signalnoise

Perhaps the hardest part of being a graduate student is the constant *negative* feedback. It's obviously the only way you get better, but bit by bit - it chips at you. What makes it so hard is that it's *really* hard to disassociate yourself from your work. It's *your* interest, *your* idea, and *your* time (hours upon hours, until those become weeks upon weeks) that are poured into it. In grad school, you trade away money, time, self-respect and what you're left with is your work: a bunch of obtuse prose and some charts. And when someone craps on it, even in an attempt to help you, that's a goddamn hard thing to take - I don't care who you are.

In sum, E and I are "fighting" this week. After not reading much of anything all year long, E got back to me on a chapter. And he had plenty of good feedback about being more precise in my language (not in my mechanism I might add, just in the structure of my introductory comments). Which is fine, and useful. But as part of these comments, he dropped some real nuggets like "I shouldn't have to be telling you this at this point."

Ouch.

I went back and looked at the prose... and it *is* clunky at times. Fair enough, I'm big enough to admit that. But it's not like an abomination on a plate. I'm not quite sure what to make of it. Sometimes he's just a real asshole when he gives comments, like he thinks he's being clever. [E has a bit of a reputation as being arrogant. I wonder sometimes if his "friendly facade" isn't something he's worked really hard to develop over time, as a response to a lifetime of being kind of a dick at times. And that maybe that mask slips a bit in the "heat of the moment' of writing up comments.] I also think there are times when he believes that being a pain in the ass is the correct way to advise: that by being cruel, he's "cracking the whip" and motivating me.

It's obviously frustrating. It's not just criticism, that comes with the territory and I take it well I think, usually. It is rough that he was so hard on my writing, which used to be a strength of mine, but I guess I suck at in terms of technical writing. Which is fine or whatever. What *really* burned is that there was just an implied tone to the whole thing that I hadn't been working hard. And that sucked. It sucked because I in fact worked my ass on those chapters: the network simulations, the data matching, the hazard models, and the fixed effect models were all shit I had to learn on my own pretty much. Even the data sets, built from my own simulations and other sources, took weeks to put together and clean. Plus, I edited that shit *at least* twice. On top of this, I've spent the last 15 weeks or so doing work for E, building on data sets, learning some stats techniques, and reading articles. So part of me was really just kind of like "Fuck you, I poured goddamn sweat and tears into that thing!"

Even beyond that implication, this assertion that the work I had done was still so subpar, despite all the effort I had poured into it, just felt like a sort of out-of-the-blue, total fucking sideswipe. Frighteningly, tt felt a bit like this was the end, like I had professional peaked and it was Shitty State U from here on out. Part of what made it so... personal was that, like a sucker, I was *proud* of those chapters. I didn't think they were perfect, but I think they were some of the better stuff I had done: solidly structured, theoretically interesting, and methodologically rigorous - or so I believed eh? Basically, it *felt* like "real academics."

I'm mostly recovered now. I went through a phase of dejection, then anger, and now I'm kind of to "eh." It is what it is. I'll take the comments, toss out the snark. Clear up the language, stiffen up the structure, fill in a few gaps in the argumentation. It's what has to be done, it will make it better, and make me tougher. But, in the back of my mind, I'm building a file of things I don't want to do some day, when I'm overseeing a thesis/dissertation/whatever. That list just got a bit longer.