|
That's a cool story! Mine isn't as long, but in graduate school I was chronically stressed out. It didn't help that I was over 1100 miles from closest family, and it took me many years to develop coping mechanisms for dealing with solitude after growing up in a big family.
On one particular evening I was having it really rough. I had just learned the previous graduate student on my project had falsified data (A HUGE NO-NO, basically academic suicide). I was the third graduate student on this long-term project, responsible for years 6-8. The previous graduate student was responsible for years 3-5. The student confessed after I confronted them about never receiving data for the required annual report to our granting agency. After that bombshell I wasn't sure I even had a job anymore, let alone graduate. It was bad, about as low as you can go as a graduate student.
I used to live in a duplex on a hill on the outskirts of town, which was great because I could watch the sunset from my front steps. I gotta admit, I was crying pretty hard on the steps that evening.
The sunset was spectacular though, and the real icing on the cake was I got to see Mercury! I completely forgot that Mercury was actually visible and I'd never seen the planet before. Normally Mercury is too close to the sun at sunset to be visible to the naked eye. It didn't completely cheer me up, but it certainly make me feel a lot better.
I'm pretty sure Mercury is the dot lowest on the left in this photo.
|