So I just finished grad school, which sucked probably more than anything else I've ever done with my life. I went to school in Ireland, which should have been a blast, but I came out of it with enough depression and anxiety that I'm barely functional more than a year after returning to the US. I've just about fought my way through to a PhD, I'm so close to being in the clear, I have my invitation to graduation and everything, and got hit with a nice one-two punch this morning. One, the school wants 12,000 euros from me, which I don't have (for a year during which I was done with academic work and sat in the US and twiddled my thumbs and waited for my professor to schedule my defense). Two, since I'm back stateside my professor helped me with getting my thesis printed and bound for submission over there, and I'm supposed to pay him back, but he just told me that instead of money, it would be awesome if I could draft an academic article by the end of next month. I'm pretty sure I shouldn't have to pay that tuition money, I finished classes in my second year and worked on my own my third year (and didn't pay tuition), and this fourth year has been literally just waiting on my professor to move things forward. But I'm only just starting to build up any savings at all, and that's a terrifying amount of money, and I'm paralyzed, and I'm worried that they might refuse to give me my diploma. Then my professor wants me to draft an article about my work, which is something I've managed to avoid in school thus far and I have no idea how to proceed, and at this point, I have a hideous, nearly-insurmountable aversion reaction to anything to do with my graduate work, to the point where it took me literal months to bring myself to start the basic post-defense edits to my thesis. So I'm getting frustrated just trying to explain this, because I can logically see what ought to be done, and I have taken some steps towards fixing the tuition thing, but then my professor emailed me about the article and now I'm just completely paralyzed. I could afford a loan to cover that tuition if I absolutely had to, and doing a redux of my thesis for publishing in a journal shouldn't even be that painful. (It's a little painful, because it's us military data and blah blah security blah). But it's a struggle to even type this because I just want to bury my head in the sand and pretend that the whole situation doesn't exist. It doesn't help that this is happening right at a time when personal and work stress have both peaked to nearly unbearable levels, and now I'm thinking I might need to leave work for home before I have a meltdown in the middle of the office. This whole stupid mess is so weird and specialized that I don't know if there's any real advice to be had, beyond 'just do it,' which is what I'm trying on myself, no word yet on whether it'll do any good. Sorry, that's too many words, I shouldn't be allowed so much space to talk.
Talk as much as you need to. No one's judging here. The space won't run out. One thing at a time. Leaving work right now is a good thing to do if you feel need it. If you feel like that, perfectly legit. You can say that you have a personal emergency or that it is a health issue. Also if you have someone reliable in your personal life, it might be good to warn them that you will need more support in the next week-month? to come, because it sounds like you do. Which is a completely okay thing to need, sometimes life sort of flops out from under us and everything seems to be going pearshitshaped at the same time. For the money, it might be worth getting in touch with someone who is supposed to know how those things work. Certainly do not commit to a loan before you are entirely sure you need to pay. I understand your professor also had something to do with the delay? So, it's not your fault, and that can help with contesting the demand too, I would assume. As to the article, how big does it have to be? I think it is also possible to simply come clean and admit that you would rather pay him. No need to say why, saying that you have too many work commitments at this moment to produce a good article by the date he wants it might work. Depends on what he is like. PS. Going to grad school in a different country is a big thing! Esp for a PhD, wow. That is an accomplishment!
