're so normal.......

In law school, our second year was when we all started to snap. Marriages collapsed, the random sexual activity set records, and the illicit drug use coupled with the booze consumption probably damaged our brains in ways we're still not aware of.

But, we'd made it through the legendary First Year, and there we were, the survivors, now competing for the choice internships, clerkships, part-time jobs with prestigious law firms.

One afternoon, it was Estates and Trusts, and I, the lone female among seven crazy boys, sat with them at the last table in the back of the classroom, as far away from the professor as we could get, just hoping we wouldn't be called on.

I don't know who started it, and I'll never know where it ended, but all of a sudden, we were passing among us a piece of paper on which each of us had to list a synonym for the female genitalia. The paper went round once, then a second time, and by the third, I was seeing things written there that I'd never dreamed of and laughing so hard I could barely breathe.

Of course, the professor - who was a practicing attorney teaching only this class - called on one of the guys, using his class roster. He had no idea who anyone was or where we were sitting.

I was next to the guy, who is today head of litigation of a certain section of the United States for the National Labor Relations Board, and watched, with peripheral vision, as he slowly slid to the floor, ending up under our table, still laughing. Then he wet his pants.

And the paper kept getting passed around. The next time one of us was called on, we just didn't answer.

Skip spent the rest of the class on the floor, but we passed him the paper when his turn came round.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

17. Excellent story!

Law school is brutal, indeed.

Three years was an unrealistic amount of time to complete 90 semester hours. Even though it's not comparable to a grad school where you have to do original research, it's tough.

It took me five years going to night school and working full time. I was nuts.

The rich kids said "How can you WORK and go to law school?" My answer was, "I'm on the pay-as-you-go plan. This is how I pay this insane private school tuition".

After I finished college, I went and sat in a couple of classes at the local law school. The teacher would drift off topic, call on maybe 6 or 7 kids to recite cases. I thought "I know what this guy is talking about. I can handle this." This was in San Antonio at St. Mary's University.

I enrolled at the school I went to, after I moved back home. Completely different ballgame. Incredibly difficult, and GRIM. No fun at all. Professors NEVER got off topic or rambled. It was lecture, lecture, recite, recite....and then some annoying apple polisher in the front row asking obscure questions.... I barged out the door of the courthouse, Stenograph and law books in hand, at 5:15 pm, drove down the street and parked. Class started at 5:30, we have not had a break--we never do; it's 7:30 now, my next class starts at 7:40, and I need to hit the bathroom. My weekend won't start until about 10 pm, because it's Friday night.

My experience proves that law schools must vary greatly in how difficult they are. I went to GRIM WORLD.

But I got a good real world education. They crank out most of the judges and trial lawyers in this town. And they win mock trial and appellate advocacy contests so much that many competitions have had their trophies retired, because South Texas College of Law wins 'em all over.

I never got a job with a law firm, though. Nobody was impressed with my education.

[Tangerine LaBamba]

18. I've blocked out the hard work

It's probably far too painful to remember, so it's just not there. When we congregate at reunions or other social gatherings, none of us remembers how hard we had to work. The hours in the law library.

This was before computers. Legal research without computers. Going from Reporter to Reporter. Shepherdizing. My god, it was brutal.

We graduated in 1976. And I got through it in two years, because I didn't think I'd make it through three. I went to summer school for two summers, three different law schools per session: George Washington in the morning, Georgetown in the afternoon, and Catholic University at night.

I studied at traffic lights.

When I started law school, there were fifty females in the class of one hundred fifty. The year before, there had been three females in the class of one hundred fifty.

Can you say "Thank you, Affirmative Action"? You can imagine how I howl when people start dissing AA.

But your comment about the brownnoser in the front row - there's always one, isn't there? - reminded me of ours. I don't remember his name, but he was the little fucker who wouldn't share his notes, didn't join a study group, and took down EVERY FUCKING WORD the professor said.

One time, though, he sealed his fate with us, the C student thugs who sat at the table in the back.

The professor was doing a hypothetical, and it had something to do with ducks.

The brownie raised his hand.

"Why a duck?" he asked.

The professor stared long and hard at him. Then he just continued his lecture.

Forever after, the brownie was known as Whyaduck. Groucho Marx would have been proud.

I saw the cruelest academic act ever during my first year of law school. Sugar was half black, half Chinese, really bright, and my best law school pal. But she had a crush on our Contracts professor, who was, I admit, quite the charismatic gentleman. So, in Contracts class, Sugar sat right in front, in the center of the room, right under his lectern.

One day, she made the big mistake of falling asleep. Her head went down on the books piled on the table before her, and she dozed off.

The classroom had never been that silent, as the professor saw what was happening, lowered his voice, and finally stopped talking completely.

We all watched Sugar. She was beyond a nudge, and the person next to her didn't dare wake her up for fear of incurring the professor's wrath.

(Did I mention that there were those male professors - they were all male - who referred to us girls as "lawyerettes" when they called on us? Can you imagine that happening today?)

Anyway, Sugar's mouth fell open, she was snoring slightly, and - of course - she started to drool.

I couldn't stand it. I dropped my case book onto the floor.

Sugar woke up, wiped her mouth, looked around, picked up her pen, and turned her blurry gaze to the professor, who was just standing there, looking down at her.

Maybe she was asleep for a couple of minutes. Maybe it was an hour. It was agonizing.

Sugar got her revenge, though; a few years after we graduated, word got out that the professor and his wife had separated.

Yep. He and Sugar married and were very happy until his death a few years ago.

And she and I still sometimes talk about that first year. Would we have done it again if we'd known what it was going to be like?

We're not sure.

[hfojvt]

19. it has been a long time, I don't remember that much stress

I only got an M.A. but it was sort of the same path. Seems to me that I got out when things would have gotten easier too. That I could have lightened my courseload and taken some credits in dissertation. I do remember coming back on a trip from the Western Social Sciences conference where I presented a paper, and thinking that I had two presentations, a written exam and an oral exam coming up in the next week. Then there was the summer class that I took to help out a classmate who needed the class and needed numbers so they would offer the class. That was kind of intense.