I was raised on a small family dairy farm. Early in the piece we could see the end of the small family farm and eventually Dad sold out and worked for the company that bought it. I was young and adventurous so I set off for the big smoke seeking fame and fortune. I was young fit, intelligent and keen. The years past, I married, went back to school and on to university, working of a night and supporting my young family. Fate though was about to step in. My wife was diagnosed with Non Hodgkin's lymphoma, and I eventually gave up work as a biochemist to take care of her and our two children. She eventually succumbed to the chemotherapy and passed away leaving me with two young children. More study while caring for my wife got me qualifications in computing and eventually I got a position as application administrator for the government working in health. I was very happy, I had the chance to use both my medical and computing knowledge and thought I was in a position to help fix some of the shortfalls I found in the system while my wife had been a patient. I was doing something I loved, felt I had a contribution to make and was being paid 80K on top of it. Then it all went quickly pear shaped. Overall the state government had employed about 15 in the same role, one within each of the geographical areas of the state. A further 10 or so support staff were employed at the department office. Each of the 15 sites were given two servers to run the software. Within a month, I was becoming confused. The software was a financial reporting system that planned to become the state wide reporting system. For the next few years I worked hard to get the system up and running joining the many committees that were working to get the system up and running. Steering committees, work shops you name it. It was now becoming obvious that very little planning, research or study been done prior to investing around 100 million on staff, software and hardware, facilities etc. I was becoming vocal about the inadequate planning, feasibility studies that hadn't been done etc. Slowly I was removed from the picture as I became more vocal about the waste of money and resources and was slowly and covertly moved into the background. After 10 years I gave up, told them I would resign and wanted some answers as to why certain projects were funded whilst others were canceled or had funds reduced, to me, it had become a monster no one wanted to know about. Eventually, 2 years ago in January I resigned having a mental breakdown. Since then I have been living of savings and friends and family. I am now trying to put my life back together and fight the system here, places like this, letters etc.
I am about to go mental too. I spend all hours working when not in school, and everything I agree to do and complete becomes invalid the next day, because then management figures the new "correct" requirements and I have to replace my work yesterday. And every day goes like this. At least at a government there is no urgency. I have no idea if it is possible to bounce back from a mental breakdown. In your situation, I would suggest (as a math student) to model your working environment using some autonomous self-optimizing control system model. That will answer your questions why the money moves between the elements (projects) of your system in such a discriminative way.
I am about to go mental too. I spend all hours working when not in school, and everything I agree to do and complete becomes invalid the next day, because then management figures the new "correct" requirements and I have to replace my work yesterday. And every day goes like this. At least at a government there is no urgency. I have no idea if it is possible to bounce back from a mental breakdown. In your situation, I would suggest (as a math student) to model your working environment using some autonomous self-optimizing control system model. That will answer your questions why the money moves between the elements (projects) of your system in such a discriminative way.