Well, a huge portion of the work part of stress is that we have a massive deadline coming up so instead of taking time for me, it's been more difficult to not do massive amounts of overtime. Nobody's pressuring me or anything, but people I respect are counting on my work, and it's like damn, you found the secret way to trick me into going above and beyond :T Yeah, the irl support is a big part of what's lacking. I've got one person I can really lean on for this, but she's camping in the woods for a week, and I almost blew our friendship apart a few months ago by leaning too hard. I talked to my parents about the money situation, since they've done the paying-for-college dance a few times now. I shouldn't have to pay for this, but especially if the school decides they don't want to play nice, I don't really have any way around things, and they have my diploma hostage. I'm not doing the loan thing just yet, but since it's abroad that screws with the normal student loan process, so we had to take a slightly different path before. Since it's nominally me handling it now, I'm just making sure my options are lined up, I'm reaaaally not going to get a loan if I can help it. My professor is hopefully going to help when he gets back into town on Monday, and I'm hoping this is just an automated thing and that a real person will look at it and say that things are fine. My dad estimates a 5-10 page draft will be enough. Which theoretically shouldn't be too painful. I want to say no, but I've technically already agreed to do an article with my professor, I just thought he forgot about it. He's usually a massive flake, I'm really irritated he remembered it again. I just don't have the slightest clue what he wants, which is fantastic, an stellar example of the guidance he's provided me throughout grad school, and I'm giving myself a headache trying to figure out if there's a way to do this that doesn't involve passing the paper through the military's information security. If it's just a redux of some of the theory in my thesis I can manage it, but he's literally the worst person I've ever dealt with in terms of meaningful guidance. I just. Loathe him so so much for being so careless and hands-off that I'd probably be less stressed out if he was actively trying to sabotage me (ex: at my actual defense, he printed off copies of my dissertation for my examiners, but he printed an old version, so among other things, my works cited started with "HOW DO I CITE X PAPER???" I could have strangled him, I really could have).
Consider: taking some time off means you'll likely be better at helping out with the deadline. Instead of burning out to a point where you can't contribute anything towards it. You know best, but if you're looking at the numbers, sometimes reducing the hours to improve the quality might be a thing. Also wow your professor sounds like a tool. *offers hugs if you want them*
In my European university it works like this: if you're enrolled, you're paying tuition. That's it. Doesn't matter whether you're taking classes or not. Enrolled means tuition.
US universities work like this too. We have thesis/dissertation credits that you need to take while working on your paper. @spockandawe Congratulations. Getting to that point is a big accomplishment! Try talking to the head of your graduate program and they may be able to help work out a plan or something with the university. As for the paper I would be happy to work with you on setting up a draft since it sounds like your degree has enough overlap with area that I actually could help guide you. Seriously, hit me up on Skype under my username here or Bridget M. Blodgett. I can sit with you and help with finding sources/citing works/translating data/etc. These things are really formulaic, so thankfully once you get it done, you'll know how to do most of them for the future.
Yeah, I think I might properly owe them the tuition. The only thing is that this whole mess was supposed to actually be sorted before this school year even began, my professor is just the literal worst flake in the entire universe. I finished writing about a year and a half ago, had a defense scheduled for early fall, which was still a six frigging month delay but okay. Okay. Fine. I bought (nonrefundable) tickets and then got told like two weeks beforehand that lol oops actually your external examiner can't make it, my bad. So then there were a few more months of delay, and it all adds up to an extra year of enrollment that is entirely my professor's fault. I would braced to pay it if I'd had any clue ahead of time, but everything he told me suggested nope, things are fine, nothing to worry about :VVVVV Worst professor ever. And @siveambrai, thank you for the offer! But I think I should be fine. My work is actually some weird nichey stuff, it's about using Bayesian statistics to model big data that also has lots of data scarcity and categorical predictors and all kinds of weird stuff about categorical responses and joint numerical responses, and I'm fairly certain I half-bluffed my way through the degree just by sticking to material my professor and examiners absolutely did not understand. A few people on tumblr and stuff have suggested that the way I react to this kinda strongly suggests ptsd, which, yeah, I'd buy that. I have to ask my professor what kind of scope he was hoping for, but if I'm lucky I might just be able to transplant one of my appendices and have 80% of a paper right there. It'll work up fast once I get myself moving, and I think getting published will even get me a bit of a bonus at work, just. Ugh. I want this all to be over and everything gone and I never want to speak to my professor again.
I had a boss in academia who gave no guidance whatsoever and then got really upset about my "performance" if the result was not exactly what he had in mind, it drove me fucking nuts and stressed me out to no end. I'm sorry you're dealing with (at least some of) that too, it seems this is a thing with some professors.
