This has been a very bad week.
It started out bright and early Monday morning with a rejection call for a summer job I interviewed for on Friday. I spent the rest of the day reeling...I had thought the interview went well, and I felt very well qualified, maybe even over-qualified. So it was humbling to say the least to get turned down. And it reminded me that in just two short months I may be jobless... that scares me more than I care to admit. The fear of failure is almost crippling. I have a degree that is almost worthless, and I'm headed into a bad job market to make things even worse.
But I was reminded of my need to trust God for my future. I had calmed down a little by last night, ready to take on a new day.
Today was probably worse. Well, it wasn't exactly worse until about 30 minutes ago.
It started out when I realized I needed to schedule my defense ASAP because the grad school needs to know two weeks in advance when I'm going to defend and the date for final turn-in of my thesis is two and a half weeks from now. Complicating matters is the fact that my advisor has medical issues and has not been in the office or responding to emails for a week now. So I called him to try to figure some things out, and he was clearly not doing well... and so the conversation didn't go very long and I didn't really find anything out - he just told me to talk to the dept chair.
So I scheduled the defense. I even called him back but he wasn't able to talk to me, so I wasn't able to ask him if the defense date worked for him. I just had to go by his class schedule and hope for the best. So I thought it was all figured out.
Wrong.
I just got an email from him saying he's going to be in Seattle that day for a doctor appointment.
I don't even know what to do now. I desperately want him to be on my committee - he is the only one who has even seen my thesis before, and I'm terrified of what will happen to my grade if suddenly someone else is my chair in the bottom of the 9th inning.
And that is added to the pressure I feel over the thesis in general. So much is riding on it, and I pretty much know it's going to get me a mediocre grade, and I want so badly for that not to be the case. I don't think people at school (professors or students) know how much doing well here means to me. My future hinges on my grade on this thesis, and it's just too much pressure. As I look to my future, I see retail, or waitressing, or something equally terrible. That scares me, because I have put so much time and effort into an education (six years now) and it might amount to a pile of nothing. I want a PhD in history so badly, but I don't even let people know how much that would mean to me, because I'm terrified I'm not good enough.
Failure looms, and I don't know how to deal with it. Everyone around me finds success, and I don't have the personality or the skills or the intelligence to find success. I'm far from home, and in two months I am going to have to find a job without the safety net of family, friends, and acquaintances...without connections. I'm scared.
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