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[Vector]

Let me put it this way: I am so fucking overqualified for most of my courses, other than the ones in mathematics (that would be why I majored in math), that it makes me want to cry.  I can't stand my fellow students, and the math courses just get more and more soul-destroying, difficult, and painful every year.  I'm finishing my BA, to be sure, but after that I want to spend a year or two just doing something else.  I want time to recharge the part of me that gets any pleasure or interest from supervised studying whatsoever, because no, right now I'm just not getting anything out of this.  I'm wondering why I'm spending thousands of dollars a year to have a brilliant professor repackage a textbook.

In other words, I want to spend a while self-educating and working creatively, and then I'll get right back to this when I'm good and ready.  I'm not giving up, but the current state of things is almost physically painful.

[Max White]

Anything in mind for this soul searching?
Go backpacking through South Africa? Get a job as a landscaper? Lock yourself away in a room with mechanical components until you have managed to build a self replicating humanoid robot?

[Reudh]

Although my life is looking up, better than it has in the past most definitely (beginning uni, maybe starting a job, maybe asking a girl out), I keep getting this horrible wave of loneliness.

I'm worried that my old foe, "Mr. Depression" is trying to come back.

[Solifuge]

Okay Vector, I was worried that you were talking dropping out right now, this semester, and go jobbing for an indefinite amount of time... and a big red flag went up. Absconding with your BA to go gather workplace and world experience is, on the contrary, a really good idea which I'd totally endorse.

For now, good luck keeping at it. The light at the end of the tunnel is getting close!

EDIT: Reudh, pursue/embrace those good things in your life as wholly as you can, and you can both combat that loneliness, and hopefully keep that Depression bastard from loitering around.

[Vector]

Anything in mind for this soul searching?
Go backpacking through South Africa? Get a job as a landscaper? Lock yourself away in a room with mechanical components until you have managed to build a self replicating humanoid robot?

All of it.  Seriously.  Read all of Shakespeare, write a novel, start a webcomic, make a video game, grow a garden, go on hikes, do martial arts, travel around, read more critical theory, spend weekends in the library, do the Tough Mudder challenge, teach myself rudimentary engineering and car repair... I want to learn so badly, but I feel like I'm dying internally the more time I spend here.  I'm sick of the grades and I'm sick of the project specs that never permit you to just sit there and tinker the fuck out of a single thing.  If I had weekends and evenings that were just free to me, so that I could have things be over and then go home and read until I was tired, I'd be so much happier.  As-is, though, it feels like I'm living every single second on the clock.  I used to do creative writing 7 hours a day, or study languages, or make rudimentary games, or do loads of cartooning, or play violin.  Now, it feels like I no longer have time to do those things, just because of the pressure.

I don't naturally learn this way, at all.  Never have, never will.  I'm the sort of person who does the vast majority of my learning by coming up with a hypothesis and then studying obsessively in that area for a few months, letting it go, coming back to the problem again after it's had time to rot a while.  My professors all know that I'm really bright, but my grades tend to fluctuate a lot... *sigh*

I'm bursting with creative energy, and it'll be something like 5 years that I've been unable to really exercise it by the time I graduate.  It's really bumming me out.

[Max White]

Well, if you want to program a game you can always find us in the programming thread.
Could always get you started on c#, Java or c++, or pretty much anything with a bit more grunt than Python. No grades, no stress, just tutorials and tec support.

Also, not sure if you know how to cook yet, but might want to take it up. Great little hobby, gets you some what healthy too.
Anyway, best of luck!

[Vector]

Yeah, I can cook.  It's too risky to experiment with cooking right now (because if I make something really terrible, my brain still has to operate as so much of a precision instrument that it just can't tolerate bad/not enough food), but I'm frankly quite good at it nowadays.

I'll probably be programming a lot more when I graduate.  Just now, I don't have the energy for any major personal projects.

[Bauglir]

I do seem to recall Vector knowing how to cook spectacular things (things involving curry are always spectacular). Hobbies are good, though, but that's not news to you. Sounds like the problem is the inability to actually pursue one in the first place, because of class-related stress.

EDIT: Ninja'd, oh well

[palsch]

Vector, I'm not in a position to really offer advice, so take these as more random thoughts from being in a not dissimilar position. For the record, I dropped out of a PhD position for entirely different reasons, but had to deal with similar stresses at times.

