(This is the cover of a book I bought at an estate sale in Corrales this weekend. It has nice colors and attractive typography, but it has nothing to do with graduate school. However, it made a better picture than this, which has everything to do with graduate school.)
There’s been a lot to mull over lately here at the apartment. [1] There’s the increasingly shit-ward tilt of the American economy, bisected by the sheer impossibility of getting my health insurance to pay for anything without an afternoon’s worth of phone calls on my part, which then meets up with the continuing tediousness and horror of the election, and all of this is topped off with this, for Christ’s sake. [2]
I’ve also been thinking a lot about my own future, about graduate school, and what I want to do with myself after this year. As I’ve mentioned previously, this is my last year of funding from the university. After this, all of my tuition, research, and other things is going to have to be self-financed (through savings or work — I refuse to take out student loans) or paid for by fellowships and other grants. This is the point, I’ve heard, where people really decide if they want a Ph.D or not: your classwork is done, your exams are completed, and all that’s left is one enormous task that hinges greatly on your own self-discipline and all the enthusiasm you can generate for your topic.
When I entered graduate school in 2004, I was certain that I wanted the job that I am being trained for, that I wanted to be a college professor. After all, my dad is one, and although he complains about his committee work and the way that his job sometimes gets in the way of his real interests (skiing and beer), he seems fairly satisfied with his work. From adolescence onward, I wanted to be either a professor or a journalist, since I wanted to write for a living, to be able to be paid to do research on interesting topics, and spend my time with smart colleagues talking about nerdy, nerdy, nerdy things. Those basic goals haven’t changed. However, now, at the beginning of my fifth year of grad school, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be a professor.
You might expect me to attribute this to all of the familiar factors: the crappy job market, the fact that you often end up living in crap towns in crap states for your first few jobs, the low pay. However, I knew about these issues, and accepted them, back when I started grad school. If I wanted to be a professor, these are just the things that I would have to endure. My decision is based more on the fact that the job just doesn’t appeal to me any more. I’m a decent teacher, but I don’t have the passion for teaching that I think my potential students deserve. I enjoy research and writing, but grad school has taught me that I’m more of a dilettante than a specialist, more of a concrete thinker than a theorist. While I remain interested in The Research Topic, and hope to incorporate the ideas and conclusions I generate while working on it into whatever it is I end up doing for a living, I don’t live/breath/eat/drink it like it seems I should be. More importantly, though, I’ve come to the realization that place is important to me. There are particular places that I want to live, and I’m unlikely to get a job in any of these places — the geographical nomadism of the modern academic is unacceptable to me. I envision myself ending up in places where it’s humid, or expensive, or, worse of all, somewhere up in the northern latitudes where my seasonal affective disorder will come back with a vengeance. [3] It’s that, more than anything, I think, that’s calling me to do something else with my life.
I came up with the title of this post, based on several things: conversations with some friends of mine this weekend (friends who are not in graduate school, but are looking to apply for it), a comment left by Chez Shoes on the last post, and, oddly enough, parts of this post, written by an author I usually cannot stand. [4] Together, these conversations and writings reminded me of some of the other reasons that I went to graduate school (besides wanting to be a professor). I felt stuck in my then-career, and I was uninspired by what I did every day. I felt like I was missing out on some of my nebulous “potential,” and I missed having a group of peers who were similar to me. Grad school, intended career track aside, was a way of filling some holes in my life — in this sense, I was swayed by the thought of being a professor and by what I’ll call The Fantasy of Graduate School.
Now, let me point out that I’ve really enjoyed grad school so far. I haven’t regretted going yet, and I don’t see myself ever regretting the years I’ve spent here in ABQ. Grad school is actually pretty fun and easy, at least until you get to the dissertation part. (This may be a result of my choice of school: my department is relatively function, people tend to get along, and there’s not a lot of pressure to compete with the other grad students.) You get to read a lot of books (even though I didn’t like most of the ones I’ve read), you get to talk about these books with other people, people who are interested in the same sorts of topics you are. Most of the fun of graduate school, for me, has not been the actual work — rather, it’s been the social aspects, such as getting to talk about history, beer, popular culture, beer, and department gossip with other smart, interesting people. I get to hang out a lot of the day with people who share my interests and who have senses of humor similar to mine. I get to travel to conferences in semi-exciting places, see people talk about their work, talk to people whose books I liked, and then eat and drink a lot of beer with friends and people I’ve just met.
But this is key, I think, to understanding The Fantasy of Graduate School. My friends that I talked to this weekend are, like I was before I began school here in ABQ, feel somewhat underappreciated in their working life. They feel like they’re not quite right for the things that they do for a living, that there’s a disconnect between the things they like and what they believe and their activities eight or ten hours of each weekday. Graduate school is, I’m convinced, as much about finding a new peer group, finding a new source of validation, as it is about getting a particular credential or traveling down a specific career path. Before I returned to school, I had a pretty decent job. I was a technical editor/writer/something (among other things — when your office only has 3 or 4 full-time employees, all of which have equally undefined job titles, you all end up answering the phone or ordering office supplies more than you’d like) at a scientific consulting firm in — get this — the petroleum industry. It paid well, although there really weren’t any benefits (I was considered a contractor), and it had flexible hours. It just wasn’t right for me, though. I worked with good people, but we really didn’t have much in common other than that we all, oddly, tended to drive Toyotas. Some of them were extremely passionate about oil shale or horizontal drilling, and, while I could appreciate their passion, it was hard for me to share. Had I been living somewhere else, somewhere where I had a wider group of friends, this might not have been a problem, but I wasn’t a good fit for Grand Junction, either (and never have been). Grad school, for me, represented not only a way to create a desired career for myself, but also a way to find others who liked nerdy knowledge, had similar political views, and shared my beliefs in the importance of education, knowledge, and decent-quality beer.
