With half of all doctoral students leaving graduate school without finishing, something significant and overwhelming must be happening for at least some of them during the process of obtaining that degree. Mental illness is often offered as the standard rationale to explain why some graduate students burn out. Some research has suggested a link between intelligence and conditions such as bipolar disorder, leading some observers to believe many graduate students struggle with mental-health problems that predispose them to burning out.
.. Ph.D. programs are extremely lonely and based on a culture of critique rather than support in which professors and peers constantly look for weaknesses in the doctoral student’s arguments, she said.
.. “You become overly fixated on what your professors think of you,” she said. “Paranoia is quite rampant in Ph.D. programs because Ph.D. students can get so isolated and so fixated on whether or not the people in authority [committee members] approve of what they’re doing since they have total authority to grant the degree.”
.. Wilson’s recollections are reflective of a widespread problem at her university and graduate programs across the country: a lack of communication between faculty and students. “Very rarely is the faculty motive … malicious,” she said. Faculty members are often “very busy and they don’t communicate the full reason for some of the things that they do, so it is only natural that a student makes certain assumptions based on what they have been able to observe.”
.. An overwhelming number complained about a lack of quality mentoring and support from faculty. The study also noted that doctoral students believed mentoring needs to begin earlier, be more systematic, and be based on a multiple-mentor model.
.. students describe the doctoral process as more “political” than intellectual in nature. There are “lots of issues of power and powerlessness that pervade the graduate experience,” Kerlin said, which may induce extreme distress for students who feels powerless.
.. found that 43 percent of all study participants reported experiencing more stress than they could handle, with Ph.D. students expressing the greatest amounts of stress. Of the students polled, more than half listed stress or burnout as a major concern, about a quarter cited feeling like an outsider, and nearly a third listed their relationships with professors. Only 6 percent of graduate students said they felt they could frequently turn to their mentors and advisors for assistance during stressful times.
.. In 2014, well over a third of doctorate recipients reported no firm employment upon graduation.
Richard Rohr: Remain in Me
What is his or her real and honest motivation? “Who” is doing the seeing? Is it the “cut-off branch,” the egoic self, trying to do the seeing? Is it a person needing to be right, or is it a person who wants to love? There is a very different kind of seeing from a branch that has remained lovingly and consciously connected to its Source (God, Jesus, our Higher Power). When Jesus spoke of a “cut-off branch,” he meant a person who can only see from its small position of “me” and what meets “my” needs. It seems our society is largely populated by such cut-off branches, while a commitment to the common and real good has become a rarity.
.. This primal communion immediately communicates a spaciousness, a joy, and a quiet contentment. It is not anxious, because the essential gap between me and the world has already been overcome. I am at home and do not need to prove myself to anybody, nor do I need to be “right,” nor do you have to agree with me.
The Gray Swan Theory of Trump
If this theory is right, then in the fall campaign Trump would benefit more from economic jitters — stock market hiccups, a spike in gas prices — than he would from a sudden recession. He would benefit more from another spate of Islamic State beheadings than he would from a terrorist attack that required a major military response, and more from a continuing sense of immigration-driven instability in Europe than from, say, a real confrontation with Vladimir Putin over the Baltics.
.. He would want to campaign amid a persistent mood of instability, anxiety and dislocation, but one that didn’t make people so anxious that they started worrying about all the obvious ways that he might make things worse.
Trump Taps Into the Anxiety of American White Males
Mrs. Clinton wins majorities of groups that have seen their freedoms and share of the nation’s resources grow in recent decades — women, African-Americans, Hispanics.
.. Mr. Trump wins majorities of groups that have experienced a relative decline — whites and men.
.. Yet there is some evidence that a sizable number of white men see the push toward diversity, along with the larger changes it telegraphs, as less about joining and more about replacement, and a country that is less hospitable to them.
.. “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
.. And when it comes to the focus of their government, a majority of Trump supporters believed that the needs of African-Americans and other minorities commandeered too much attention