Posts tagged “Graduate school”

Why I can’t write a good personal essay | Tenure, She Wrote

I wrote about how my understanding of disability has shifted from internal to external and how that’s affected my ability to get support. A little smarts and hard work and luck can’t make my chronically ill body “productive.” Even if they did, it would only make it alright for me – and that’s not good […]

What’s a grad student worth?

I have a post up today on Tenure, She Wrote about structural financial barriers in academia for chronically ill graduate students. If a worker is less productive, should they be paid less? This is not an abstract question for me. As a sick graduate student, I take longer to produce academic products like papers and […]

So you think your PhD is a waste of time

This guy Frobisher goes the Arctic to find the Northwest passage and totally fails, but he finds some rocks that he thinks may have coal or gold or something in them. So he brings them back to good old England and somebody tells him they do indeed have gold in them, so he goes back […]

Where did all my money go?

Several times a year, I look at my overall income and then my savings account and feel like a terrible, wasteful, spendy person. I think, given how much I’m making, I should have been able to save $X. And then I remember to factor in tuition and how much it went up again, and I’ve […]

Life’s sharpest rapture

Last week, I plodded slowly up the hill below my house, grunting with relief when my run timer went off before the steepest incline. Another runner bounded by me, and I had a moment of jealousy. But then I saw where I was standing and a different feeling overwhelmed me. On a cold, rainy day […]

I finished my PhD proposal, take 2

When I initially finished my PhD proposal, I wrote this lackluster post, but after a month of sitting with my accomplishment I am super proud. At first I was just sort of ashamed that it took me 2.3 years into my PhD to finish writing my proposal (2.6 if you count my medical leave), but then […]