I have several different goals for this page. For those considering graduate school, I intend this to be helpful advice and a series of necessary warnings. For those in graduate school who hate it, I want to offer support, validation, and strength, as well as a few hints for getting out of their difficulties. For those who have left graduate school, I hope I convey understanding and camaraderie. For those who teach in, advise in, or run graduate departments, I intend this as a reprimand and a challenge to do better.
I certainly welcome comments, suggestions, and other experiences I can learn from. Please do email me with anything you might have along these lines!
My writing style is more conversational than some people (especially academic types) prefer. Sorry about that; it's my training in sociolinguistics causing me to deprivilege overly formal grammar. Feel free to mark up my sentence fragments, "which"es for "that"s, sentence-starting conjunctions, sentence-ending prepositions, and so on in your head. I do not pretend, moreover, that this page is in any way objective. If you're reading this, you're reading a distillation of my experiences, and the experiences of people I know. If you need to see a spurious detachment in order to believe something, go read the typical "How to Succeed in Graduate School" manual; I shan't cater to you.
I intend to organize this page around a series of axioms, misconceptions, and tips. I have no way to prove my axioms, which is why I call them axioms. I do not ask that they be accepted uncritically; by all means, think them over and try to poke holes in them. I do ask that they be accepted as the fruit of experience, not as mere argumentative conveniences. I shall do my best to prove them, and to disprove the misconceptions, but most of the evidence I have is anecdotal.
Something to think about: Why doesn't academia talk more about what happens in graduate school? Why do I need to rely on anecdotal evidence (and before you ask, it isn't for lack of searching for better)? Shouldn't there be statistics, sociological studies, roundtable discussions, publications, self-examination made public? Is academia so afraid of the graduate school skeletons that it refuses to open the closet? Or, worse, is it so complacent that it doesn't realize there's a closet to be opened?
As for the tips, I consider them sine qua non. If you haven't done what these tips advise, you are very likely going to end up in trouble. Most graduate school guides won't say that, by the way; even the decent ones tend to be appallingly mealymouthed about the trouble graduate students can get into. This leaves students shocked, frightened, hurt, and without apparent recourse when they do get into trouble, especially since most people going to graduate school have very little experience with getting into trouble. I'm going to shoot from the hip, instead. If that offends someone, that's too bad. If it scares someone—that's the point.
Well, I suppose you might say I'm a failure. I entered a graduate department in 1994 fully intending to earn a Ph.D, and I left in 1998 without one. If you care for my graduate school story, it is elsewhere on this site. I understand a lot more about graduate school now than I did in 1994, and one thing I learned is that many graduate students have no real idea what they're getting themselves into, and many graduate schools have no real desire to tell them. Experienced graduate students are often too scared to talk honestly and openly about what is happening to them; some of them do not even think about it, because too much awareness might distract them from their goals, or worse, might force them to realize that they hate what they're doing.
I am not scared any longer; I have no reason to be. Graduate school and I don't owe each other anything, and neither of us has anything with which to blackmail the other. I used to be scared, certainly, and I spent a lot of time hiding from myself what I knew and felt about what I was doing and what was happening to me. Indeed, I fell into most of the graduate school traps I am going to talk about.
A natural assumption, and one that is especially widespread in academia:
Sorry, not so. Sure, some people live that way; my mother (who left while writing her dissertation) is a textbook example. When I left school, my father discussed her lifelong regret with me to try to scare me into going back. But I'm not bitter, I'm certainly not inferior, and if I'm resentful, it's a resentment of a ridiculously stupid, unfair, and ineffective system, and I express my resentment by writing these pieces in hopes of helping you survive the system and perhaps even forcing the system to change. I don't automatically resent people who succeed in academia, I don't resent all the academics I've ever known, and I don't resent academia as a whole. Does a bitter, resentful person try to help other people do well in the same situation she failed at? That's what I'm trying to do.
I'll say it flat out: I think scholarship is needful and noble, and what's more, I haven't given up on it just because I've given up on academia. If someone needs to go to graduate school to become a scholar (something I don't concede, incidentally), then I want to offer some of the tools that person needs to survive the experience. On the whole, however, I think academia is failing to be the community of scholars it desires to be. I'm going to try to change that, by talking openly about the worst and most outrageous abuses academia offers the people who want to join it.
