J ob-market woes, mental illness, and unionization seem to be all we read anymore about the graduate-school experience. There’s no shortage of advice on those fronts from professors and administrators. But as a doctoral student, I’d like to focus on some common apprehensions about graduate school that get far less attention.
We rarely hear from graduate students about these pressures, so we experience them as private struggles, rarely dissected in departments or journals. I’m referring to three in particular: the overwhelming pressure graduate students feel to know something about everything; the tendency to constantly measure our CVs against our peers’ (and be found wanting); and the pessimism about our own work that has become almost fashionable.
Those misapprehensions can fester even in the most collegial of departments. They are the traditional anxieties of doctoral study, and may even be necessary to some degree as we carve out our intellectual outlooks. But many graduate students lack the confidence of the hired, the tenured, the published, and the expert to make these struggles bearable. We harbor a creeping suspicion that we somehow missed the “How to Be a Graduate Student 101" seminar that everyone else obviously took. I propose to my fellow lonesome graduate students that we normalize our fears. Instead of an outlook of anxiety and self-criticism, perhaps we should try to establish one of hope and optimism.
You can’t learn everything. In 2014, Matthew Might, an associate professor of computing at the University of Utah, published his popular graphic, “The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D.,” depicting the scholar funneling through circles of all human knowledge until, after years of struggle, the Ph.D. makes a minuscule “dent” into new frontiers of inquiry. For all its value in depicting the importance of sheer determination, this image also captures something unspoken in graduate education: the pressure to know everything. Through years of comprehensives, unclear demands for “original” research, and obsessive attrition numbers, we come to imagine the ideal academic as someone who can hold forth on anything. That circle of knowledge is populated by minds curious enough to want to know it all, but flash-steamed in a culture that ruthlessly crucifies not-knowing and under-citing.
Rebecca Schuman touched on that culture in an essay for Slate, writing, “Rule No. 1 of Grad School Fight Club is that you never admit that you don’t know something in public. (‘Oh, Phenomenology of Spirit? I’ll have to re-read that this semester.’)”
We endlessly dissect how much we know and think we need to know, all the while stumbling through personal, curricular, and administrative confusion. We spend more time wondering what a bibliographic essay is than enthusiastically learning its vocabularies and implications. Departments wage battle over the rigor of the comprehensive examination with rare student input. Tales of absent advisers and original essays languishing in publishing limbo leave graduate students wondering about the dictums of modern knowledge-making.
Back when I was a first-year master’s student facing my comprehensive exams, I felt surrounded by fellow students who — when our various intellectual hobbies were taken together — presumably represented the collective knowledge of the ages. I felt horribly inadequate, spent three hours a day on the comp list, and read with increasing fever until I realized I had retained little. It was six months after comps before the sight of a Barnes & Noble, with its shelves of unread material, didn’t leave a pit in my stomach. Too many graduate students know that needling sickness upon hearing of a new book or inquiry.
Breathe: It’s normal. We learn from scholars who have spent longer on texts and practices than we’ve been able to read. We all have that peer whose mind just “gets” academic theory, and we all face a billowing explosion of digitized archives that daily increases the knowable at our fingertips.
Yet much can be gained by discerning institutional ways yourself, drawing your own (temporary) boundaries, and wondering when to stop. You don’t need to know it all. Yes, learn as much as you can. This may be the one time in your life to read all day and debate over Foucault for hours. But my recent encounter with an all-knowing super-celebrity in my field revealed how little total knowledge can yield personal happiness. As an act of humility and courage, discover what it is OK for you not to know. Let your soul into your research.
CV’ing up with the Joneses. Maybe you’re in your cubicle. You’re happily doing research on your next chapter when you overhear that so-and-so placed an article in a major journal, or won a prestigious fellowship. Suddenly your whole day changes. You’ve got to finish that article, scrounge the Internet for elite conferences you can attend next week, and rethink your entire project. Ask any graduate student: No well-written paragraph can equal hours of angsty CV-stroking for a sense of emotional calm.
Read with addiction, write with abandon, and talk about your shared, human, problems.