Grad school also offers a sort of validation that, in my experience, is often difficult to get in the working world. Grad school, in some ways, is all about you. What topics are you interested in? How are you interpreting this book that we all had to read? What research do you plan to do this summer? How are you going to contribute to the field as a whole? Where undergrad classes were often driven by the need to follow a particular curriculum and fit classes into required slots, grad school is, save a few required classes, completely up to you. You can get away with a lot in grad school, if you can make it fit into your plans for The Research Topic. You can play around with ideas, and argue for things you believe in (or play around with ideas you don’t necessarily believe in). You get to dig through archives, and unearth documents people haven’t looked at in years. Sure, there’s papers to write and tedious seminars to sit through, and some of your fellow graduate students will be extremely annoying, but grad school presents you with far more opportunities to promote yourself, develop your own ideas, and act in your own interests than most jobs do, even good ones.
So, in my mind, that’s a lot of why I went to grad school, and why I’ve enjoyed it. Grad school is an opportunity for intellectual and personal development that’s often lacking in the world of regular employment. It offers an antidote to the often dull, impersonal reality of most jobs. And there’s nothing wrong with this — there’s nothing wrong with going to school to learn new things, meet new people, read a lot of books and drink a lot of beer. There are people in my department with exactly this goal, like my friend R., who went to grad school after a long career just because he really likes to talk about history and shoot the shit with other smart people. There’s just a mismatch between the experience of graduate school, or at least my experience in grad school, and the ostensible aims of graduate school (at least in the humanities — I think it should be clear here that I’m mainly talking about grad school in history or English, or, God forbid, American Studies, here) — to produce a pool of new professors to stock the few openings at colleges and universities nationwide.
There should be more opportunities in life to find smart friends and develop your own interests as an adult than there are. Often, I think people’s models for how to do this are centered around school — high school, college, whatever — because it was easy to meet people and you were encouraged, required to develop your ideas and promote yourself. I think it’s natural for certain types of people — people like myself: smart, idiosyncratic, overeducated, interested in a wide range of things — to look to furthering their education as a means not only to another career, but to finding a place where they feel they fit in. This, I think, is The Fantasy of Graduate School.
That was a lot of writing. And now, some links:
A Republican says something stupid, unsurprisingly. Now, if you try to express that freedom by walking, bicycling, or wanting more and better public transportation, you’re a communist.
Sometimes free things aren’t worth the price, given the hassle.
A week or so ago, BoingBoing featured a post about Casa Bonita, to prove that it was actually a real place. The popularity of that post resulted in an open thread about memories of 1960s and 1970s Denver, which, oddly enough, mentions a lot of the things I remember from watching Denver TV in the 1980s (we didn’t have any good local channels in GJ when I was growing up, so my parents quite pointedly watched the city channels) and living there in the 1990s. Most of the things discussed are still there.
This collection of presidential-campaign logos from 1960 to 2008 proves that there is a narrow range of permitted colors in American political discourse. (My favorite is the light-blue-and-white, lowercase Lloyd Bentsen logo from the 1970s.)
The Rogue Columnist, who often has smart things to say about cities and urban development (and satisfactorily bad things to say about Phoenix), has a good list of what’s wrong, exactly, with the American economy.
[1] Back when I was taking classes, I didn’t have time to mull over things.
[2] Strangely enough, I just recommended Infinite Jest to someone last week. My friend M. was looking for something new to read, preferably something long and absorbing, so I suggested it to her. I told her that it was about many things, but one of those things was sports (tennis, to be specific) — M.’s interested in sports history. She didn’t buy it (I think she picked Kidnapped instead, but I told her I would lend it to her. This might take a while, since I started reading it again — it, like Pavement albums, reminds me of my years of underemployment in the mid-1990s. I bought my copy with a gift certificate that I received for Christmas (I also bought the Anthology of American Folk Music, which is the other thing that everyone I knew received for Christmas/Hanukkah/other major gift-giving obligations that year). I read it while spending six weeks in Seattle with my then-boyfriend, feeling sick, being broke, and generally lacking ways to constructively spend my time. Each day, I walked from his house to downtown, spent hours in coffee shops reading page after page of IJ, marvelling at its language, and the sense of humor and absurdity inherent in each page. For some reason, I would be in such a fog of fiction afterwards that I would inevitably miss the bus home and have to walk all the way up Queen Anne Hill to where I was staying. I did a lot of walking and smoking those six weeks.
[3] When I was in Portland in August, I enjoyed myself enough to think, hey, why don’t I consider moving back? This was because it was summer — had I visited in January, I think the deep-seated memories of the two very non-functional winters I spent in the Pacific Northwest would return. I don’t need to live somewhere warm, but I do need to live somewhere where there is sun in the winter.
[4] Exhibit one: this post. But, the feeling of Hey, I have a book in me! is similar to Hey, I should go to graduate school! in some ways. I too, have a book idea in me — I would have to buy a better camera, and take a bunch of time off to travel around to complete it. This is probably why the idea is even extant in my brain.
