Not-So-Effective Topology: My Ill-Fated MS Thesis
While this website is largely a repository for positive things that I deem “good enough” to reach a wider audience, the attentive reader would note that in my CV, it states that I attended grad school at CWRU for mathematics until the Spring of 2018, but my CV doesn’t record any degrees other than a dual BS/BS in Computer Science and Mathematics. What happened?
This is the story of how I dropped out of grad school.
It begins with something relatively innocuous and seemingly unrelated: My deeply-ingrained habit of speed-walking around campus. I would avoid the beaten path, avoid chit-chat, and avoid getting stuck behind the unbearably slow hordes which seemed to clog the arteries of the network of campus side-walks.
During the fall and spring, I would arrive in classrooms somewhat drenched in my own sweat. During the winter, I would work my body so hard that it was more comfortable to wear shorts right up until the temperature reached zero degrees Farenheit and the wind began to howl.
To me, there was something admirable about this hard work. I was “keeping sharp” by leveraging what would otherwise be down-time. I was greater than human, uniquely capable of discarding its comforts in search of the greatest possible efficiency of action.
Or so I thought. In reality, I was deeply, deeply ill, but refused to let myself come to that conclusion.
Paired with the feeling of superiority and defiance over my own human nature was a paralyzing feeling of guilt which seemed to follow me wherever I went. I was gawking at people inappropriately and for too long. I was stalking the person in front of me, whoever that person may be. I was inconveniencing any person in anything vaguely representing a customer-service role. I was objectifying women. I was behaving like a creep.
Combine these feelings with an inexplicable, private desire to cross-dress, and you have a powerful and potent formula for self-loathing. While I was able to keep it together most of the time, largely by appealing to an ideal of efficiency and emotionlessness, this system would occasionally break down, leaving me trying to tie the threads together. Was I just a moderately-creepy “sad boy” who would otherwise belong to the group of people who are “nerds” who are “forever alone?” Or were all of my ills a reflection of my trans-ness?
I was only able to arrive at an answer years later through hours upon hours of introspection, therapy, and eventually, SSRIs. What had plagued me all those years was simple: A serotonin deficit, manifesting itself behaviorally in the form of powerful anxiety and OCD.
In spite of my mental illness, I chose to ignore it as best as I could. For the large part, these efforts were successful, and I was able to quickly progress through my undergraduate studies, even beginning on the BS/MS track to challenge myself to go further.
Then, 2016 happened. I was disenfranchised in the 2016 Wisconsin Democratic Primary due to an issue with the timing that my voter registration was post-marked [which took longer than I had expected], leaving me somewhat bitter about the loss of Sanders to the clearly weaker candidate in Clinton. As the summer stretched on, and the news bombshells kept dropping, my bitterness and sense of dread only dragged on. I would spend countless hours browsing the Donald Trump sub-Reddit out of curiosity for the neo-Fascist movement which was forming in front of my very own eyes. I would dive deep into threads and articles about the then-raging culture war, many aspects of which only served to strengthen my own internalized trans-phobia. However, the polling kept re-assuring me that the outcome would be more boring: The neoliberal war-hawk would win, and while disappointing compared to a hypothetical Bernie win, we could all go back to business as usual for America. I cast my ballot for Clinton, as many others I knew did.
The morning after election night, I brought vodka in a bottle to class, with red solo cups in tow to allow for effective commiseration with my comrades. I remember wondering that day why everything had not simply stopped functioning – why were there no riots in the streets? Why did everything carry on as usual, albeit with a slightly-more-depressing ambiance? I had this very same feeling at many different points in Trump’s presidency, from when he issued an executive order banning transgender individuals from serving in the millitary to his unillateral withdrawl from the Paris Climate Accord, to his threats toward North Korea, to his travel ban for majority-Muslim countries, to his blatant corruption and leveraging of the office of the President for personal profit.
As a result of these depressing political events, I fell into what I termed a “lower-case ‘d’” depression. While never to the point of suicidal ideation, everything felt hopeless enough that I only really felt two emotions for the majority of my waking hours: Extreme anxiety, and the lightness that one gets when you step outside yourself for a second to see your own situation as completely and utterly absurd. Terror and detachment from reality, in turn, only served to strengthen the symptoms of my mental illness.
It was within this environment that I began work on my master’s thesis. From the start, there were several issues with it, all owing to my own faults.
First off, speaking to my advisor was incredibly difficult for me due to the paralyzing feelings of anxiety and impostor syndrome that I would get upon approaching anyone of even moderate academic stature. This delayed the start of work on my thesis for several semesters until I was finally able to muster up enough courage [albeit, shaking and sweating] to meet with him in person.
Secondly, at the time, I felt as if I was dragging myself along as part of my frantic rush to finish school. I developed a mindset where I viewed my own intellectual facilities as a limited resource that I needed to make efficient use of before they completely and utterly collapsed. As a result, I was willing to settle for any thesis I could write, not necessarily something that I would enjoy writing, or something that would be very useful to other people.
Partly directed by my advisors’ and my own interests, and partly by the tractable, well-defined nature of the task, I eventually settled on proving the Basic Perturbation Lemma of Effective Algebraic Topology in Homotopy Type Theory. Ultimately, I don’t think that doing this was terribly useful to anybody – at best, I got a half-decent exposition on the subject matter and more practice with Agda, but that felt like a completely hollow achievement in light of the horrors going on in America.
During this time, I also served as the Algorithms TA, but was sleighted by the department out of a more involved position in the course due to my continued delays in my MS graduation date. I also did a Hackathon project with some others to try to “Make Anime Real”, which eventually turned into the (also ill-fated) worker’s co-operative, Funktor Reactive.
The ultimate fate of my thesis was a draft submitted to my advisor and a half-finished Agda formalization, followed shortly by an extreme form of self-sabotage by withdrawing myself entirely from grad school. I had felt, despite any evidence to the contrary, that I had completely wasted the past year of my life, and that it was time that I tried to make this situation right. These were the events which led to me retreating back home to Wisconsin in order to start Funktor Reactive, LLC.
The rest of this story is beyond what I want to cover in this blog post, but I will at least say that my letter of resignation from grad school was met with my advisor re-assuring me that I was, in fact, cut out for academic work, and that I needn’t have felt like such an impostor for so long.
Unfortunately, for the time being, I doubt that I could seriously dive in and re-read my thesis draft due to the extremely negative emotional context I formed around it. However, you, the reader, likely do not possess such a mental context around this work, so I will include it here for posterity.
The moral of the story? People who seem to be perfectly fine on the outside can be anything but. Serotonin is a helluva drug. Don’t count on America to do the right thing. You cannot always rationalize away your own problems. You are likely not an impostor, but instead have low self-esteem. And so on, and so on. I’m just glad that the grim period of my life that was my grad school experience is finally over, and I am at peace, relatively speaking.