coldhearted scientist وداد

I

I went to graduate school because the woman at the career center said that looking for a real job was a full time job, and that getting one would take about six months of full time looking. This gave me great pause, since it meant I would have to spend the last six months of my senior year allowing my thesis and GPA go to rack and ruin. That seemed like a poor idea, but then I did not know what I might live on during six months of post-graduation unemployment. As a joke someone said, well, you can always go to graduate school, and I thought, Eureka! It is a job – I will be a T.A. – and it will be interesting to boot! I can decide what I really want to do Later! And that is how it all started.

II

There is this good post, and an entire cloud of posts near and around it, on the difficulties of the transition to graduate school. It seems that it was rough. Although not a particularly successful academic, I know what I am doing. I am asked for, and give a great deal of practical advice. My advice is very different from the fear-based advice I received myself, and which nearly destroyed my career.

My advice works. That is why I am asked again. I have often been told I should write one of those guidebooks to academia. If I ever do that, though, it will be in the form of a memoir, not a manual. I am not at all sure that my experience and opinions apply to everyone or even to a large group.

I was not going to follow the meme and create a post on the transition to graduate school, but the posts which exist bother me, in that they remind me of a lot of the unnecessary pain I have been through in and around academia. So I will write a post to get that grisgris off.

The interesting issue the posts on this matter raise for me is that there is a fine line between, and a great deal of overlapping among information given, information withheld, misinformation, necessary advice, and terrorizing horror story. It seems to me that we hear horror stories, and have homilies recited to us – and are told this is the straight dope – when in fact, the actual information we need is hidden, and the straight dope we have been given is literally a hallucinogen, and a bad trip at that.

1. Graduate school is not difficult academically; the transition from undergraduate to graduate work was not difficult for me; academic jobs are not difficult. By saying these things are not difficult, I am not saying they do not take work, talent, and common sense. I am only saying that for a person with research, presentation and writing skills they are second nature. In my opinion what is difficult about the enterprise is what people, including many people in charge of graduate students, transfer onto academia in terms of general neurosis, destructiveness and faithlessness.

2. I do not think that academic work is the only work I can do, or that would hold my interest. My academic field is not the only one which interests me. Very many people over the years have insisted to me that these things should be the case, or that if I were more realistic, or mentally healthy, or committed, I would feel that they were the case. I continue to believe that the realistic and mentally healthy attitude is my own, and that commitment to something in which you feel you have no choice is no commitment at all.

3. I do not think it is necessary to suffer physically, to look bad, or to ruin your health in order to be in graduate school. I got a certain amount of flak about this from professors – specifically, women professors from the East – when I was a graduate student. I looked too healthy to be smart, they said. For them to believe I was working, seeing the results of my work was not enough: I also needed to appear to be suffering.

Fortunately I did not believe them on this specifically, although I realize I did try to make up for it, and thus gain their trust, by martyring myself in other ways. One of the things I liked about becoming a professor was that my colleagues did not expect this kind of Gothic martyrdom. Barring rare extenuating circumstances they took exercise, ate regular meals, slept regular hours, and had recreational activities. They would have found it odd had I not also.

4. It has always been difficult for me to prepare classes because since before I started my first TA-ship and up to now, one of my relatives has insisted that I would spend too much time on teaching, and that I do. His evidence for the idea that I would do so was based on observations of other graduate students, not of me. His more recent evidence for it is based on my having interesting course activities, and reading interesting books in courses. He imagines that creating all of this takes up too much of my time.

I am to this day nervous when I prepare courses because I hear his voice sounding at my back: you should not be doing this, it can destroy your career. Therefore I do it as fast as possible, and I cut corners when I can. That is impractical because each class session is a cliffhanger: will we make it? We always do, but I then have to recover from the adrenalin rush it has taken to get me through. I am well aware that time spent in recovery is time which could have been better spent getting my handouts printed, for instance, in a little less of a frenzy. I am still scared to give myself the time I actually need.

In real life, the only serious criticism I have gotten about teaching is that my courses sometimes seem a bit thrown together. I know they do, and I know why; now you do, too. I am glad that I have excellent presentation skills, am a good typist, have a good design sense, am an excellent listener, and can dance on a dime, because if not, following this advice about teaching would have led to my certain demise.

5. I have already spoken a great deal in this website about how very many people believed, and insisted to me that I would delay my comprehensive examinations unreasonably, not finish my dissertation, and not publish. I heard these exhortations so many times, it was exhausting. I finally ended up with a case of nervous fatigue, as a result of my polite listening. Years of hearing how hard writing should be, must be, would be, would become, were very demoralizing and actually made it hard.

Particularly difficult about listening to these exhortations was that there was no evidence for any of my interlocutors’ worries. The more I wrote and published, the more they told me they were sure I would stop. What are these people seeing, that I do not? I would wonder. That was the frightening aspect of it.

6. Faithlessness, destructiveness, general neurosis. My advice to graduate students is rather unlike the advice given in the many posts which exist on the matter, and which say: learn to be discreet, learn to “suck it up.” I would say, do not internalize abuse. Have faith in yourself and your judgment; take care of yourself; have a good time.

Especially if your academic skills are good, as mine were when I started graduate school, do not listen to people who give scary or worrying advice. They may say their goal is to help you, but their assumptions about you may be erroneous, and their actual objective may be destabilization. Conversations which are unsettling may not have been just a rough learning experience. They may have been destructive and unhealthy.

7. If you have academic skills, use them, and do as you see fit. For yourself at least, question authority. Finally, never be afraid to ask for information – especially about how things work or how they are done.

III

DISCLAIMER: This advice does not apply, of course, to people without the requisite intellectual abilities and academic skills to be in graduate school, or the requisite social skills to be on the planet.

Also, this text reflects very clearly that I had not understood or resolved my own issues concerning emotional abuse when I went to graduate school and became a professor. From what I have observed in academic life, however, I am hardly the only one who had not or did not. For this reason, one of the things I am very serious about is not passing that down to yet another generation.

Finally, I am not one of those who tries to recruit people into graduate school. I only advise into graduate school people who have very obviously caught le désir académique. As in medieval romances, if you have already drunk the love potion, the only remedy is love itself.

Axé.