mudlark

I heartily agree with this. I'm nearing the end of my PhD, and my husband is a high school graduate. We have a very happy marriage, and the fact that I have higher earning potential is not an issue. He has a steady job that he enjoys and it has given us a lot of stability as I go through school. The thought of breaking up with him because he can't get on my "career ladder" is... well, it would be awful, because we have such a good relationship. That said, there are lots of things in the original post that make it seem like this guy has a general pattern of not having his crap together and pulling his weight as an adult. Is it really about his level of education, or is it about his lack of follow-through in general? I feel like the education issue might be the straw that's breaking the camel's back here.

Like you, I'm a social person and have a very hard time working alone all the time. The shift from coursework to solo research was so hard for me that I considered dropping out. Now that I'm nearing completion, I'm glad I didn't! Things that have helped me: Using facebook to my advantage. I created a writing support group with friends on facebook where we check in with daily goals and cheer each other on. I'm going to be on it anyway--may as well make it work for me. Making work dates with friends. Even though we end up chatting a lot, I find that having another person around makes me much more motivated and productive. Volunteering. This may not be possible in your program, or at certain stages, but I spend a fair amount of time every week volunteering. It helps my mood more than anything else, and gets me out of my head. Good luck! You'll figure it out.

I planned to write one chapter (35-50 pages) per semester, and found that it was a very manageable pace.

Oh, these are great. Thank you!

Does anyone have some lighthearted blogs about grad school and academia to share? My faves are the fabulous gif blog wheninacademia.tumblr.com and the sadly-no-longer-updating academictimgunn.tumblr.com. I also just discovered a new one, englishgradstudentshaming.tumblr.com--it's like that dog shaming blog, but for English nerds. My dashboard could use some new material, though--suggestions?

If it makes you feel better, I won a CGS when I had no publications. I know lots of people who won SSHRCs without scholarly publications. The committee understands that some fields--like English--value solo-authored pubs that take more prep and production time. Really, it would be rare for an MA student to have published something so impressive that it would sway a SSHRC score. I've heard these exact same things (no pubs is common, the pubs that do show up on apps are rarely super impressive) from a full professor who has served on the adjudication committee at the national level multiple times. So don't stress!

I'm not sure how it works in the states, but in Canada SSHRC sends the money to your school and you get paid through their payroll system. Payment schedules will vary school by school... some monthly, some bi-monthly, etc. I get my SSHRC mixed in with my teaching income.

I don't think it will hurt your prospects if you have a course-based master's with a capstone project. That's a really common set-up, and it makes a lot of sense. In my field (lit) in Canada, there's a movement away from having MA students do a thesis. It's a whole extra year of your life, and you end up with a long document that's difficult to use for other purposes. It's too long to publish straight up, so you have to be careful about being able to carve it into smaller pieces. But if it's just a series of journal-chapter-length arguments, you're not really getting the added experience of writing a long, sustained argument. Your research skills, writing skills, and interests will likely change and grow a great deal by the time you start your PhD dissertation, so your MA thesis may end up being irrelevant to your ultimate goals. In my experience (again, in a different field and country, so grain of salt) the vast, vast majority of MA students do not write a thesis. Last year in my program only 4 out of 28 students opted to write one. Students who chose not to have been very successful with their PhD apps. You should check with a professor to find out what the norm is for your field, and whether an MA thesis is valued by admissions committees. Bottom line: if you can be smart about it in the ways suggested by TakeruK, it might be somewhat helpful to do an MA thesis, but not doing one will likely not hurt your chances. If you do end up applying to a program with a thesis option, make sure that funding is available for the time it will take you to write the thesis.

