8 Changes You Go Through In Grad School

When people ask me, “how was your first year of grad school,” I typically illicit this maniacal giggle that completely gives away the fact that I lost damn near all my sanity, as I feel most graduate students do at some point. 

To anyone considering graduate school, good luck, and to those of us in the muck of it, hats off to the size of our balls.

You literally have no idea where your money went.
When you started the year, you had mounds of funds just sitting in your checking and savings accounts, and more to come with those hefty student loans you applied for.  But you promised yourself only to use your checking account; savings was money for ‘the real world.’  Like, putting a down payment on a house or a boat or adopting a kid from Cambodia.  All of your money from summers of nannying for 5 days a week and sacrificing the week-long benders of most of your friends who work in the food and retail industry started to accrue, and you’re ready to be an adult and invest in your education, but also live comfortably (i.e. going out for drinks on the reg and splurging at Sephora occasionally).  Fast forward to the end of the year as you’re looking at your bank statement and laugh-crying, because you halfway think this is some cruel prank that a friend pulled on you when she talked you into giving her your PIN number when you were drunk, but you halfway know it’s because you’re inescapably financially irresponsible, just unwilling to admit it out loud (or to your parents).  You contemplate becoming an Uber driver to make some money on the side, then realize you have no car.  You settle for a waitressing job, because you’re 90% certain that your Masters of Science in Television will land you a great career as a food service industry professional by the time you’re 30.

You lose your shit. A lot. Especially in public places.
Your tear ducts get more action than the Boston Fire Department (and probably more action than you, if we’re being honest).  There’s something about grad school that rips away anyone’s dignity in the ability to stay composed.  And you always feel it coming.  It’s always right after a week when you’ve had 10 cumulative hours of sleep, maybe had time to shower about once or twice, and watched too many episodes of New Girl to procrastinate on loads of work that was all conspiratorially due the same day.  That lump creeps up into your throat as you quietly sit on the train.  You think about all your student loans and the fact that you’ll forever be deemed a poor ‘starving artist’ and then you think about the people who fall for poor starving artists, and the options are so slim that you see yourself settling for a guy named Chad or Todd, who will most definitely have a bald spot or an ugly soul patch he refuses to shave and his favorite show will be Family Guy and he'll say things like 'okey dokey', but you can’t give him up because you never know if anyone will love you, and oh, your poor children, who will most likely hate you, because starving artists can’t afford to send them to nice schools and buy them nice things, then they’ll take up prostitution and drugs and get tattoos, oh god, NOT TATTOOS.  And suddenly, you realize you’re doubled over and sobbing on the guy next to you in the Red Sox hat as he eats a burrito and manages to drop a few pieces of mango salsa into your hair.

Your skin reverts to its pubescent ways.
Remember that unflattering yearbook photo of you in 7^th grade?  The one where you had a huge zit on your chin, but you were so cosmetically inept because you hadn’t really gotten into make-up yet, (apart from those N.Y.C. colored mascaras and unhealthy amounts of tinted Bonne Bell), so you used your mother’s foundation, which was CLEARLY not the right undertone?  You ended up looking like someone rubbed Cheetos all over the lower half of your face.  Yeah.  You know the photo I’m talking about.  It was totally acceptable back then.  Your body was doing weird shit and your face became a breeding ground for more weird shit.  No one blinked an eye at the 12-year old with skin problems.  As a 22-year old, I can’t say there’s much sympathy.  Who actually has time to maintain a Clinique facial care regimen when you’re ass deep in assignments, too exhausted to take off your make-up at the end of the night, and only find happiness in consuming all the pizza and beer because it provides a solid coping mechanism?  Your face definitely pulls an America and declares its independence, as you’re left excusing yourself with the line that generates the most compassion from female audiences, “oh, you know, period breakouts.”  And then people start to wonder why you have your lady time 4 weeks out of the month.

