You Infected Me, Took Diamonds, I Took All Your Shit

Met with a person higher up on the food chain today to see what was to be done about the money issue. The department had magically concocted a plan to quickly sweep their error under the rug. How they decided to skirt the issue that they are screwing me on money:

I should drop a class. The most basic class in the department to be exact. That way, I'll get a tuition refund from the dropped class (hopefully 100% because it's past the deadline for that...but they sent an email so of course that should fix things *sarcasm*). The tuition refund in addition to the refund I received from my scholarship should be...well...less than I'm *supposed* to get but would be enough to get me through the semester. However, the other stipulation is that I'm supposed to audit the class.

Which is really just a fancy word for get up and go to class which starts at 9am (which requires a lot more effort than people thing especially when you work until midnight and have to get up two hours earlier than the class to organize things and take public transportation), do all of the work for the class, take all the tests, sit through the mind-numbing lectures because I learned all of this information in eighth grade...

And receive absolutely no credit for the course. So I get to do all of the work of a class I took nearly nine years ago (and passed with flying colors...) and get nothing to show for it. Other than of course, my money to live off of. What. A. Deal.

Remind me again why I thought graduate school was a good idea?

Besides that, I asked the person who dealt with my money issues today as casually as one can about withdrawing.  Started off real nice, saying that I have to do whatever I need to do for myself. But then it turned into a tirade on how "all graduate students feel that way at least three or four times a week" and even she herself "still felt like that."

I don't know why people would find that to be an acceptable way of living. I want to be happy. I deserve to be happy. I can't understand why these other students would find it completely acceptable to be miserable. Or why a professor would deem it okay to admit that life in academia doesn't even make her happy, once she got past the miserable stages of finishing a PhD.

One of the happiest periods in my life was the few months I was able to actually live with my fiance, just being a housewife.  As horrified as my mother would be if she read that, it's the truth. I know I can't be a housewife forever (he's planning on going to school and eventually starting a business), and I don't plan on it. I just want a job that lets me and him and our future children live happily and comfortably. And I truly don't believe that job exists in academia any longer, after having caught just a glimpse of the academic world.

I gotta say, while in undergrad, as many times as I chucked a textbook (oh real analysis, you hold a special place in my heart <3), no matter how many times I was frustrated to tears, however many occasions I got thirty lines into a proof and realized I made a completely idiotic basic algebra mistake...I never felt like I do now. I never ever thought of giving up on math, no matter what happened. It never felt hopeless like this coursework does. 

All I really need to do is find someone to sublease my apartment. Once I find that, I'm home-free because the apartment complex does this thing where once the subleaser signs the lease, I'm no longer responsible for anything with the apartment. The hard part of this though is that I'm already feeling that academic guilt. 

I feel like I'm a failure if I quit, even though I feel like my advisor set me up for failure. Even fellow classmates have commented on how they can't see why my advisor would place me in the graduate level classes I'm in. Others outside the situation say to ask the other students for help, but it doesn't actually help. They can tell me how they came to their conclusions, show me step by step, but if I don't know the vocabulary, can't read the texts because of that, can't figure out the grain size, etc, it's not really going to help. They all have either four or six years of experience looking at rocks and sediment and dirt that I don't have. All the experience I have is in proving theorems.

And from looking into this university's graduate mathematics classes...I actually took a good chunk of them as an undergraduate.  And loved them. They were required as undergraduate courses. Plus my undergraduate university was on quarters instead of semesters so I got through three of those graduate level courses in the time it takes for people to get through two here at this university I'm not attending.

This post turned into a major rant. To summarize: grad school turned out to be nothing like I'd anticipated it to be. I thought I would have more free reign, be able to pick and choose, wiggle room. I guess I didn't realize how spoiled I was with having free reign in choosing classes in undergrad. I had to complete my core requirements yes, but there were options. And to fulfill gen eds, I took whatever I wanted as long as it has the right label. For example...I had to take a religion class (yay private Catholic school). So I took business ethics. 

I want my life back.