This really reads like you're a junior undergrad. If that's the case, go to your instructor's office hours and talk to him/her about the essay. Also check into any writing center services offered at your campus, as they'll be more willing to sit down and go over the specific grammar issues in your intro. People on the internet don't know what level of course you're taking, what the assignment was, or what you've been focusing on in class. They won't be able to help you like someone who knows the situation will. If you're a grad student, you desperately need to go and do a lit review of what's already been written on Huck Finn and race (an insane amount, I'm betting) and try to find a more specific corner of the argument to tackle, along with spending a lot of time in the library learning the historical context so that you can talk about something more specific than "blacks and whites in the South". Either way, you need to cut back on your plot summary and build your intro around your argument. This isn't the end of the world if you're a first or second year undergraduate student, but it's a fairly big problem if you're anything else.

If you look at the fine print, many awards administered by universities say that you can't hold them AND a "major award" at the same time. I've usually seen "major award" defined as anything over $13,000. This happened to someone in my department, and here's what happened (best as I can remember). Short version: they yank the fellowship (possibly retroactively) and pay you a SSHRC retroactive to an appropriate start date (May or Sept 2012, for this year's competition). She didn't lose a year of SSHRC, but they retroactively yanked the fellowship money she had already received. In most cases SSHRC minus fellowship would leave you with leftover money, and you'd get a nice one-time payment to catch you up to what you would have received if you'd been getting SSHRC all year instead of the fellowship. Her fellowship was actually worth more than the SSHRC, though, so she was in a weird position where the university actually wanted money back from her. Happily, the department stepped in and covered over the gap with internal funding. For those still waiting--you'll see most of the movement earlier than next February, I promise! I won a couple of years ago and was bumped from a small to a big award sometime in June or July. Fingers crossed that you get some news soon.

You are not special. I don't mean that in a flippant way. It's really the most useful piece of advice I know. Worried that everyone is juding you behind your back? They're not. Because they don't care all that much about you because you're not special. Faced with crippling anxiety about whether or not your planned project is absolutely perfect? Stop worrying and get to work. You're not going to come up with a field-changer in your first year. You're not special. Still have some bad work habits that you secretly think are part of your creative genius? They're not, because you're not Keats, you're just a grad student. Suck it up and fix them. Again, you're not special. I guess I could phrase it as "Work hard and keep your head down", but it doesn't have the same ring.

Yes, I think it is. I know at least three students in my program who own their own place (including myself) and we're all in long-term relationships. Both of the other students have husbands in law school, though, and my husband makes less than my scholarship at his job, so it's not necessarily about having a second person to bankroll the project.

I love my supervisor. He's a perfect match for my working style, and with him as my supervisor I'm producing better work on a better timeline than I ever have before. I love my committee members. They are super smart, super supportive, and just interesting human beings. I love, love, LOVE conferences--flying to interesting cities to listen to other people geek out about my little corner of the humanities? Heaven! I love my library, and my grad student borrowing privileges. I love the material that I work on, and am very grateful to have all this time to spend with *my* authors. I love teaching. I love commanding a room. I love passing on the texts and ideas that changed my life when I was young. I love first year students. I love their curiosity, and their ability to improve. I love that they still seem to think I'm some kind of authority figure. I've been through some very dark patches, and considered dropping out. But I kept my head down and worked my ass off, and came through all the funks in better shape than before. There are things that I don't love (grad student drama, battling egos, endless bitching) but the love column wins easily.

I'm two years into my PhD and hoping to be pregnant by the end of the year. We'll start trying to conceive once I pass my candidacy exams at the end of this term. I wanted to hit that milestone partially in the hopes that clarifying my project through the exam prep process will up my odds of completing my PhD, and partially because I wanted to establish a good relationship with my supervisor before breaking the news. It's not that I expect him to be unsupportive, just that I want him thinking "Having a kid is hard, but mudlark NAILED her exams, so I'm sure she'll handle it", rather than "I don't really know this mudlark person... we'll see if she comes back from leave." I've had a lot of heartening conversations with women who had kids during their PhDs and pulled it off. Hopefully I can be passing along similarly optimistic advice in a few years!

Long distance relationships are the worst! I did a year apart from my then-boyfriend now-husband, and it was awful. I also watched last year as every. single. long distance relationship involving someone in my cohort ended. Like, six or seven of them. I have no helpful advice, except for hang in there and try to end the distance as soon as possible!