Stop obsessing. Think about this: Graduate students are like runners. I encounter a variety of people on my running route, and we take turns overtaking one another. My knee twinges, and sometimes I lose my breathing rhythm. Yet our running forms all look generally similar. Slow, fast, eccentric, and elegant, we all move forward with arms and legs swaying. We often run through the pain, trying to keep our heads up. When you pass me, I rarely know how long you’ve been out, your goals for the day, or the pain you feel.
Like runners, graduate students also pursue a singular, skills-based path that confounds nonpractitioners. (“The last time I ran, my house was on fire,” offered a friend once of my running, but he could just as easily have been talking about reading John Donne.) Like graduate students, runners negotiate discomfort to develop new muscles, and should probably drink more water. Crucially, no two share the same goals. Like running, academic skills serve a variety of purposes. Some of us finish the race in two or three years on a short track to nonacademic work in advising, publishing, or grant writing. Others pursue the marathon of a Ph.D., tenure, academic monographs, and directorships.
But graduate-school culture hides that diversity of purpose. Departments applaud alt-ac careers and nontraditional dissertations but fail to alter their own placement expectations and are too slow to widen the field of respectable intellectual labor. We deify the academic journal and allow academic publishers to evade tough questions at conference symposia with responses like “Your advisers should be telling you this.” Graduate-school culture writes off inconsistent standards as charmingly academic. It muffles rejection. As Devoney Looser writes, “Rejection is something you’re supposed to learn by experience, and then keep entirely quiet about.” Looser’s essay offers a helpful “shadow CV,” recording all the rejections and criticisms that preceded her successes. Unhelpfully, academic work emblazons CVs on departmental ramparts alongside one another, where they alternate between badges of honor and Swords of Damocles, at any point landing that job or skewering you to your own ego.
In a profession where exceptional scholars work as adjuncts and alt-ac booms, you cannot compare yourself with others. I spent years working toward my current post, constantly haunted by the lingering fear that I wasn’t doing enough. Keep at it: Submit essays relentlessly, present wherever you can, teach lots of different courses. But remember: Your track is singular. You will watch your peers find total fulfillment through tenure, alt-ac, and abandoning academe altogether. Recognize that all of those doors in academe that read “Authorized Personnel Only” are only awaiting your push.
Don’t read PhD Comics. OK, read PhD Comics. It’s savvy, honest, and a great way to normalize your struggles. But don’t fetishize your struggles.
I would never diminish clinical struggles or mental abuse. Jessica Langer vivisects here the clogging atmosphere of academe with its brutal conditions of “constant self-surveillance and self-criticism.” But years of graduate work have shown me how easy it is for the stress of the seemingly endless hoops we face in graduate study to justify a hypercritical-pessimistic mentality.
We end up treating the grading, writing, testing, and job searching — for which we voluntarily applied — as inherited and undeserved injuries undermining those whose intelligence demands that they pursue the study of literature, philosophy, art history.
But I think we too often use that pessimism to valorize self-doubts, poor habits, and defeatism — things that ultimately stem from our personalities and pasts, not the constraints of graduate life. A recent panel of PhD Comics featured a draft thesis humorously plaguing a student in her sleep with reminders to write. The strip playfully represents our writing guilt, our unsustainable pressure to be writing all the time, and the tiny truth that, yes, you actually could be writing all the time.
But nobody writes all the time. Even the most prolific scholar I know gets less than 20 hours a week of actual writing. He learned to identify his most productive hours, organize thoughts in his head, and commit to routine. I think reading PhD Comics too much — and group-ragging too often in the grad office, and posting too many “didn’t write this weekend but look how clean my apartment is!” Facebook posts — trains our minds to treat the guilt as part of the landscape.
Let off some steam. Have that glass of wine after your article gets rejected. But then, go make a habit. For every gripe you see, write another sentence. For every gripe you want to make, skim a chapter. Defeat the landscape.
Here’s how to hope in graduate school: Read with addiction, write with abandon, and talk about your shared, human, problems.