First, though, let me take a couple of quick stabs at the inferiority canard.
This is a pretty common idea, I think, and for obvious reasons academia fosters it. I have heard a fair bit of talk like this, mostly but not entirely from prospective grad students: "But if I don't get a Ph.D, I'll never be able to talk to anyone with similar interests, never be able to interact with people on my intellectual level, never be able to contribute to human knowledge, never reach my intellectual potential, never be able to teach, never ensure that my ideas live after me..." I've never heard anyone spout all of this rubbish, admittedly, but I can give you plenty of names for each individual piece of it.
If you are considering graduate school, moreover, it is very likely that others around you think that you belong in academia. My parents aimed me at academia like an arrow at an archery target. So did several of my undergraduate professors. Such people, however laudable their intentions, often use Misconception 2 as a lever to maneuver you where they think you should be.
Beware of Misconception 2! It is a very dangerous line of thought (completely aside from its basic snobbery, which itself is bad enough). Misconception 2 can trap you in a bad graduate school situation much longer than you should stay. If I hadn't been so completely taken in by Misconception 2, I'd have left my department after earning my MA. But because I did not believe I could or should do anything else with my life, I stayed, and I damn near ruined myself because of it.
Every mind I disabuse of Misconception 2 is a mind better prepared for graduate school and better prepared for life. Therefore, I am going to offer some thoughts that I hope will dethrone it in a few minds.
Please do me the favor of thinking of the best professor you ever met. I'll mention the name of mine, because it is the least I can offer him now that he is dead: he was Dr. C. Clifford Flanigan of Indiana University-Bloomington, and he was a gem, and I miss him terribly.
Now think of the worst professor you ever met—the biggest blowhard, the biggest idiot, the biggest exploiter, the most arrogant, the most oblivious, the most out-of-date. I'll be quiet about my choice here, from respect for libel laws.
Have someone in mind? Didn't take you long, did it? Remember that s/he has a Ph.D, too.
This is the truth to Misconception 2's lie.
If you listen to your professors for a while, or read enough academic attack articles, you'll find that academics understand and believe the first half of Axiom 1! Is it really such a stretch, then, to believe the second? It is if you ask academics, who have a vested interest in denying it.
Let me tell you a true story about academia's soft underbelly: its desire to keep itself an exclusive little private club. When I was maybe nine or ten years old, there was a huge scandal at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (and I apologize to them for bringing up something I'm sure they want to forget!). A man that they'd hired (several years running, I believe) in a non-tenure-track position to teach some undergraduate courses turned out to have presented false credentials; he did not in fact have a Ph.D.
He was a good teacher, it seems. His students loved him, and circulated petitions to keep him teaching once UNC-CH fired him. None of his colleagues had seen through his deception, so it would seem that he understood the field he was teaching (which I'm afraid I don't remember, if I ever knew it) well enough.
My father, a Ph.D and professor himself, was furious about this incident, I remember very well. I was shocked, however, to find that his objection was that a non-Ph.D (however competent) should be teaching, rather than that someone should lie to get a job. "But, Dad," I remember saying timidly, "if he was a good teacher, and knew what he was talking about, why can't they let him teach? Why does it matter if he doesn't have a Ph.D?"
"You'll understand when YOU'VE sweated blood for one!" he snapped back at me. Well, I've sweated blood, plenty of it. I don't think it's my lack of a Ph.D that causes me, still, not to understand. Competence is competence, and credentials are credentials. The latter doesn't automatically imply the former, as thinking of your least favorite professor should help demonstrate.
(Mind, this doesn't mean I think UNC-CH should have kept that guy. They had every right to fire him for his deception, of which I do not approve. I hope, however, that he found enough self-confidence to find other ways and other people to teach, without resorting to fraudulent credentials. If he's reading this, I'd sure love to hear from him.)
Let me tell you another true story. My supervisor the first year I was a teaching assistant understood pedagogy inside and out. She taught me a lot about teaching. She was also an excellent mentor; she ensured that none of us felt overwhelmed by the responsibilities and difficulties of our job.
She was fired a few months after I left school. She had committed no misconduct, angered no one, not abused any authority, not slacked off in her job. She was fired because at the time she was hired, her Ph.D dissertation was not complete, and she had not found time (what with supervising twenty-odd TAs and teaching two courses!) to finish it.
