LeavingI am the first to admit that I handled my last few months in graduate school pretty badly. I can't offer much in extenuation of that fact. The closest I can come to explaining it is to compare it to driving into a concrete wall at twice the expressway speed limit in a Yugo. Not much is left behind to cope with the police when they arrive. When I finally went to get counseling after over a month of nonstop sleeplessness (not to mention irritability, lethargy, memory loss, inability to work -- all symptoms of anxiety and depression), the first question everyone asked me was when my symptoms had first appeared. Well, hell, I still don't know when that was. I thought I was more or less all right when I returned from my honeymoon (I got married May 23, 1998) to do paid lexicographical work for Dr. A, although in hindsight I was a goodly distance down the road that led out of this department. I did the lexicography work. I did it well. I finished it early, even. And while I was there, I did the usual meeting with Dr. A to determine whether I'd fulfilled all the coursework requirements before taking prelims that August. Given my record of luck in graduate school, one might expect a snag. Sure enough -- I had forgotten to demonstrate my French reading competency via a test given by the university extension, and there wasn't another test planned until after August prelims. If I had taken two years of university French, I'd have been okay, according to the rules. But I didn't do that; I took a French for Graduate Reading Knowledge course as an undergraduate and earned an A in it. But that didn't count, apparently. That's right: a French for Graduate Reading Knowledge course didn't count toward demonstrating French reading knowledge for my graduate department. Now, I can understand why the department wouldn't accept the mere fact of taking the course that the UW Extension gives -- that course is not graded; it's tied directly to the reading knowledge exam. The course I had taken as an undergraduate, however, was graded. I don't pretend to understand why they wouldn't accept it. (Its value was vindicated when I took the French exam during the fall semester and passed with flying colors.) No matter what, though, I wasn't taking prelims in August. I'd have to delay them until January. I'd have to try to prepare for them while teaching two courses (which I had decided to do the previous spring, based on the belief that I'd be through with prelims!) and taking at least six credits (because of a department rule that apparently requires non-dissertators to do so if they wish to teach). Also, during the fall semester, Dr. A asked me to reinvolve myself in a project (a computer transcription of the Aragonese law text known as the Vidal Mayor) that I thought I had completed my part of. (I had, in fact, done the proofreading I had originally been asked to do. The problem was that the other contributor, a friend of mine since my first year in the department, was having his own time crunch and couldn't quite hold up his end of the bargain. Dr. A didn't care what the bargain had been; he wanted the project finished, and I was closer to Dr. A -- and thus easier to bully -- than my coworker was.) It was then, in mid-June, that I finally broke down more or less completely, whatever earlier trouble signs there may have been that I ignored. A few weeks later, I had my first very bad attack of dyshidrosis, a sort of eczema that (I am told) is exacerbated by stress. The huge blisters and the painful swelling of several knuckles left me without the use of half my fingers for about a week. (I had another attack, almost as bad, just before the semester began, possibly in response to the pre-semester attack of anxiety I was accustomed to from previous years.) Worse, though, at that time I first found myself just about unable to sit down and study. When I did force myself to study, I found that my concentration and memory were shot to hell. I procrastinated for a while, believing the helplessness would pass. When it didn't, and when in the fall it extended itself to my actual coursework, I got scared. I had never in my life before been unable to keep up with basic coursework chores like reading and library work. Never. Not once! I realize that may be difficult to believe, but it's the truth. Perhaps if it had happened to me before, I might have dealt with it better. As it was, I simply fell further into abject fear -- and got further behind in my work. There was only one linguistics course available that semester that I hadn't taken. So at the end of the summer, Dr. A had helped me sign up for research credits to fill up the TA Six-Credit Requirement, and talked me into doing a computerized bibliography project using ProCite for Windows, which I would have to install on my home Macintosh via SoftWindows. This didn't work. At all. I was at my wits' end how to get the work done when I couldn't even get the software running. Around mid-semester, feeling trapped, I cast about for ways to gnaw a leg off that would still allow me to pass prelims. I looked for documentation of the six-credit requirement, to see if I could find a way around it. Such documentation didn't exist. Not in the sheet detailing Ph.D requirements. Not in anything relating to TA matters. Not in any university-wide publications regarding graduate school. Not on the department's web page. Not anywhere! I began to wonder if I'd been lied to. In hindsight, I don't think anyone intentionally lied to me (despite what I said in my resignation letter). I believe this department's communications are so poor that everyone believes in a rule that no one has ever codified. So I did the logical thing. I dumped the research credits via the touchtone registration system. It helped, a little. Not enough. I was still behind, in work for my remaining seminar as well as in studying for prelims, and I was still unable to work well enough to catch up. I grew desperate enough to seek counseling. I'm glad I did; having someone reasonably objective to talk to helped soften the blow of deciding to leave, and it may well have kept me from mental disorder serious enough to warrant inpatient treatment. A few weeks later, I received a letter from Dr. A. It hurt me. I don't like to read it, even now. I grant that I was remiss in not discussing this with him. (I'm not sure what I could have said. How do you tell your academic adviser that you are breaking down? How do you make him believe you? And what difference would it have made, in a department where rules, written or unwritten, matter more than people? How do you make him want to help?) Still -- he might have actually asked me what was wrong, why I had done what I did. He might have been empathetic, or at least polite, instead of sarcastic and accusatory. (Please note that the final accusation in his letter, regarding a project I was supposed to be working on with a professor from another university -- as if with six credits, two course sections to teach, a project to help finish, and prelims to study for, I had time to involve myself right away with something else! -- was utterly unwarranted. As the professor himself said, he had never actually asked me to send the diskettes Dr. A was angrily accusing me of not sending!) At the same time, I received notice from the Bursar that I owed them fifty dollars. They didn't tell me why, and the highly abbreviated explanation "Deferred 4 credits; is taking 6 credits" at the top of the bill said something wholly untrue -- I had started out with 6 and dropped 3. I tried to get an explanation from them. All I got was "The computer says you owe it. Go see the Graduate School." I'm sure you can well imagine how willing I was just then to go chase down a screwup on the part of the bureaucracy. (The Bursar dunned me again about it in January 1999. I paid it. They did, when I asked, make an attempt at explaining what had happened. The problem is that the explanation hinges on my originally having signed up for four credits -- which, to the best of my knowledge, I never did.) I felt utterly without power to withstand this latest onslaught. Together, Dr. A's letter and the Bursar's bizarre bill were absolutely the straw that broke this camel's back. I dialed up the touchtone system and used it to withdraw from the university, and I wrote letters to the department and to Dr. A explaining that I was leaving. That's the end of the story. I finished teaching my two sections of Spanish 203, and I left. No one on the faculty tried to change my mind. No one asked me why. No one expressed even a tinge of regret over my leaving except for the graduate secretary (and a number of my Spanish 203 students; I tried, largely successfully, to keep them out of my troubles, but I didn't want to lie to them about my not teaching anything spring semester). No one even said goodbye. So much for four years of work. One more graduate student gone. Who cares? |