Checking my email makes my heart race a little bit. 

I have constant headaches. 

I often feel like I’m going to throw up. 

I sleep A LOT, wake up feeling tired, I feel tired ALL the time. 

I force myself not to skip my classes (and sometimes I am unsuccessful) 

The only time I feel like myself is when I’m in the pool or when I’m drunk. 

I hate my life right now, and that makes me sad. 

I graduate in 10 weeks, and I really want to enjoy the last of graduate school career at UNC.  Some of my classmates are out RIGHT NOW and I’m ignoring their text messages because I wouldn’t be good company. 

Why do I feel like a pile of cold crap? 

Because I am coming up on thesis deadlines and all my committee can say is how bad my paper is. I send them a draft and they email me back my drafts covered in the 21^st century version of red ink. I dread opening my gmail because at any moment they could be emailing me to tell me what a horrid writer I am. 

The thing of it is, I am falling out of love with my thesis. And I agree with them, it sucks ass.  

Why? 

My paper has no voice.  It sounds like every other piece of academic drivel that I’ve read over the years. The more I sanitize my paper the more they like it, and the more I hate it. Writing for an academic audience sucks the life out of me and my writing.  Writing for an academic audience is like have a deflated sex doll.  Boring. Dry. Lame. 

And I am none of those things. 

Writing this paper is almost enough to turn me off from a PhD. (almost but not quite) 

Don’t use first person. Yuck. Use the passive voice. Yuck.  Look at the language and formating of these other 600 articles and copy that. YUCK!!!!

There is no room in academia for innovation. If you do anything that’s not like everyone else, you must be doing something wrong. It makes me sad.

Can’t I be an academic who blogs instead of writing articles for stinky old journals that no one reads? Blogs are fun, they are accessible, and they give you bits of knowledge in bite size pieces. 

I think that the only that makes me feel better about my thesis is the idea of cutting it up and blogging it.  (Btw, I will be blogging my paper soon) 

My committee thinks my paper lacks analysis. They want me to compare means, and do a billion cross tabs, and perhaps do some correlations. 

I think my paper lacks thought.  I want to report what’s happening in the world, say whether it is good or bad and help make the world a better place. I want to write about what I think.  

Apparently that is unacceptable in academia.  If you can’t prove your solution empirically then it doesn’t exist. 

Fine. 

I’ll just blog about it.  It’ll be more likely to get to the people who need to see it anyway. 

I don’t have all the answers, and regardless of what my committee thinks; the SPSS data output doesn’t have all the answers either. And honestly, my brain, while it can’t run a regression, it is capable of taking a problem and coming up with possible solutions. 

I’m afraid that academia has its head so far up its OWN ass that it can’t see that it’s irrelevant.  You heard me ACADEMIA IS IRREVALENT!! The real world doesn’t run on theories. The real world needs people who can SOLVE PROBLEMS.  

 My MPA has taught me how to solve problems, and I am complete at a loss at why I have to write this stupid paper, not like I’m writing for actual people who may be able to use my information to improve life, but for stupid academics. 

It is a useless exercise.  One day I will go back to school and I’ll get my PhD.  But I swear, I’ll never be the kind of academic that pumps out journal articles.  Oh, I’ll publish.  Every day. On my freaking blog. (or whatever medium we’ll be using then)