<p>Thank you very much for your kind replies.</p>
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<p>I wish so much that I could as well, but I had difficulty finding time even over spring break. </p>
<p>In fact, I was so desperate for an actual break over my spring break that I postponed some of the work so that I could actually spend some time with friends and family. This was an extremely bad decision, and its effects are now cascading out of control. Because of this critical error, my grades in several courses are going to suffer quite a bit. (For the first time ever, I have not been able to complete work on time, work that counts for a large portion of the grade.)</p>
<p>In a sense, everything that could have went wrong with this transfer process has went wrong–although I was initially doing poorly socially but well academically, this mistake has changed this status: I’m now doing poorly both socially and academically. I’m not so sure it’s not in my best interest to attempt this anew next semester in the company of good friends.</p>
<p>There’s a little more to this than I’ve written here. In all honesty, about a year ago I became obsessed with academic perfection. I wanted to go to a prestigious undergraduate school and I wanted to go to a prestigious graduate school. I transferred here because it was a great school and it offered what I wanted in terms of academics, but the whole goal, to be utterly honest, was to make it into a place like Princeton for graduate school. I’ve been placing immense pressure on myself to realize this goal ever since it materialized about a year ago, and to me my current “breakdown” represents the naivete of this goal, and I see taking the rest of the semester off as an opportunity to significantly reevaluate my goals.</p>
<p>I gave up a lot–all my friendships, for instance–to come here and pursue this dream of going to Princeton or Harvard for mathematics graduate school, but I’m understanding now more than ever how silly this dream really is, and now that the dream is deflating so are my reasons for being here instead of at my old school with friends.</p>
<p>You make a very good point about the summer research position; this is something I’ll need to look into.</p>