My survival analysis professor is making my life hell. She assigns weekly homework assignments that could easily be final projects. Seriously, I've spent 20+ hours every week on single assignments. Which might be reasonable if she gave us 2 weeks to complete them, but we're lucky to get one week! We have yet to turn in the current assignment, yet today in class she handed out two questions due tuesday and a third (long) one due right after Thanksgiving break. When I pointed out that we might not have access to the computer lab she gave us a 2 days extension, which helps, but only means we'll have 2 less days to do the last assignment, which, by the way, will be due right after I get back from Anne's funeral. Oh yeah, and I don't have SAS on my laptop, so even if I had time, I couldn't work on it while I'm in Boston. I know this just sounds like a whiny grad student, but I swear it isn't because I'm trying to get out of working hard. I'm working on a PhD for pete's sake, it's not like I thought this was going to be easy. But her class is orders of magnitude more time consuming than any of my other classes. And most of the time this results in a sacrifice of learning. Because I inevitably reach a point each week where just getting it done matters more than actually knowing what the hell I'm doing. Not to mention half of the time suckage is due to her lack of preparedness. She hasn't done her own homework assignments, so she has no idea how long they will take. In fact, she never does her homework assignments, because she gets the solutions out of a book. And if we work solutions differently, she still doesn't work out the problem to check our work! Neither she nor the class know the computer language she wants us to work in, but if she finds a program online that claims to compute something she's interested in, she'll tell us to use it without checking it out or using it herself first. The last straw is that she has this very put-upon attitude, like oh poor me for having to teach this class. I have to work soooo hard and I'm soooo tired. Well then don't be a fucking teacher!

/end rant