I am a graduate student nearing the end of my Ph.D. studies with a feeling of dread that I have spent the last five years training for a life in research, which is something I don't really want to do. I have been in school for a zillion years because I am pretty good at it and it's the default mode for me. I like teaching a lot and I like thinking about ideas, but I dread the prospect of getting an assistant professorship somewhere and getting on the hamster wheel for 70 hours a week for seven years until I get tenure. And then I start my life?

What I really live for is writing fiction. (I am a social scientist, in urban studies, so this is a bit at odds with the day job.) In my more rational moments I don't pretend I could ever make a living off this, and frankly I am afraid to try. I have sent a few short stories off to magazines and literary journals and heard nothing except for one rejection letter in which the editor said that I'd never be able to write because I've had too much university. Maybe he was right.

I like to read novels, cavort with my husband, write letters to my family and garden. I prefer being alone to being with lots of people. At the end of the day, I like to leave work and go home and garden. How to avoid the hamster wheel?

Doctor Lady

Dear D.L.,

Throw out the idea of tenure. Take a part-time job teaching and enjoy yourself, thinking about ideas with the students and with colleagues who will envy you for your courage in getting off the hamster wheel before it started. In the other part time, write fiction. Have your friends read it and ask them to tell you which parts made them more alert, and which made their eyes glaze over. This is how we learn to do better. What your rejection told you is that the rhetorical devices you've been immersed in as a graduate student have distorted your narrative voice. You can learn to write in a different voice, but this takes time, and lots of writing, but if it's what you want to do, then do it. Take your nose off the grindstone and smell the flowers and put words on paper.

Dear Mr. Blue,

I am a 29-year-old research associate who manfully (or, in my case, womanfully) took this temporary posting in Chapel Hill, N.C., because I felt I'd learn more from this job than from a similar posting in New York. Little did I know that I would be sucked into a vortex of isolation, despair and (yes) malaise. My co-workers have formed happy little cliques that do not include me. (I have true friends but they happen to live elsewhere.) The worse I feel, the more unmotivated I am at work. So how do I get out of this funk? I've joined volunteer groups, and am taking French, but I am in the slough of despond.

In Crisis

Dear Crisis,

It sounds to me as if you are depressed. Plain, ordinary, small-"d" depression. Go get treatment. This won't necessarily improve your social life, but it will change the color of your mood while you create your own happy clique of rejects of other cliques, and work on getting a posting back with your true friends in the city so nice they named it twice, the city of proclivities.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"