You get fat.  Like, really fat.
This is the point in your life when “sweatpants are the only thing that fit me right now” is your anthem. After months of stress, sobbing into slices of pizza, consoling yourself with a 3 a.m. study break for Thai food delivery, and putting off all responsibilities until after you devour a whole half-gallon of Edy’s, you’re a bit touchy about your new waistline.  You have had nights you refuse to leave your shitty, overpriced studio apartment due to the inches separating you from buttoning your jeans that you bought while you still had your undergrad body, but now resemble overstuffed sausage casings as you make a futile attempt to do the jump and wiggle (you know what move I’m talking about).  Spanx cannot fix this.  All of your clothes are a smidgen too tight, but not so tight that they don’t fit, just tight enough to be in that awkward well-I-guess-I’ll-just-throw-a-boyfriend-cardigan-over-this-to-hide-my-muffin-top phase.  You refuse to get a bigger size in anything, because you say it motivates you to go to the gym.  Spoiler alert: you’re not going to go to the gym. Seriously, WHEN is there time to go to the gym?  You spend at least an hour commuting to and from class daily, you have hours upon hours of class that are usually prime for Snapchatting, especially when you have to watch films you've 17 times, and then let's not forget about that job that you have that helps pay for graduate school.  The fact is, the last thing you want to do when you get home is change into a pair of yoga pants that don't fit your ass anymore and take another commute to the gym where you'll be taunted and ridiculed by all of the undergraduate varsity soccer girls because you can't go 5 minutes on the stair stepper without falling off.

Your boobs get HUUUUGE.
Not like the, I-want-to-motorboat-the-shit-out-of-those huge, but like, she-looks-like-she’s-fed-a-whole-village-in-Africa huge.  This is most likely a symptom of the weight gain that you would think bodes in your favor.  Well, it doesn’t.   It prohibits you from wearing any sort of A-line dress or a belt around your waist, because it only highlights the ill-fitting bra lines that start to create back boobs.  Your cups runneth over, and there’s really not a damn thing you can do about it.  You still have all the bras you wore in undergrad that made your boobs look perf, especially for all those frat parties you now reminisce about, mainly because in the real world, no one hands out shitty, heavy-handed mixed drinks for free, even if it is Karkov, for having a nice rack.  You’re too poor to have the luxury to go out and buy the right size for your girls, so you’re stuck being nostalgic with your old titty tamers that give you a mean case of the quad boob.  And don’t you dare even think about going braless if you’re bigger than a B.  You put everyone at risk of being a casualty to your nip-slip.

You become a functioning alcoholic.
Monday?  Margs.  Tuesday?  More tequila.  Wednesday?  Wine.  Thursday?  Anything, just because.  Friday? Was that called a Scorpion bowl…?  Saturday and Sunday?  I’m not going to drink today, really.  Just a Mimosa or a Bloody Mary.  Okay, well maybe two.  But I stop at three. 
This type of bargaining goes on every week.  It’s that voice inside your head telling you that maybe you should let your body have just one day without an elevated BAC, but then you look at your to-do list for the week, put on a bra, call up your girlfriends and say, “let’s just take a really quick study break at Yardhouse.  Oh, yeah, definitely.  Just one beer.”  The next morning, you find a half-eaten, open jar of peanut butter next to your head, mascara stains on your pillow and 37 outgoing calls to your ex-boyfriend.  But you still pull your shit together enough to take a shower, albeit, you vomit into the drain a few times and cut yourself with a shanty armpit-shaving attempt.  The motion of the train makes you sick, and you almost lose your skimpy breakfast of half a container of Chobani (they were on sale at Stop N’ Shop) into your backpack, but you’re successfully on your way to class.  Totally functional.*

*alcoholism is a real thing and I don’t condone it.  I had to put this disclaimer to make it seem like I’m not insensitive.

You nap an unreasonable amount.
You wish you could go back to your childhood and add up all the hours you refused to nap, no matter how much your mother implored, because let’s be honest, you were probably a little terror as a child, and stash them in your sleep bank.  You. Need. All. The. Sleep.  And you take it, unapologetically.  Huge script due tomorrow?  Let’s nap on it.  Thesis proposal?  I should probably nap first.  Production packet that counts for half of your grade for the semester?  I think a nap will clear my head.  There is seriously not enough sleep in the world for you, you determined, worn-down, soul-sucked graduate student, you.  You nap with vengeance.  Even when you’re not tired (but when are you never tired?).  When you’re overwhelmed, the only plausible thing to do is overwhelm yourself even more by taking time to nap and putting off any sort of responsibility whatsoever.  You have missed several outings due to their infringement on your precious nap time, and you’re notoriously known for missing calls and not returning them, because you checked them in your misty-eyed state and then passed right back out.  People probably argue that you’re depressed with the amount of sleep you need.  Depression and sleep deprivation are just side effects of grad school.  Just like student loan debt and superiority complex.

