Grad School Anxiety

Grad school will open up many more opportunities for you, they say. Grad school will allow you an opportunity to go much deeper into what you learned in undergrad, they say. Grad classes will be easier than undergrad classes, they say. But what they don't tell you about is the anxiety that comes with grad school.

Now, before I get on my soap box, let me first qualify this by saying that I am only speaking about the experience of a Master's program. Fortunately, I do not have to worry about the beast that is prelims/quals--I don't think I would make it through a PhD program. But a Master's degree generally involves the same core coursework as for a PhD, so my thoughts and experiences on this issue are not totally invalid.

I have never before in my life felt such long-term anxiety about school. Sure, in undergrad, I had short, periodic bursts of anxiety surrounding midterms, projects, finals, or really hard problem sets. But never before have I experienced just a constant anxiety around school that does not let up when you leave the lecture hall, or when you finish the problem set, or when you are trying to enjoy your weekend. At all hours of the day (and I seriously mean all), I find myself worrying about "oh shit, what if professor asks about this on the midterm?" "what is the next problem set going to look like?" "what the hell am I going to write about for my Master's thesis?" I have been counting down the weeks until the period of instruction ends. No, I don't mean until finals are over--I mean the weeks remaining until no new material will be introduced. Finals happen afterward. That is the point where I will stop being bombarded will material that I am supposed to be able to reproduce in a problem set or on an exam. It is sad that I do that, because I love learning--and yet I anticipate the day that I will not have to learn more.

The reason for this is that I am living in a box of fear and anxiety. I am not afraid for the future of my life, or for my future career; I am afraid for just the next lecture. And I want to escape this box, but I can't.

This constant anxiety drains the life out of me. I have not felt fully alive in months; I feel subdued.

Through some of my undergrad classes, I had to learn the lesson that a good grade does not necessarily correspond to learning. Similarly, a sub-par grade does not necessarily correspond to not learning; and truly learning is what is more important. But for some reason, I can no longer make that distinction. When I spend 8 hours on a problem set that I can't make any sense of, and then I receive a score of 3/10, I doubt my self-worth and think that I am too dumb to be in grad school. Conversely, when I score 40/40 on a problem set, I think that I am a genius. I vacillate often between these two opinions of myself because I have re-tied my self-worth to grades.

I sometimes think that I have gotten into my program by mistake. That my application was not enough of an indicator for how I will be able to perform in grad school. I doubt the validity of my good grades in undergraduate classes.

I compare myself to my peers. Many of my classmates are taking the department's prelim exams in about a month. Just thinking about the idea of them overwhelms me, even though I don't have to take them. Perhaps I get overwhelmed because prelims are a reminder of how fucking hard academia is, and the power that it can exert over your life.

I don't think it's normal to walk out of every lecture for every class feeling dizzy and light-headed.

This is EVERY. SINGLE. FUCKING. DAY. for me.

I don't want to feel like this. It is eroding away at my life. It is killing me.