Bored Now

I have decided that success in graduate school is dependent on about 10% intelligence and 90% motivation, ambition, and fear of faculty realizing they made a mistake in admitting you. I used to be very ambitious. It's unclear to me where that ambition went, but I think it's deteriorated slowly, replaced bit by bit by fatigue. My motivation used to come purely from the love of astronomy; like 90% of other grad students in astronomy, my application essay started something like "Astronomy has always been my passion." (And I can say that with some authority, having served on the admissions committee for two years. I have read a solid 300 application essays over the past few years and except for the guy that wrote about his pet alpaca, they've all been more or less the same). Yet even my motivation has gotten lost in the math and the sheer dullness of what I do on a daily basis. I'm running purely on fear anymore.

Graduation was last week. All but one of my friends is leaving this summer. They all have real jobs or post-docs and are heading out into something new and fabulous. I'll say this up front: I'm so excited for them! Truly, I am. The same kind of thing happened to me, though, a few years ago, the first time I went to graduate school. All of my friends graduated a year before I did and I was left more or less alone in my final year finishing my Master's degree. It was really, really depressing. It's a little different this year, in that I have about 47,000 times the amount of work to do in my final year of my PhD. (as compared to the M.S.), but the sadness remains. And not a little bit of envy. I wish I had a clear view of the job I want (or even the one that I don't want), but it's not like that. I look at my job prospects and I have to admit that unless I want to leave astronomy altogether and end up running a Starbuck's (which is not out of the question), I have no idea where I will be in a year. Speaking of jobs, here is the one thing that nobody tells you early on: in astronomy academia, pedigree is everything. Everything. One of the first things anyone asks you is where you are from. And it matters. It matters a lot.

It's strange how your priorities change in grad school. I used to have grandiose ideas about the incredible discoveries I would make as a graduate student. I was going to change the whole field with my new insight. Four years in, a big deal to me anymore is new office space (which, thank the heavens, I have managed to score starting this summer). Conference travel used to super cool, a chance to get out of the office and go somewhere cool. Now it's just time that I won't be working on my thesis. (Not to mention the amount of time and effort that goes into planning said travel, let alone figuring out how to pay for it!) All in all, I guess grad school is just much more real than I had imagined. It's hard, and it's often mundane and tedious. I have made no huge discoveries and have barely scratched the surface of what people in my field already know. Reality really does bite sometimes.