Hi everyone,
It’s been a minute. I haven’t been on this site since 2016 when I graduated high school, I believe! Now, I am a third-year honors student at UGA studying sociology/women’s studies. I am doing well so far, but I don’t really do anything besides school. I’ve been wanting to get my PhD in Gender Studies, but things are not going well. Last semester, I took a few master’s sociology courses and realized I would rather do a PhD in women’s studies than sociology, and I found it very difficult to do my work. I pulled through because I wanted to keep my GPA up for when I applied for PhD programs in the fall. Now, I am taking classes I do not like (no women’s studies classes this semester, unfortunately), and I am finding it hard to do any work at all. I have started off the semester poorly and refuse to do my assignments. I cannot find the motivation to complete readings or essays, which is very unlike me. I have a 3.95 GPA, but I feel like giving it up completely. I’m feeling really down and like I cannot do a PhD if I can’t even get myself to do 12 credit hours’ worth of work. I still want to pursue the PhD, but I don’t really have anything impressive for my application either. I haven’t published any articles, presented work anywhere, been involved in any clubs, or anything. I feel like all I am is a good GPA, which won’t be enough to get me into a PhD program. Additionally, I have to apply next semester. With this doubt looming over me, it makes it even harder for me to complete my work. I feel like everything I am doing is for naught and I am just kind of panicking. I know I sound all over the place and dramatic, but it is so unlike me to be sitting here with class tomorrow unsure of what I am going to write my paper on, which is due in a few hours. I have never procrastinated like this and really cannot find the motivation to do my work since I feel like I’m not gonna get into a PhD program anyway. Has anyone else felt like this–like completely burned out or unmotivated? I don’t know how to fix my attitude, and I feel like I am not coping healthily. If anyone can send some encouragement my way or something, I would appreciate it. Though I have not visited this forum in almost three years, I really do not know where else to turn.
Thanks in advance. <3
It seems to me that you may be focused on the wrong thing. A PhD is a piece of paper. What is your motivation for continuing in school until you complete a PhD? The degree itself is sort of meaningless right? It’s meaning is enhanced if it helps you along some path -to enable you to do something. What would that something be? If not for that, well you could have simply been reading on your own. I would discourage anyone from pursuing a PhD unless it was required for them to pursue a vocation they had as their goal. Otherwise, it seems like mental “self stim”. A phD is a means to an end but has little value outside of that. It seems sort of pointless if it is the actual goal. Perhaps that is the crux of the problem.
I’m in a top phd program in my field (I was accepted to a similarly ranked History & WS joint phd but turned it down for my current department). I did not have any of those things when I applied. Hell, I didn’t even have a relevant undergrad degree. What I did have was strong writing skills, a good fit with a faculty member, and a reason for pursuing my phd.
A phd isn’t just a piece of paper. It’s training.
What is your goal? There are lots of things you can do with a phd that aren’t professor-track or even in academia.
PM me if you want to talk more. Good luck!
Deep breath. One day at a time. You are trying to think of everything at once from today through PhD and it is overwhelming you. To earn the degree you are working on, you are going to have to take some classes that you aren’t interested in. That’s just the way it is. Do the best you can today, then tomorrow, then the next day so that you keep your options open.
If you still want to apply for PhD programs in the fall, research which programs that you are interested in over the summer, do some GRE prep over the summer so that you can take it in the fall. A lot of people who do PhD programs take a little time off after undergraduate school to work and save money and have the time to research programs and take the GRE. You don’t have to compress it all if it’s too much.
Perhaps you can even find a job at your university over the summer that has some relationship to the field that you want to study in graduate school.
Don’t think of it all at once. It really is a step by step process.
You don’t have to apply to PhD programs next semester. You can apply to them in a year, if you want to. It can be a good idea to have a pause between your undergrad and your PhD, anyway, so you can work for a bit, and figure out if a PhD - and in what field - is really what you want. This is the path I often recommend to students, because I see too many people enter PhD programs that don’t end up working out for them, and taking a year or so off can help bring focus. So an option is to take that pressure off yourself for now, and to not apply to PhD programs just yet.
You might also benefit by taking some action, going in a bit of a new direction. For example, you say you aren’t taking any women’s studies classes this term. What are you taking? If you don’t like your sociology major at all, you can switch to pure women’s studies. If you’re really missing women’s studies, you could consider doing something related to it as volunteer work or similar. You can drop the class you hate the most, to free up time and psychological space (you really can. And one W won’t hurt you re: grad school admissions.) You can speak to a counselor in student health services, because how you feel right now is quite common in college students, and they can help you figure out how to deal with your feelings. And talk to a professor in women’s studies at your university. Find out what is actually needed to get into a program in your field, because you may not be missing as much as you think you are.
And actually yes, I did feel this way toward the end of my undergrad. What I did to combat it was to change my major slightly, to something that gave me space to take more of the classes I liked, and which also shortened my time to graduation slightly, so I got done more quickly. I also started to very carefully research any of the gen ed/core type classes I had left to take, so that I took the better professors/more interesting classes.