Ranting and Okenshield's Raving

(I want to put out the standard disclaimer towards anyone out there that may read this and be concerned about my mental health: I'm fine, just disgruntled about various idiocies, mostly my own.)

You would think that a semester in which I helped out in writing my first grant and got my first journal article accepted (in addition to being published in a humor anthology coming to a B&N bargain bin near you--LOL!) would be cause for me to be "excited" about my progress as a graduate student and human being in general. Think again!

Since I am assisting in writing grants and such, a perceptive reader might infer that the only way I actually receive money to buy takeout Chinese and large coffees is through being a teaching assistant. But of course, most of you knew that already--this is the dumb shit I've been doing the last year plus, without much eventfulness, aside from the fact that I wasn't entirely terrible at it.

Unfortunately for me, in the less than two months of the current school year, teaching (or teacher-assisting) has gone from something I have to do to something I despise exponentially more than Will Ferrell, Willie Randolph, and dance parties combined. Why? Well, as luck would have it, I was assigned (by default) to a first-semester graduate course of roughly 40 students. Now I had taken the course before but as it was "under transition," I became vastly underqualified to be the TA for it. Meaning all the material is completely different (i.e., stuff that I had barely learned well) and the professor had to put everything for the course together from scratch. Which basically means, that I had to put a shitload together from scratch. So in addition to grading all the homework, holding office hours, and handling all the stupid e-mails, I have to write up all the solutions and do all the homework in half the time that students did. And since the course's textbook has no solution manual, and is generally a worthless collection of paper, I am essentially taking this dumbass course as a TA for no credit, and am subject to much embarrassment during office hours.

So now roughly 90% of my time is taken up by something which I get no credit for (besides the measly pay and the hatred of students) and which has nothing to do with getting me the hell out of grad school. And the reason why I couldn't instead be spending roughly 10 minutes a week as a TA and earning the semi-appreciation of annoying undergrads? Because some stupid rule says that people with bachelor's degrees must take the class that is killing me--even know-it-all students who bug me over every last point deduction on HWs and who come to office hours to nitpick stupid shit rather than out of confusion.

And I just can't help getting beyond salty upon realizing that people who finished as undergrads one, two, three, hell even four years after I did will be finish a PhD before I ever do. I can't even make the excuse that I worked before going back to school, all I have is wasting two years realizing how horribly inadequate my undergraduate education was and how much harder I should have worked before I became a grad student. But it's all good, really. At least I'm not making six figures somewhere or something in some awful place like NYC.