Sometimes I yell.

I have various ways of releasing pent-up emotion and stress.  Lately I've been yelling.

Not at people, or pets, other drivers, or really anything in particular.  It's not really even a yell per-say.  More of a guttural noise.  An expulsion of air from the diaphragm releasing a primal bellow.  

Some people like to cry to release pent-up emotion, especially when it is frustration.  I find exercise or excessive house cleaning is good for frustration.  (By the state of my home anyone could guess that I haven't been using the latter for releasing frustration).  I know that crying does release some good chemicals  into the brain, you can feel it when it happens.  A release and a slight cooling sensation.  I find the yelling (or grunting, as it may be more appropriately described) to have similar effect and much easier to call forth.  

Tonight I topped off a healthy bout of yelling, with a long session of hand watering in the garden.  Not really necessary due to the soaker hoses we've installed, but pleasant and appropriately cathartic none the less.

TGINFW? Thank god it's not finals week!

A recent post from ScienceWoman has me relieved that I'm not dealing with finals right now while my focus is trying to be productive in the research arena.  It's interesting to hear the finals stress from the point of view of the professor.  I've often wondered about the effect this stress environment has on professors and students like.  Though I must admit that reading her blog was the first time I truly considered exam stress from a professors point of view.  I've heard professors describe stress dreams they have about still being a student and missing exams.  But the stress of being a professor sounds equally awful, if not worse.  Fear of being unprepared to give an exam to all those students must be so much worse than our fear of being unprepared to take the exam.  As students there is some small measure of anonymity when taking exams and being graded, but professors have none.  Some times I wonder why we chose this academic life?

Breakdown, meltdown, cracking up...

I had my first real stress induced breakdown of my graduate career this afternoon.  I made it through the first two terms without being reduced to a puddle of tears, but no more.  Yes, it is completely girlie to cry when you are stressed, but I am a girl - so bite me!

Since I first started school I've been working on my thesis proposal, and now that I'm facing my first grad-committee meeting (this thursday) I've been working even harder on perfecting it. Writing for long hours of the day and giving the transformations of the draft to my professor for editing (with the hopes of sending the proposal to committee members tomorrow morning.) Normally I love getting a draft back with lots of good comments and changes, I firmly believe that editing is what make writing great.  But today I received my latest draft by email with a suite of comments, and as I scrolled through them I realized it would take many hours to make these changes, many more hours than I would have to work on it tomorrow morning.  

Slowly the realization sunk in, I had to go back to work.  Normally this wouldn't bother me much, I work most days, but I had planned on spending today with my husband, going rock climbing and brewing a batch of beer.  I felt crushed, and I knew just how disappointed he would be and I lost it.  I started packing up my bag and the hot tears started rolling, frustration burned through me.  My husband didn't know how to help but offered lots of heartfelt but unhelpful advice, like refusing to make the changes and such.  Nice idea, but that just isn't how it works.  There should be a support group for spouses of graduate students.  I'm sure he was even more frustrated than I felt, being unable to do anything to help me.

Having now experienced this little meltdown, and subsequent mini-breakdowns this afternoon at my desk, I realize it was just another inevitable part of the graduate school process.  I should just be glad it didn't happen during my committee meeting.  

I'm reminded of stories one of my best friends tells me about her fellow vet-school students having breakdowns in the middle of lecture yelling at the professor and storming out.  I was shocked the first time she told me such a story and I wondered if they treated the students any different after suck a breakdown.  Her response was simply no, we all breakdown eventually and it's usually public and humiliating so we're all really supportive when it happens to a fellow vet-student.  

Totally unbelievable.  

Professional school (in her case) and graduate school (in my case) is so overwhelming at times that it is totally acceptable to have a disruptive public breakdown.  How does that make our social dynamics any different than a pre-school class?

It sounds absurd, I know, but I can't help but feel there is a little truth in it.

Maintaining balance

Students at every level struggle with balance.  Perhaps an even wiser statement would be all humans struggle with balance.  But for students it is always balancing school with other things in you life, family, friends, hobbies, work, sports.  It's nearly impossible to get it right all the time, and naturally other aspects of your life always pull on you the hardest when all of your attention needs to be focused on school.  I wish I could say that I have figured out a way to deal with it, but I probably use one of the worst tactics.  I tend to ignore phone calls and skip fun activities as deadlines approach.  I'd like to send out this note just before the end of term hits: 

"Dear family, friends, and loved ones,

For the next two weeks please refrain from any dramatic altercations, mental breakdowns, life altering revelations, time consuming favors, tragic accidents, and life changing decisions that need my in-put.  Thank you for your cooperation in this matter, communications will now cease until after my last final."

But I have a feeling it wouldn't go over too well.

Stress is in the air

Well, they started again last night.  Those damn stress dreams!  You know the ones, everyone has had them at one point in their college experience.  You overslept on the day of your final, you keep trying to get to the exam and one obstacle after another presents itself.  Or the old classic, it's the last day of the term and you find out that you were registered for a class that you forgot about and you are now going to fail because you haven't been attending, and it's too late to drop it from your transcript.  

I think the stress of all the students and professors must combine to form a giant stress cloud over the university and stress storms begin to hit people at random all over campus.  No one is immune, I been told by professors who have been teaching for a quarter century that they still have those dreams about missing exams and forgetting class.  A friend described the condition as being like post-traumatic-stress disorder, once your body has gone past it's limit of stress your mind plays out irrational scenarios  on it's own.  I really don't know anything about PTSD but I'd believe that attempting to function in this high stress environment for long periods would begin to effect your health.  

In fact, all this stress has helped me discover my end of term mantra; "Just two more weeks, just two more weeks."