My own antidotevaccine to burnout was walking at least an hour a day in pleasant surroundings. In York I had a route along the river between my house (near Millennium bridge for those who know the city) and the city centre that I would take at least once a day each way, maybe with a stop at one of my favourite book stores or food shops in the middle but sometimes just to walk. When I spent a week in Berkeley at the National Lab I made a point of walking down the hill and through campus into town on the flimsiest excuse. Once for a cup of coffee, once to time how long it would take me to get to the BART the next day. Just walking with some music and letting my mind wander would let me get back to work in a far more relaxed mind frame. Even pulling all nighters against deadlines (in both locations) I'd blow off a half hour, grab a drink and find the most beautiful spot I could to enjoy it.

It sounds incredibly clichéd, and when you are up against a huge pile of work it's hard to let go of the guilt that is the defining characteristic of any good student, but it's worth trying to.

And even if it doesn't help reduce the stress, I always tried to take that kind of walk when making major decisions like this. You can rant at yourself in your own head and let the conversation play out in full. I have most of my best ideas and clearest thoughts while walking somewhere with a lot of green. Or maybe they just seem that way because I never write them down or return to them. Meh.

[NobodyPro]

Came back from a camp full of ambition and resolutions. Mum switched my bed while I was gone because mine was bigger than theirs. There's about half a foot less space at the bottom of the bed than there was.
If this doesn't sound too bad to you then you are not 6'4" tall!
I apparently have to sleep diagonally now. >_<

[Reudh]

6'4"


My dad's 6'6". I'm the oddly short one of the family, at 5'11".

[NobodyPro]

To clarify: When I lie down straight, with my head touching the wall, my feet are hanging in the air. My feet are size 15< men's (I don't know the exact size, I just know that 15 us too small). That's alot of foot being exposed to mosquitos.

[Vector]

I'm... 5'3" and look even smaller (about 4'11", apparently, though I don't know why).  Believe it.


Basically, here's what I know about myself and education, and please forgive me for momentarily dropping my self-deprecating veneer.

I am exceptionally bright.  I am far brighter than most of the students that attend this university, and that brightness has been compounded with a large amount of education, both solitary and formal.  However, my general intelligence is hobbled--or strengthened, depending on your point of view--with a total inability to study lots of things simultaneously, or keep myself working on something in which I have lost interest all day every day.  The obsessive window is long, but it's not infinite.

The other thing is that I have a very low tolerance for repetition of textbook material in class, and tend to get angry about needing to interact with other people on their whimsy at any and every hour (read: most of the time, I'd gladly go a week or so without talking to anyone).  Furthermore, I tend to do my best to downplay my own intelligence, because it seems to be rather off-putting; this also exhausts me, and generally makes me feel shitty about myself because I'm spending so much energy trying not to show other people up in some locales, and trying not to look like an idiot in a small handful of others (the ones in which I actually need to be doing something other than phoning it in to succeed).  I get deception-whiplash.

And so, all of this is a long way of saying that I learn best on my own, that college generally has been a bloody terrible way to meet peers or feel that I'm really learning the things I want to know (though what I have learned is how to ask good questions and use an academic library, which very well might have been worth all that money; I don't know why my high school teachers thought college was going to fix my feelings of loneliness, I really don't), and that right now I'd give one of my toes to have a solid 8-hour chunk every day in which I can do what I want and sit around in my PJs coding or writing or doing whatever without needing to hand it off to someone else, and without a deadline on every single goddamned thing I do in my day.  I don't care if I have to pretend out my ass the rest of the day, and I don't care that much if my coworkers and boss are stupid assholes, because hell--I'm young, I'm over-educated, and I've spent my entire life putting up with other people, being bullied, and doing my damndest to be invisible.  What I'm craving is a venue in which I don't have to do it 24/7, and in which no one's pretending that I'm being intellectually stimulated.

I'm tired of lying all the time.  I'll take lying a third of the time with the prospect of maybe, someday, never having to lie again far more gladly.

[Solifuge]

It's just above freezing outside, and my heat has been on the fritz lately. I don't know if my heater is finally dead and I'm only getting radiant heat from the apartments above/below me, or if it's just that cold out... but its somewhere below 50 F (10 C) inside, and dropping.

I'm wearing layers, a wool-lined hoodie, and a big fleece throw, and I'm still getting numb in the extremities. Time to make some tea, methinks.

[Pnx]

<snip>

I get the feeling you've been wanting to let that out for a long time.