So, I am but a semester away from graduating from college as a Computer Programmer in Canada. All is well in the grades department - I've completed all assigned work and maintained a ~4.0 GPA throughout the course of my studies. However, I still feel anxious and have a sense that I'm entering the workforce without the base skill-set requisite for success.  Is it commonplace for students to feel lost and/or potentially inadequate prior to graduation? Are these types of thoughts and feelings common among new graduates?
I am a third year (starting fourth year in the fall) PhD student in mathematics. I've passed all qualifying exams and am currently doing research. As far as I can tell, I am not doing poorly. I have the good fortune of having a great advisor, being in a very supportive department, and having friends and family who genuinely care about my success.   The fact is research is hard. It appears to consist primarily of staring at a problem for days and days and days without getting anywhere. Sometimes, rarely, I do figure something out and that feels wonderful, but the overwhelming majority of my time appears to be spent banging my head against a mostly figurative wall. I am not complaining about the material being hard, and I am not averse to putting in hard work, but I get frequently discouraged when I realize the vast volumes of mathematics that I yet know nothing about (and probably never will). It's very hard to quantify progress - in particular, there are too few tangible returns after too many hours worked. I find myself thinking along the lines of "Oh, if only someone actually smart were thinking about this problem they would have solved it in moments" and so on.   I've talked about this to some number of people; here is some advice I have received:   Take a day off. Putting in hours upon hours of trying things doesn't magically lead to a solution, particularly if the brain is tired and just wants to sleep. Have a hobby. Since math research doesn't exactly provide instant gratification, a hobby might provide some instead.  Talk to other graduate students. Realize that many graduate students go through this.   I'm interested to know how other folks have dealt with being discouraged as a graduate student. Does it get better with time and experience? Is this a sign that research is not for me and that I should seriously consider a life outside academia?
Calculating $\lim_{n\to\infty}\sqrt[n]{2^n-n^2}$ Why do universal constants have the values they do? Motivation behind standard deviation? Database design for products with bundles of products Getting Windows 7 admin account password? How to Sync OneDrive Business /Office 365 on Linux? Microsoft OneDrive Business/Office 365 Pro offers 1 TB of cloud storage but unfortunately there has never been a method to sync it on Linux. Frequent Write to Non-volatile Memory What it says on the tin, a foreign friend of mine has asked and I can't tell him; apart from it sounding horrible.  For example:  "Why is it raining today?"   Instead of:  "Why it is raining today?" What is the intuition behind the unit normal vector being the derivative of the unit tangent vector? I've seen the math, but... It just doesn't make sense to me. How is the slope going to point perpendicular to the vector that is clearly a straight line not going in that direction? Exit strategies for "chameleon questions" How to multiply a BigDecimal by an integer in Java What is the best way to clean the sensor on a interchangeable lens camera (mirrorless or digital SLR)? Why are images formed? How do rays of light getting focused at a point create an image?  How are the information of object's shape and dimensions expressed as an image when light rays converge?  Is it understandable by solving wave equation for light? Export My Stack Overflow Data Is there a first party (or third party?) way to export just my data out of Stack Overflow?  I realize there's a massive Creative Commons data dump.  I'm interested in knowing if there's a quick and easy way for me to get my posts dumped out in some plain text file format for easy  personal archiving. How can I selectively disable paste blockers How do I bypass restrictions on the length of the PATH variable System Properties      This environment variable is too large. This dialog allows setting values up to 2047 characters long.   I use/have used a lot of software, and my PATH has grown as a result. When I try to add new paths, I get the above message. As a workaround, I'm editing my user path, but prefer not to. Minecraft launcher could not connect to server? What do I do? I looked at a similar question to mine and there was an answer saying to make sure Java is allowed past the firewall. So I checked and it already is. I've tried uninstalling and installing both Minecraft and Java but nothing has changed.  says that all services are fine, so what's going on? I bought a 2nd account to use as an alternative in-game account and now I can't log in.  (I cleared the email and password boxes for obvious reasons in this screenshot: security purposes) What is the best way to restrict access to adult content? I bought my kids a PC and installed 12.04 (Unity) on it.  The bottom line is, I want my children to use the computer unsupervised while I have confidence they cannot access anything inappropriate.  What I have looked at:  I was looking at Scrubit a tool which allows me configure my wifi router to block content and this solution would also protect my other PC and mobile devices.  This may be overkill as I just want the solution to work on one PC.    I also did some Google searches and came across the application called .  My experience of OSS is that the best solutions frequently never appear first on a Google search list and in this case I need to trust the methods therefore my question is very specific.   I want to leverage your knowledge and experience to understand What is the best way to restrict adult content on 12.04 LTS as this is important to me.  It maybe a combination of things so please don't answer this question "try this or that", then give me some PPA unless you can share your experience of how good it is and of course if there are any constraints. Recursively delete empty directories in Windows I have a directory on my Windows 7 machine that has hundreds if not thousands of sub-directories.  Some of them have files, some do not.  I want to delete all the empty directories.  Looking at the del and rmdir DOS command, it does not look like you can recursively do this without deleting all the files.  Is there a way to do this from the command line? Example of a ring with an infinite inclusion chain of ideals I'm trying to track down an example of a ring in which there exists an infinite chain of ideals under inclusion. (i.e. $I_1 \subsetneq I_2 \subsetneq I_3 \subsetneq...$)