The fellow student/TA I learned this from was angry about it, and I have no trouble believing that other students were too. We liked and appreciated her, and we felt that her unquestioned competence and excellent performance at her job should count for something. But no. The credential means more than the excellence.
Very well, then, perhaps not all smart people have Ph.Ds. Are they okay with that?
This is the refutation of Misconception 1.
Take me, for instance. I don't have a Ph.D. I do have a marriage that is a perpetual source of delight, a nice house (more than half paid for), an intellectually challenging job in a field that (unlike academia!) is expected to grow at a healthy clip, friends, interests, and talents. I am as happy as I have ever been—much happier than at any time in graduate school. I like where I live, I like what I'm doing, I like the people I live with and work with and associate with, and (to be completely frank; I don't expect everyone to believe this, but here it is anyway) if I were offered a Ph.D on the spot on the condition that I trade everything I am now, I wouldn't do it.
(Think such a trade is ludicrous? Think twice. Then think about what parts of your identity you'd trade for a Ph.D. I'll get back to this point later.)
My husband, another grad school dropout (although the stubborn cuss is thinking about going back), is a happy man too, busy and challenged and always, always learning. The TA supervisor I mentioned above got a new job in short order at a local company that makes educational software, and when I last talked to her about it, she was excited and enthusiastic, not regretful at all.
This leads me to a corollary to Axiom 2:
My father the professor isn't a happy person; I can't really remember him happy, ever. He hates his department and his responsibilities, and has for many years. He indulges in many get-rich-quick dreams based on his work, I think to give him a rationalization for continuing to do it. (Not a single one has come to fruition—he hasn't seriously pursued any of them, really—but he keeps coming up with new ones.) My erstwhile graduate adviser isn't a happy person; he's trying his damnedest to retire, and was furious when he was told that if he retired when he was planning to, he'd lose a lot of pension money.
Something that struck me in college was how many professors I had who were divorced. A lot, that is. I don't know if the numbers of divorced people are any higher in academia than in the general population, but they certainly felt higher to me. There's a Salon Magazine article about this phenomenon, but—once again!—something that could cast academia in a less-than-glowing light hasn't to my knowledge been formally studied.
I do know that a good friend of mine who got married the year before I did had a marriage that was on the rocks within a year and a half because of the pressures of graduate school on her and on her husband. My friend isn't stupid, doesn't have a history of bad relationships, and was never a difficult person (I don't know her husband, so cannot comment on his personality). She told me point blank that grad school was doing this to them. I believe her. (Her husband has since finished his education, and I am greatly relieved to say that they have reconciled now that he is out of the clutches of graduate school.)
I also know that I am deeply ashamed of the way I treated my own husband during my last few months in graduate school. I turned into an irritable, sleepless, lazy, moody hag. He surely deserved better. Since I left, though, we're back to what we were before: a happy, close, generous, honest couple with plenty to give each other and share with other people.
This is a perfect segue into Tip 1:
This process is utterly crucial. Academia clings strongly to the Romantic ideal of the obsessed, driven achiever. Plenty of academics sneer at "dilettantes", believing that anything worth doing is worth consuming an entire life to do, and anyone who isn't willing to devote an entire life to academia doesn't really want to be a scholar.
A few people really do personify the Romantic ideal. If you are one, fine. Just be honest enough to admit that to yourself, and more importantly, to the people around you; it is manifestly unfair to them to do otherwise. Think twice, three times, four times, a hundred times, before marrying or having children. These commitments are as serious to the other people involved as is academia to you. Can you give those other people what they will need from you? Is that other person willing to make the sacrifices necessary to give you the space you need for your all-consuming career?
You cannot ethically make this bargain on behalf of a child, in my opinion. No child should be sacrificed on the altar of academia by a parent. I say this as a child who was so sacrificed. Academia won't send an angel to stop your knife hand, Abraham.
If, on the other hand, you aren't especially obsessive or driven, you need to decide—in writing, preferably, in the clearest language you can manage—where your boundaries are. What hobbies and interests do you want to pursue while you are in graduate school? What relationships do you want to maintain? How important is your sleep at night? How important is your health, physical and mental? How important is your ethical framework, the way you treat others, your time, your life?
