Oh, dear readers. I have wanted for DAYS to write something, but there is nothing interesting going on in my life. Well, that's not entirely true. I've been really busy at work, busy enough that I feel guilty trying to write a blog post, but now I'm doing it anyway because I LOVE YOU. (All 3 of you.) (You know, it occurs to me that my blog will never have the worldwide following it deserves if I only post once a month. Perhaps I'll think about that some more later.)
Part of what's keeping me so busy at work is trying to write a paper for a journal, and a proposal to talk about said paper at a conference in the fall. If I get accepted to go to the conference (it's the same one I went to in November), then I get a free trip to San Francisco! So, cross your fingers. I have to submit this proposal by the end of the day on Friday, which, if you're keeping track, is tomorrow. This suddenly occurred to me around 4pm yesterday when I realized that I had just wasted half my day... um, looking up apartments near my new grad school. (I could argue that this was important business, but since I'm not moving for another 5 months and I've already read every rental property listing for the area 9 separate times, I have no justification for my behavior.) So then I resolved to get at least a rough draft of the thing done before I left last night, which ended up being at 8pm. Behold, the power of procrastination!
This episode raises some interesting issues, I feel. On the one hand, once I finally made myself work on it, I felt pretty exhilerated. I actually enjoy the process of writing and all that nonsense, which I think bodes well for my grad school experience. On the other hand, my senseless time-wasting turned a normal day at work into a 10-HOUR DAY. So, I dunno. Either I'm perfectly suited for grad school, or I'm DOOOOOOOOMED.
This is a good segue into something else I've been thinking about over the past couple of days. It should surprise no one that it only took about 4 hours for the excitement of being accepted into grad school to wear off and for panic to set in. (Lee refers to this as my very special ability to turn all good things - compliments, good news, candy, ponies - into bad things.) (What the hell does he know, anyway?) The point is: What if this was a terrible mistake? What if I do not have what it takes to be a PhD student? These people are obviously unaware of my Olympic-level procrastination skills. What if I get there and everyone is way smarter and more grown-up than me and I'm in statistics class and they ask me a question and I'm like, "Um... ketchup??" I checked the list of current PhD students, and there are several Asian* names, and I'm pretty sure you know what that means: no one is going to want to copy my homework anymore.
The silver lining to all this is that later, when I was googling "grad school success tips please don't let me fail oh god" I ran across an article about 'imposter syndrome', or the feeling that you're "fooling the world" about your abilities. This is apparently a condition that affects all graduate students and academics at some point or another. The way I see it, this is great news, because if my imposter syndrome is setting in so early on, then I must be way ahead of my peers. At this rate, I'll be writing books and coming up with new ground-breaking theories of social work by my second year of grad school. Take that, Asians!**
*I'm sorry, Asians, I mean no harm. I know that plenty of Asians don't know shit about math.
**But I'm sure the ones at this particular grad school are much, much smarter than me.
Oh, by the way, I started a twitter account, because it seemed like a fun thing to do at the time. If you like, you can check it out here.
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