You learn to just go with it.
Yeah, you’re emotional and you can’t afford to feed yourself occasionally, and yeah you’re probably a little pudgy, and yeah, you probably haven’t been sober in about 8 days. But you’re in fucking graduate school.  You’re getting a degree in something cool as hell, and when you finish and get through all of this, you’ll hold a shiny Master’s Degree in your hand, and think, “damn, that wasn’t so bad after all.”  All of your complaints seem silly and so surface level when you think about it.  You realize that you have to be poor to experience how incredible it feels to make money and really earn it from doing what you love.  You realize that emotions shouldn’t be tamed, even if the whole transit system probably thinks you’re on the verge of a mental and emotional meltdown and threaten to pull the emergency break, because feelings are meant to be felt and expressed.  You realize that the way you look is so infinitesimal on the Grand Scale of Things That Matter, because your ideas are what will continue after you, not that goiter of a zit you had on your forehead during finals week or that pair of fat jeans you wear after you indulge yourself in a night of gastronomical debauchery.  You realize that getting drunk and rowdy with friends will always be a perfect pastime, and you’re probably not as much of a lush as you think you are, because you managed to get through a rigorous grad program, which is pretty fucking valiant.  And you realize that you can sleep when you’re dead, because there’s too damn much to see and experience, and it’s better to go through life happy and a bit haggard than to have your eyes shut completely.

A Bit Reminiscent

          Just taking a little stroll down memory lane (My Documents) and found this little gem I wrote after all the stress of applying to graduate school and not knowing what the hell I wanted to do with my life.  Hopefully it resonates.

 

QUANTITATIVE REASONING: 35 MINUTES

            You have reached the quantitative reasoning section of the GRE.  Congratulations.  You may not look back at previous tests once this portion has started, so too fucking bad if you’re still stuck on the question about the contrasting arguments in the passage about the Navajo Indian remains found in New Mexico, on which you just spent 7 minutes ruminating, and too fucking bad if you missed the definition of ‘ruminating.’ In this portion of the exam, we will ask questions that involve letters, numbers, pictures, functions, formulas and charts, probably some of which you have never seen, and we will give you an absurdly limited amount of time to finish them.  We have designed quantitative reasoning to allow left-brained, logic-zealots to look like glistening thoroughbreds in the race to graduate school, grabbing the attention of Ivy League suitors who are willing to bet on the favorites.  For those of you who are right-brained and have a nauseous aversion to logic and reasoning and would rather spend hours with charcoal and easel or pen and paper or camera and film, this section will parade your weaknesses like a Pekingese in the Preakness.  And don’t get your hopes up that everything will ‘just click’ when you see the test material.  This is not Good Will Hunting.  And you are not Matt Damon.

            There are a total of 20 questions and 35 minutes for this portion of the test.  Don’t try to calculate how to pace yourself now; we know it’ll take all the energy you can muster to figure out the conundrums beyond this page.  We hope that 500-something page book you bought over the summer works to your advantage, even if you completed (and by completed, we mean skimmed) 4 out of 9 of the practice sections and retained none of the lessons that the book offered.  Surely, you remember some material from high school math classes, because despite your groans of, “I will never use this is real life,” your teachers hammered it into you how important trigonometry and pre-calculus become in your daily life, and you believed them, because who ever questions a high school math teacher?  We understand that it was your choice to slack on GRE prep, because you were so busy chasing after three children, because if you’re going to attend graduate school, you must have some way to pay for it, preferably a full-time job that involves no paper trail.  Your choices were drug cartel or summer nanny.  You chose wisely and we applaud your judgment, but we regret to inform you that you will not receive any points for that on the GRE.  Please remain seated for the duration of the test and keep fidgeting to a minimum.  Our monitors really don’t want to come out from behind the glass window and tell you to stop adjusting your ponytail and distracting the other test takers.  Relax; this is only one of the make-it or break-it factors for graduate school.