All of these can go on the altar; never doubt it. Take your life, for instance. Given a typical lifespan in the USA of 75 years or so, you can spend one-tenth to one-eighth of it in graduate school. (Think I'm kidding? Here I do have statistics behind me. Look them up; if you doubt this, you won't believe me if I tell you.) Toss in college, and you can go up to about one-sixth. If you consider that your adult life begins at perhaps age 15, graduate school can take up one-sixth of your adulthood, and college plus graduate school, nearly one-fourth. Is it worth it?
Your favorite pastimes: The friend I talked about earlier, she with the rocky marriage, was in high school a brilliant musician. If I'd had her gorgeous lyric soprano, or her flute technique, I'd have gone to music school in a red hot minute. When we reestablished contact, a few years into graduate school for both of us, I mentioned that I'd recently gone to a sing-along Messiah (almost the only music I indulged in during graduate school, and though I wasn't on the same level as my friend, I wasn't too shabby in high school or college, either).
"Oh," she said, "I wish I had time to keep up my cultural things!"
I had a bit of trouble picking up my jaw from the floor. All that talent, all that practice—even more, all the joy that music had always given her, as long as I'd known her—all of that, tossed away? But then I took a closer look at myself, and saw that I hadn't done any better. All the things that had been my joy, my soul—music, theater, writing, love—all of them were withering from neglect.
This doesn't happen to every grad student, but it's quite common. Those who manage to avoid it do so because they know up front where their priorities are, and refuse to let pushy professors or overly demanding students keep them away from the other things they care about.
Your health: I was lucky, on the whole; all graduate school did to me physically was cause two major stress-related outbreaks of a skin disease (called dyshidrosis or pompholyx) to which I am apparently genetically susceptible. I had never had such outbreaks before, and have not since. I hope I never again spend two weeks at a time with fingers so blistered and swollen as to be unusable.
As for mental health, grad school drove me into the last stages of burnout. As it is, I seem to be more susceptible than some to depression and anxiety, but my mental state when I left graduate school ranks without a doubt as the second worst of my life (second worst only because this time I wasn't actively suicidal; some of the symptoms were if anything more terrifying than the single suicidal episode I experienced earlier in my life).
I've known grad students on antidepressants. I've known grad students on tranquilizers. I've known (young!) grad students with ulcers. I've known grad students with high blood pressure. I've seen more than one panic attack, and more crying jags than I can count. That's just what I've personally seen or experienced; if I went into the stories I've heard about students I didn't know, I could go on for quite awhile.
So decide, seriously, what you're willing to let go and what you're willing to endure in order to have an academic career, and be prepared to balk, scream, and stomp your feet if your boundaries are encroached upon. Moreover, you need to steel yourself to bail out if you have to—if you can't make yourself leave, this exercise is meaningless.
That leads me to Tip 2:
Why? Because you can't count on surviving.
This is simply wishful thinking.
I don't care how smart you are. I don't care how stubborn you are. I don't care how many papers you've already published. I don't care how many professors like you. You cannot assume that you will get your degree (and you cannot assume that the degree will get you a job, either). Now, if you take the trouble to read all the way through this, and follow my advice, I am arrogant enough to say that your chances of surviving graduate school will be considerably enhanced. But no one, ESPECIALLY NOT YOU, can make survival a certainty.
A lot of people reading this will cling obstinately to Misconception 3. I did when I was in college. I did for far too long in graduate school. Surely intelligence and drive are enough, I thought. Surely anyone with the brains who really wants a Ph.D will get one, no matter the hurdles. The "How to Succeed in Graduate School" manuals presume from the outset that success is ultimately under the control of the student.
What's more, academia loves Misconception 3, because academics want to believe that they (and no one else) deserve to be where they are. Their belief tends to manifest itself in denigration and dismissal of those who do not leave graduate school with a degree. My graduate adviser used to get borderline profane when talking about "failures," whom he thoroughly despised. When I broke the news to my parents that I was leaving grad school, and tried to explain why, my father the professor emailed me a pages-long rant describing in considerable detail how my personal shortcomings had caused my failure, and exonerating my department from all blame. Even fellow graduate students are not immune; they are all justly afraid of failure, and so find or invent differences between those who have "failed" and those who have not (yet) "failed."
