200 words …

Professor: Hey!!, I just came back from a conference, I have millions of ideas for your project!…why dont you try a) b) c)

SOME TIME LATER————

Grad Student: Hey, I tried a) b) c) and none of them worked

Professor: WHY THE HELL WOULD U EVEN TRY THOSE PROJECTS… you have no common sense

So I’m trying to recruit people to take my survey for my residency project. It’s about people who choose to transfer the friends they’ve made online to their offline lives, so I thought - gee! Why not recruit people online! So far I’ve gotten:

• People who can’t read the age requirements, get midway through, and go, “Oh. I’m too old. You can just discard my responses, right?”
• Someone complaining that the study requirements are not listed and it’s a waste of people’s time to make them take a survey they aren’t qualified for. Except that the requirements are in the informed consent that you said you read and agreed to before you took the survey.
• About 50 responses I can’t use for at least one of the above reasons. Out of 62 possible responses. WOW.

Really? Someone remind me why I want to do research for a living again?

(Fine print: if anyone wants to redeem my faith in humanity and take the study, it’s here, for those of you between the ages of 18 and 25 who have made at least one friend on the interwebs).

Grad school finally got the best of me… since I’ve gotten here I’ve been struggling lived in fear and anxiety of dropping the ball… I’ve pulled miracles out my ass left and right to keep from drowning, and a little over a year in and it finally happened.  Grad school got the best of me.  Spent over 40 hours on this exam and didn’t get it done.

I asked my friend in grad school what the difference was between grad school and undergrad… he said “Undergrad is like a series of sprints, where grad school is like a marathon.”  Yeah, grad school is a marathon, that sometimes includes sprints of 20 miles.  

I’m tired of running.