            Pressure is measured by the equation PV = nRT; pressure multiplied by volume equals amount of substance multiplied by the constant (8.3145 J/mol K) multiplied by the temperature.  Meaghan, Kathleen, and Jessica are all sisters.  Meaghan and Kathleen both completed their undergraduate study at a small, private, liberal arts college in Memphis, TN.  Both pursued law degrees at prestigious, top-25-schools-of-law in the nation.  They received the same LSAT score, which ranked them in the 98^th percentile for all LSAT takers that year.  Surely, they would have received near perfect scores on the GRE, as well.  No pressure.  Plump scholarship bundles allowed them to reduce the amount of the loans that they would inevitably pay back when both of them become partners at a firm and are making north of $250,000.  Jessica has never had the desire to be a lawyer or a doctor or anything with a practical function.  Jessica writes for enjoyment.  In the dead of night, she can’t stop the synapses that signal her right hand to pick up a pen or a keyboard or a phone and start writing, typing, recording messages of words that have fallen so deliberately and temporarily into place and beg to be remembered.  She realizes most writers shiver in the winter behind the paper-thin, smoke-stained walls of their “New! Refurbished! Great Neighborhood!” apartments and eat canned ravioli out of calcium-crusted bowls.  No pressure.  Graduate school no longer creeps up as an option, but butts in as a necessity.  If the volume of the disappointed sighs is at its loudest and if the room temperature constantly rises when the graduate school talk slips into conversation, then how many people counting on Jessica does it take for her to fold under the pressure?

Forty-one thousand, three hundred and fifty marbles are put into a bag labeled, 'GRADUATE SCHOOLS.'  As your hand shakes and your bowels clinch, you close your eyes and grab seven marbles, without replacement.  What is the probability that you will scrape by the application deadlines for all seven schools, and what are the odds that each will require a hokey, get-to-know-you essay (most likely, given your past ratio of luck to misfortune, all will have slightly variant prompts so you can't write the same thing seven times), wherein you use the canned, overwritten phrase that always comes to mind when you're asked to write about your future: "Since I can remember, I've always wanted to write"?  Because since you can remember, you’ve been filling up cheap Staples notebooks with wordy passages that flow seamlessly between pages and attempted screen plays you never had time or encouragement to finish and the occasional catharsis with raw, impulsive emotion behind all the “fuck”s and “shit”s and “what the hell am I doing?”s. Television writing became your dream before you even knew what television writing was.  When you were younger, MADtv would be dully playing in the background during dinner, and you’d catch hints of laughter every few moments and think to yourself, that will be my job.  These seven schools represent your chances to emulate what you experienced during your childhood, and perhaps make another starry-eyed six-year-old find her calling.  What fraction of those schools is looking for an acute little girl with exponential talent, but whose total sum is still unknown because she's crass and stubborn like her father, but overly sensitive like her mother, and can't find a way to balance either side of the equation?

            There are 3 points on a map: Boston University, Sacred Heart University, and Brooklyn College, labeled respectively, A, B and C.  If point A is 151.3 miles from point B, and point B is 68.1 miles from point C, when does it stop hurting that all hypothetical points revolve around a relationship that ended in a text, saying "I love you but," and you knew exactly what was coming, so instead of asking for a good 'but,' you just asked for a goodbye?   And as acceptance letters rolled in, you ached to revel in the fact that you're going to graduate school, but instead, you ached as you pictured the geometric shapes of his face, and the 90 degree angles of the walls in the apartment you'd planned to own, and the precise circumference of the coffee table in the living room that bled into the kitchen, but you’d already established that it was okay if your apartment was shitty and small, because all you'd need was one another.  Too much time playing with imaginary numbers, cubing them and squaring them and swearing at them until they would become real, piecing together the factors that would never exist except in an alternate reality.  So much emphasis on i and -i and not enough on the I that you started to become the negative I.  Focusing so much on the unknown variable that you forgot the formula.  And the structure.  And you stood at the board scratching your head wondering why your answers are always wrong.  If you are 21 years old, and put all you had into a six-year relationship, what percentage of your life did you waste living it for someone else?  Including birthdays, anniversaries, Valentine’s days, and Christmases, how much time and money did you put into a relationship that you and your therapist knew damn well was too one-sided to ever last?  At what point do you move on, despite the proximity of the cities? At what point will you be comfortable admitting that you are okay if your lives no longer intersect, and at what point would a hypothetical glance on the subway not make you fall to pieces?