No matter how many academics swear by it, though, Misconception 3 is completely bogus; see discussion of Axiom 3, below (and remember your least-favorite professor!), for why. Therefore, inexorable logic demands that you have some other skill with which to make a living, one that will allow you to respect yourself. It doesn't have to be much; when I finally left, I was prepared to rely on typing at 98 words per minute, much to the horror of my parents. I do think it's best, though, to have something you can honestly consider desirable (I didn't exactly want to spend my working life typing someone else's memos, and I'm very glad that a stroke of luck allowed me to escape it).
So take computer classes; compugeeking is, by and large, a fun set of careers. Or take the USDA's indexing and editing courses. Moonlight or volunteer (although moonlighting is preferable, I think, partly for the pay and partly for your resume) in a field you find interesting. Go to night school at the local technical college and learn a trade. Do some freelance writing, translating, programming, web design, tutoring, or whatever else you can do and get paid for. Get a teaching certificate, if your area of study is teachable on the grade-school level—in these days of teacher shortages, certificates are not too hard to come by. Learn how to start a small business, and do up a business plan. One way or another, build yourself a back door. It's best, frankly, if you have a back door built before you even enter graduate school.
Believe it or not, your back door will help you in graduate school. Honestly, you won't feel as if you perpetually have one foot out the door. Instead, you will have a reason to say to yourself, "I am here because I want to be, not because I have to be." You will be able to weigh your situation honestly, to reconsider your goals fearlessly, to hold your head high in front of people who think they own you, and to make the best decisions you can for yourself (which are not always the most expedient from the perspective of your academic career).
I've known a number of graduate students (myself not least) who felt that they had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do, whether because of Misconception 2 or for some other reason. I've even known some who were in graduate school because their parents made them go. I can't say this strongly enough: this is a HORRIBLE reason to go, this motive will NOT see you through, and if it is your main or your only reason for going, GET THE HELL OUT NOW before you hurt yourself, and find some way to free yourself from your parents!
Students who build their entire identities around academia are liable to feel trapped there at some point, and this does not help them reach their goals. Examine the pitfalls, all of which I learned about by falling into:
Far, far better that you have someplace else to go, and something else to do.
Intelligence, perseverance, a good adviser, research, publishing, balancing responsibilities, blah de blah de blah. That's what the How To Succeed In Grad School manuals talk about. They are, as I have already said, biased toward believing that if you work hard and play by the rules, grad school will smile graciously upon you.
Get real. Grad school doesn't smile graciously upon ANY grad student. The rules are whatever the professors say the rules are, and they can change daily. Ask your professors to talk about their grad school days. What you'll hear in 99 cases out of 100 will NOT be nostalgia. And they're the ones who survived it, and have every reason to romanticize it in front of you!
Then ask them if they can recall someone in grad school (a grad school colleague, or a student of theirs) who didn't make it. What you hear (if you hear anything at all; a lot of academics will dodge this question, or be so intent on denying its legitimacy that your only answer will be a blank look) should be eye-opening. You may hear scorn and accusatory invective, like that of my father or my ex-adviser. You may hear a long litany of personal problems, like divorce or illness or money problems or unexpected pregnancy. If you've got an especially forthright professor, you'll hear Axiom 3:
This is the more fundamental reason Misconception 3 is not true. Sure, some people don't make it because they go broke or their spouse leaves; everybody can understand and accept that. Very few people want to admit, however, that a smart, stubborn person without any exceptional life problems can still get axed.
I'm pretty smart. I'm stubborn to the point of muleheadedness. When I hit graduate school, I had given a well-received paper at a small conference, I'd completed a fairly decent book-length translation, and I had professors positively slobbering on me. I'm a Phi Beta Kappa, and I left college with a 3.97 GPA and twice the necessary number of upper-level credit hours. And I didn't make it through graduate school. Am I unique?
Well, consider my husband. He's smarter than I am. He got a perfect GRE Verbal score (I've seen it!). He has powers of concentration and study that I have never matched, not on my best days. He absorbs languages and history as a sponge does water. His writing style is beautiful, classic and scholarly without sacrificing comprehensibility. And yes, he entered graduate school too, and no, he didn't make it through either.
How can this happen? What can go wrong? Brother, everything you can think of and a lot of things you can't. I'm here to think of some of those things for you, to help you avoid them. Listen well, then. Let's talk about applying to graduate school, first.