So About That Whole Grad School Thing

Today I just had my beautiful 5-year plan for a Ph.D. destroyed. Thank you budget cuts. When I was accepted here last April I was taken on using auxiliary funds and not guaranteed future support. The idea then was that they wanted me to come to Wisconsin and that getting guaranteed funding for future years would be more or less simple after having been in the system for a year. What my advisers, to no fault of their own, did not count on was another exceptionally strong applicant class coinciding with budget cuts on both the state and national level. Now there are barely enough assistantships available to give to the students who have guaranteed support and still have a few left to give to best applicants. Fitting neither of those categories, to no fault of my own, I get left out to dry. No funding for next year, meaning I have to leave.

The current plan which I just discussed with my advisers is to bust my ass this term in order to prove to the geophysics group here that I am worthy of giving emergency funding to so that I can get paid over the summer and next fall while I finish my masters. That means in addition to taking my first engineering class ever this term, I have to do a majority of the preliminary research for a publishable paper and write a rough draft by the end of April. I don't think my bed will be getting much attention from me for the next couple of months.

So this summer will be spent writing and doing analysis for a paper, and then the fall will be spent turning that paper into a masters thesis. If I'm lucky, I'll actually be getting paid to do that, otherwise I'm working for free and most likely mooching rent money off my parents. Then I'll graduate in December. After that I have no clue what'll happen, to be honest I'll probably go get a job doing something in Colorado ski country in the winter, and the summer... gees, I did not plan on having to figure this stuff out so soon. Maybe apply for Ph.D. programs... who knows.

Time will tell whether or not this ends up being a good thing. There's a part of me that's looking forward to trying something random for a while and being out of school and there's another part that is pretty pissed I'm being shown the door here. But that's the future, right now I need to focus on actually getting enough done by December that I can actually graduate, because the only thing worse than leaving here after just 18 months is leaving here after 18 months without a degree.