            Two non-parallel lines with the midpoints of (NOW, -NOW) and (THEN, -THEN) on a plane intersect at a certain point.  If you know that NOW= (THEN + -THEN)(-NOW), then NOW = 0, and this is your clean slate, and the THENs cancel out because they don't matter anymore, and the -NOW multiplied by itself only leaves a positive integer, because in this realm, two negatives make a positive because you're pretty damn positive there's no room for negativity now.  Then, you couldn’t withstand the pressure.  You applied for the wrong reasons.  No one likes a conformist simply going through the motions, no matter how educated she is.  You had your dependent variables lined up as you checked off each one: 1. make something of yourself and make your parents proud; the disappointment in their eyes when you used the excuse “taking a year off” was enough to shame any daughter into racking up more student loans and a supplementary degree, because they knew (and you subconsciously knew, too) “a year off” would turn into “a few years off,” which would turn into “I’m comfortable with my bachelor’s degree.”  2. delay life; you wanted to slow things down and put off responsibility, even if you didn’t know what that responsibility would even be yet.  You were so uncertain of what you even wanted and you just knew it was too soon to pursue it without a graduate school buffer.  Now, you realize looking back that you were painfully attentive to all desires, except your own.  Appeasing the dependent variables, you were unable to establish the independent variable.  The variable that stands on its own.  The variable that is unaffected by outside forces.  The variable that says, this is what I want, and all of you can just sit on it.  You remember your first graduate school interview, and as soon as it was over, you burst into tears and called your mother, because it was at that point that you realized you were doing it for all the right reasons.  You knew who you were, and you knew what you wanted and where you were going and someone saw that in you.  You want experience, you want gain, you want day in and day out to be rooted in something you love. You will stand up and say I am passionate about me, and only me, and going off on this tangent will be a sine that you are not willing to cosine your life away with anyone else; the point at which these lines intersect can only be (FUTURE, FUTURE). 

I'll Do It Myself

                If you ask my parents what my first phrase as a baby was, I’m sure they’d give a mundane answer like, “I’m hungry,” or “I pottied,” or “goddamnit, Jessica” (we repeat what we hear, right?).  I, however, would disagree and have to say it was, “I’ll do it myself.”  And even if I didn’t say it aloud, I know the words were bouncing from cortex to cortex, unmumbling themselves, trying to carry the weight that they would hold one day; when my mom poured my cereal, when my dad tied my shoes, when my sisters helped me put toothpaste on my bristles, my synapses were screaming, “LET. ME. DO. THIS.”

                It’s the eve of my 22^nd birthday, and I would make a wise conjecture that Taylor Swift was not in my position when she wrote that pop song that will forever occupy the Facebook statuses of all those entering Twenty-Two-Dom who have nothing else wittier to say on social media.  If I were to re-write a few verses, maybe it would go something like this:

“It feels like the perfect night to look over my lease forms,
and sign on the X’s, uh uh, so broke.
It feels like the perfect night, to crash before midnight,
‘cause I got a real job, uh uh, still broke…

…We should have warned you,
get used to feeling 22.”

Or something along those lines.  I doubt it would have received much radio play.

                I didn’t know what independence was until this summer.  I’ve had the, “I’ll do this myself” attitude for years, but during the past few months, I’ve realized it’s hard to walk when you haven’t quite mastered the crawl.  Let’s be honest, up until this summer, I was still shitting myself with contentment and sitting in my Huggies, waiting for mom and antibacterial wipes to come to the rescue (if we’re sticking with the baby metaphor, we may as well not half-ass it).  I have lived in comfort my entire life, and was so busy “claiming my independence” that I failed to face the fact that I had no idea what independence entailed.  You can’t buy it on the emergency VISA that your parents gave you (wherein the lenient, self-governed stipulations state Cole Hahn and Michael Kors as your primary emergency contacts).  Independence is a responsibility.  And a goal.  And a mindset that correlates positively with well-being.  And sometimes gaining it ain’t no stroll in the Lexus that your mom lets you borrow that runs on company gas.  But the paradox is, to find it, you have to say, “I’ll do it myself.”

