I have spent the past year in an MA program in rhetoric and professional communication (English without literature, basically). Throughout I have struggled with various learning, emotional, and organizational disabilities, which I have had basically since childhood but which have not prevented me from doing modestly well in school and college. I am now in my early 40s, however, and with my difficulties and resumé history, my employment prospects are drastically limited unless I earn some kind of advanced degree.
This past term, I had an unusually heavy and reading-oriented workload. I do not read efficiently or retain large amounts of information unless the process is slow and painstaking, and this term the material has been particularly frustrating and the experience stressful. Much writing is assigned to demonstrate one’s command of the material, which despite being a fast and accomplished writer, I am completing only slowly. I am behind schedule in all three classes I am enrolled in. I am disillusioned, out of coping strategies, drinking and sleeping more than usual, and less and less willing or able to keep up. And there is less than a month left in the term.
I am fairly confident I could address some of my problems with counseling and coaching (there is also a disability office at my university, who can help if a lot of official paperwork is filed). However, at this point I am anticipating that my GPA for spring term will be below 3.0, meaning I could not return to complete the degree (typically a 2-year process).
My question is as follows: Would it be wiser for me to withdraw before the end of the term with grades of “incomplete” in all 3 classes - which would have to be made up summer term, with most or all of my professors away? Or should I, for any reason, keep the pressure on and risk a <3.0 average, a total burnout, or both?
You need to talk with someone in the program. It is unlikely any of us here could offer good advice. You might check and see if you could get some kind of medical leave to give you more time to make up the incompletes.
That’s another very good idea. I’ve had a long and unproductive history with mental health professionals, or I would have considered it long ago.
I sometimes feel challenged on so many fronts that I think I may need residential therapy of some kind if I’m going to have a chance for a few decades of happy and productive adulthood. (Outside of a few very narrowly defined activities, I have for many years been most happy when I am least productive.)
It sounds as if you may be reluctant to deal with the disability office due to the paperwork burden. If this is the case, think of all the paperwork required to get into the program, not to mention this far through it. A little more, while annoying, is just a drop in the bucket and could end up helping you a great deal. Many disability offices do a very good job of helping students such as yourself, and might also be able to act as a liaison/advocate with your program. It is their reason for being, and you should not be shy about availing yourself of their services (after all, your tuition pays their salaries).
Best of luck with your studies. We hope to be calling you Master soon.
There is a middle way here; do you think you could pull your socks up if there were only two classes? Then you could take your incomplete in the third, and have only one to make up.
I think taking an incomplete in all three would be far superior to merely failing all of them.
Especially if you try again, and pass later. At your (our) age, I don’t think people would question as much withdrawing due to implied life circumstances.
Having been burned out in grad school myself, I recommend taking the incomplete. It won’t count toward your GPA, and you can always make up an excuse later about why you withdrew from the classes. (Assuming your future employer will even bother to ask…)
I would take one or more incompletes, then make them up as soon as possible.
In my experience, professors tend to be a bit more lenient with grad school students with respect to incompletes than with undergraduate students. The profs usually realize that the grad students have lots of other things going on in their lives, including jobs (especially for part-time students), family obligations, etc.
I took one incomplete in grad school, and took more than two years to make it up. (I was a part-time student.) I ended up with an A in the class…eventually.
In my experience, most schools won’t allow you to convert an incomplete to a withdrawal. If you don’t finish the incomplete within the allotted time (including any allowable extensions), you get whatever grade you would get assuming you had not completed the missing work. This could well be a failing grade, if you missed any exams or major assignments.
In undergrad, I got that nasty case of senior year depression and went from the Dean’s List to a .5 GPA. (I did not fail piano.) If I had had the sense the good lord gave a sweet potato I would have gone to the counseling office, gone to my advisor, and taken a medical withdrawal. Instead I didn’t say anything to anybody (which I realize was part of my sickness) and only graduated because once I did man up and go talk to my advisor he moved heaven and earth to get the department to bend the rules for me and take one of my high school AP classes as fulfilling a requirement (normally not allowed.) I only went and talked to him about five days before the end of the semester.
I do not recommend this course of action. Go to people and tell them you are having trouble - they want to help you.
Yeah. Too late to withdraw. After one term at ISU, an I becomes an automatic F.
I think the institution is somewhat “spoiled” by the average student’s excellent work ethic. We are a high-literacy, historically White Protestant agrarian society, where part of being a person of good character is to accept anything and everything life piles on you, without rancor or public bitching.
Mostly that culture makes for a very pleasant atmosphere and way of life - one of the reasons I came back here, where I grew up, after years in the northeast. However, when you have head games going on AND much of the work you’re doing is theoretical and affects nobody and nothing but your GPA, things ought to be different.
One reason I felt I had to leave Iowa to begin with was that I knew I was never cut out to be a White Protestant worker (despite having the requisite ancestry and skin color). I wasn’t sure there would be a place for me, or if there were, whether there would be forgiveness if I fell behind. I had trouble in school as a youngster, and mostly, there was no such forgiveness. Now, I hope, things have changed.
I am what you might call an “adult gifted child.” I’ve been doing reading - the kind I do best: internet based, with no note-taking and a personal compulsion to read - and many of my difficulties apply more to gifted/ADD children than to anything in any study about adults.
My special needs as a child were pretty much ignored - no one’s fault but the culture’s; it was the 1970s and 80s and only so much was known, and not all of that widely accepted - but in many ways I am in a childhood stage of development. I tolerate almost no frustration. I “flinch” constantly in daily life, expecting harsh or negative treatment from others. I have very little control over my energies, my efforts, or my self-talk.
I could go on, but this is self-pitying enough now. Just more fuel for the fire as to why I’m not interested in my schoolwork, or indeed, in work. (I have been supported, sometimes grudgingly, by my fairly well-to-do family, and until recently made a respectable return on an investment portfolio. Just my telling you this indicates to me that my self-respect is about shot. It’s one of my big secrets in life; I was brought up among people who believed that those who couldn’t work barely deserved to live. I have been waiting for my orders to the underclass for quite some time now.)
I am currently on leave from grad school, due mostly to time, burn-out, and family issues that dropped my GPA down to on-probation levels. I voluntarily pulled out (before being forced out) to allow me to collect myself and reapproach at a later date. Will I go back? Who knows, but at least I have the ability to decide on my own terms.
Your completed credits are in the bank, think of it as running a marathon with plenty of breaks and water tables. Everyone will still be there clapping just as hard when the stragglers cross the line.
