Our hero tirelessly presses onward until she stops for a minute and thinks "why am I doing this?"

I have reached the "Why am I doing this?" moment of grad school. This is for a few reasons.

First, my program is highly theoretical and conceptual, and this conflicts with my rational, job-oriented mind. I know that I need skills in order to find a job in this profession (by this profession, I mean HCI, UX, technical writing, etc). But since the program is so theoretical and broad, I haven't been learning any of the technical skills in class. Thus, I've taken it upon myself to learn these skills outside of class, on top of all the coursework.

I also spent a few days this week doing some really hard "writing exercises" for some undisclosed, California-based tech giant. It's worth reiterating that these exercises were really hard, and they required me to learn about things like the DOM, REST, SOAP, and more scary acronyms that require research just to understand the research. Now, I like to think of myself as pretty tech savvy. I know some C++, and I can code HTML/CSS websites by hand. I know Flash, Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, Motion, etc, etc, etc. But, this test opened up a whole new world of things I have to learn. Really, it never ends.

After 48 hours of tirelessly working on the aforementioned exercises, I returned to normal life where I completed projects for my classes. It's pretty impossible to overlook the discrepancy here. The projects in class are just not nearly technical enough to help my technical writing. And they don't emphasize the code and design techniques to enable me to learn about UX design or research.

In addition to all of this, I built my portfolio website, and through that experience, I discovered that I need a lot more stuff for it. Will my future classes provide me with the opportunities to create useful portfolio pieces? Or should I do them on my own?

The interesting part is that it seems like other people in my classes don't share the same sense of urgency that I do. I think that some people are using the program as a crutch to wait out the bad economy. I hear things about how there are no jobs out there, so people are switching to the PhD program so they can stay in school longer. Then there are others, such as myself, who are using the program as a stepping stone, or even a launch pad, to something much, much greater. I, for one, am trying to get out as fast as I can so that I can start doing things.

But perhaps this is what separates me from the majority of the world. I am striving towards something greater than myself, greater than anything I've previously done, and I am not stopping for anything, especially a bad economy. From my perspective, if there are no jobs out there (which there are, you just have to work to get 'em), I will just make one for myself.

So here I am. The motivated, rational part of me wants to start doing things, and sometimes it feels like grad school is a waste of time. I know, though, that it's necessary and it's enabling me to do these things. I just don't want to get stuck in the grad student mentality where I stay in school and over-analyze things and lose sight of reality.

Lastly, I am juggling three separate lives - the grad school life, the marketing work life, and the bike racer life. Obviously juggling all these separate, secret lives is not sustainable, and the daily transition between unrelated work life and school life is really unpleasant. And each day, I continue to let go of the bike racer life, partly because my hip still hurts a lot and partly because I am thoroughly losing interest.