                I stared at the ad on Craigslist.  To call, or not to call; that is the question.  And depending on the answer, I could A.) be homeless in September B.) have a cozy, albeit very expensive, studio apartment for myself and my little pup secured for a year, or C.) take my chances and let some whackjob with a corndog fetish contact me and ask if I want in on “a super-chronic, 3 br 2 ba apt, HOT GIRLS PREFERABLY**”

(**this was an actual ad on Craigslist.  Minus the corndog part.  That was just an assumption).

I e-mailed my mom immediately.  My mother; the woman who paid to put me through Catholic school K-12, a private college for 4 years, and numerous graduate school application fees and visits  (my dad deserves credit here, as well, but he was the second one I contacted; that’s always been our chain of communication [unless I need a DD, then it’s Dad all the way]).  I sent her pictures of the small, $1,225/month studio in a nice area, only a mile and a half from campus that also happened to be pet-friendly.  I was almost giddy when I sent the e-mail, waiting for her approval.  The response I received wasn’t one I was used to: “That’s great! It’s your apartment, if you feel comfortable paying for it and you like it, get it.  It’s your decision.”

Wait.  What?  I just…I can get it…wait…is there a catch here?  You always make me ask permission for big decisions!  Like, remember when I had to ask for permission before spending the night at Kim Toop’s house after prom, and then after you gave me permission, you called to check to see if I was there, and I wasn’t because I wanted to go somewhere where I knew parents weren’t home and bottles would be poppin’?  Remember that, mom?  I NEED PERMISSION.  I DON’T WANT TO DO THIS MYSELF.

Desperately, I turned to my dad.  He was always the more level-headed and financial of the two Hines parents.  I know he’ll have some reservations.

“looks great.  Love the vids. Up to you.”

CAN SOMEONE PLEASE JUST GIVE ME PERMISSION?!  I need someone to affirm that I am making the right decision.

And then it hit me.  Like a truckload of tequila.

I. Am. An. Adult.  Those words felt heavy.  Like I had just lost something that I had been clinging to for the past 21 years; the security of having every move monitored, every step supported, and most acerbically, all decisions dichotomized by the parental panel before approval.

                This was the first of many adult things (by “adult” I mean, “expensive beyond my means”) I had to do.  And while half of me was scared shitless to sign that lease agreement and send in my first savings-account-obliterating payment, half of me started to feel liberated.  And excited.  And despite the fact that I’d be MC Hammer broke after making all the payments for my new temporary home, I felt a sense of pride and self-sufficiency that I had never experienced before.  Coming from the girl who still makes her mother call the dentist and gynecologist to make her appointments, this was one step closer to being a fully functioning adult in the real world (and hopefully one step closer to sleeping without my bathroom light on).

                The preparation for graduate school hasn’t been easy, nor has the transition.  I think back to 7 months ago when I had my fingers crossed, hoping some program somewhere would see potential (which was especially questionable, considering most of my writing samples included the staples of my writing: sarcasm and profanity) in me.  The day I received an e-mail from Boston University’s College of Communication, ranked 8^th in the U.S., I was driving on IN-62, and started bawling (I know it’s bad enough that I’m checking my e-mail while driving, but what’s even worse is crying and singing to myself “This Girl Is On Fire” while trying to navigate the backroads of southern Indiana).  That’s when I knew my shit was going to get rocked here pretty soon, and I was hellbent on being ready for it. 

                Since my acceptance, I’ve been weaning myself off my dependence on others.  There’s never been a feeling more visceral (and cringe-worthy, at times) than knowing that you are your own keeper.  And I’m all about the nitty-gritty and the down and dirty, so bring it on.  When it comes to my future and my goals, I figure it’s better if I do it myself.  If I believe in my talents, then who the hell can tell me that I can’t?  I’d rather do it by myself.

                So here I am.  On the eve of my 22^nd birthday.  Sipping Oliver Peach Honey wine, and watching my little furball make pee spots on the carpet as I blog.  And you know, I can’t help but be happy for myself.  Because through all the years of guidance, I found independence.  Come September, I’ll have $32,000 sitting in my bank account, and Uncle Sam will be happily draining me with sky-high student loan interest rates.  I’ll have tuition to pay, and rent to make, and groceries to buy and a life all on my own.  And despite my protests, I may even have a little help from my parents—you can call it the Fund for Future Starving Artists.  But no matter what I’m up against, I think this process has empowered me and made me realize that I’ll have to do it myself.