Graduation Shmaduation

About to graduate in December - I do not know if that is something that should bring me joy.

I am currently going through something that can be best defined as a Graduate's Nightmare.
Okay, so I am looking for grad schools, and yeah if you thought undergraduate applications were tough, well wait 4 years and then you see that all the crap about college being the "real world" meant nothing until you got to grad school. Now undergraduate college seems like heaven when I even look at the grad school admission pages. They expect you to have grown up by now, yes you are supposed to know exactly what you want, and to have exact credentials to match your choice. Well, that seems reasonable enough. But what about people like me, who think that every decision they make is going to blow up in their faces and bury them alive.

A major dilemma I face is deciding between productivity and interest. When I read through the various faculty research pages, there are these certain areas of research that stand out and glare at me like the lights at Vegas at midnight. I go like "that is so cool, that is so what I want to do for next 5 years". They are singular, novel and have never been done before. And that, is the very problem. I find myself disheartened by the fact that I will essentially be taking a risk by throwing myself into such a specialized field of study, and that I will not have a lot of options once I complete grad school. I find the scientist in me die a little every time I reject a program on these grounds. I look for a program that could help me later on, that could help me find jobs, buy a house and look after my parents when they are old and wrinkly.

Somehow, what I really want has been shoved into the deep crevasses of my subconscious, peeping out sporadically when I come across something that is supposed to stimulate the scientific spirit in me. I am so overwhelmed by figures of GRE scores, financial aid, stipends, course eligibilities, that I often find myself floundering around to re-evaluate the reason that motivated to get into all of this in the first place. Most days I don't know where to start, where to look and what to settle upon.

I guess this is one of the reasons that makes me feel like I am a disadvantage for being an international student in the U.S. I have no knowledge of the reputations of the universities here. Of course we all know the best ones, but that somehow applies mostly to undergraduate choices. For graduate programs, I learned after much research, I could not rely on my meager knowledge of college credentials.

So what do I do? I loathe researching college applications. I delay it, and delay it some more. Meanwhile my dad freaks out over how I need to shortlist my choices "BY THE END OF THIS MONTH!", and I just 'hmm' my way out of those awkward conversations with him.

Also I binge on fatty food. I know, that seems unrelated - but my corpulence index seems to be gaining momentum once again owing to the hypertension-clinical depression combo pummeling away on my head all day. There were these nice few weeks, when I had become conscious of all that stuffed into my mouth, and planned out my grocery lists and such. But of course, that fell through, as I got closer and closer to August

So, yeah I graduate in December. I so don't want to know what happens after that.





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