I’m turning 23 in exactly one week. Every year around this time, I like to look back on what I accomplished.

Most years, I can point to a bunch of awards, accomplishments, research, musical pieces, etc. When turning 22, I was still in shock over my admissions results, but willing to spin the wheel one more time. I remember being rather miffed that I was doing work that the University of Pennsylvania could take partial credit for, since that university wouldn’t accept me in admissions, wouldn’t let me study what I wanted, wouldn’t provide me training under faculty who I wished to study under… but seemed content to have me do their research for them. I had to travel there at the time too, which wasn’t fun. I remember wanting to complete my “Let’s Compose!” initiative, which I eventually just reduced to the “Ecossaise” IRC client. I wanted to finish my research on the divisor function and explore the connections between the divisor function and the Riemann hypothesis via Robin’s Theorem (not that I anticipated anything coming out of that particular theorem); this was before I fully adopted the view that the society that doesn’t let me do my math research in peace doesn’t deserve the advancements anyway. I also got to look back on graduating first in my class, winning the CS award, being inducted into honor societies, tutoring, playing in my first concert, composing my best pieces, etc. It was productive. I was glad at where I was, if not where I was headed.

But that was last year.

This year? An MS, 3 unpublished papers, one workshop presentation, one website for a client, one website for myself, 3 musical pieces, and 7 pieces of art or poetry, all of them having to do with the loss of freedom or the necessity of suffering. Obviously, one can tell what my creative outlet… and my life… has become. It’s a lot of art, but otherwise a fairly unproductive year. And not because I’ve been working on the art; my research usually comes first. I’ve simply been stalled most of the year, usually by circumstances outside of my control.

It’s been a bad year, and what small success I’ve had has been in spite of my school, rather than because of it. One paper and the MS were for Temple; the other things were completely independent. The MS was such a trifle that I barely count it an accomplishment; after what I did at Monmouth, a simple 12 graduate credit per semester load is a laughably small amount of work in comparison (so long as the classes are right; I do more work in the one class I’m in now than I did in the four I was in last Spring). Our actual publications are being held up more or less indefinitely by the people whose only function on the team seems to be to take credit for the work, which invariably falls flat on my head, as it has in every group I’ve ever participated in. I haven’t received emails from one of these people (the one with the classifier) for over a month. And people wonder why I hate group work. I don’t mind it if everyone pulls their own weight, but group work almost always translates to “do the entire group’s work”!

This school has so thoroughly screwed up the last year of my life that I have no words to describe it. I’m most likely going to defend my dissertation before we publish anything there. It would be laughable… if it were happening to someone who didn’t care. It’s all just a charade. Graduate school is meaningless.

I applied for a Ph. D. so I could receive scientific training. I’ll graduate rather soon, because now that I have a topic, I intend to write this dissertation so fast that I’ll break records (the only thing to do when your school is such a mess is to leave ASAP!), but what then? I’m certainly not going for another Ph. D. to make up for it. I’m not going anywhere near academia ever again if I can help it. I am certainly not going to subject myself to postdoctoral work, which would just be a continuation of what’s happening here. I probably will still lack the training I require to do serious research, unless what’s in demand is basically just paper-writing. So that probably leaves software development.

Which I could have done with an MS, in which case I’d have just graduated from Columbia (or probably any one of the ivies, as I had no trouble gaining admission to Columbia’s MS program and they’re as competitive as any of them. I just couldn’t get into the Ph. D. programs at any of them).

So this year was a complete waste, except for the fact that I received a meaningless piece of paper. Auspicious. I bet that’s what the rest of my life is going to be like, too. Collecting meaningless pieces of paper. Lots of people would like that.

But that’s a pathetic life.