[gumpzilla]

age: 27 in a couple of days.

occupation: physics Ph.D student

family: getting married in a few months

happiness: This is a mixed bag. Most days, yes. However, it's become clearer recently that grad school was probably a mistake. I'm close enough to finishing that I think I'm going to ride it out, but the postdoc route doesn't look very appealing for a variety of reasons, so I'm going to try and find some industrial job. I am pretty open to this not involving physics per se.

This is an occasional source of depression/frustration and is the main source of unhappiness for me. The academic route is what almost everybody goes into grad school expecting, and is what the culture is built around, so even if you've made the conscious decision that it's not for you, you still feel like you've failed. Sometimes this triggers jags where I get to feeling that I'm not very interesting anymore (which assumes I ever was), and that's not so fun. But this is pretty rare. For the most part, things are pretty good. I like my friends (grad school has been fun even if it wasn't the greatest idea), and I feel pretty lucky to have found my fiancee. She's a great companion, and considerably more tolerant of some of my foibles than most women would be.