I'm on leave for the next several weeks, so I have queued up a series of "reboot" posts, revisiting evergreen material of mine from this blog and other corners of the interwebs. Today I'm sharing some perspectives I aired during a panel about diverse academics and mentoring earlier this year. [1]
Me in my crunchy-hippie undergrad phase (left), then my transdisciplinary artist-writer phase a decade later (during grad school, right).
I didn't go to graduate school until 10+ years after undergrad.
I actually never intended to go to graduate school, until it happened. Once I was there, I got lucky -- my advisors and program were fairly hands-off but quite supportive. I got a lot out of my program, though not everything. The flip side is I learned a lot of things I didn't know I needed to. And, my degree and experience doing it set me up for the (long, stressful, and unpredictable) path I'm on professionally now.
All that has led me to a conclusion: Graduate school is a great thing for you, if and when it is.
But, if you've been around academia very long, graduate school takes on an element of inevitability or even urgency. There's a "has to happen" vibe that implies you can't be who you need to be or want to be in the world without one or multiple graduate degree(s).
I think we need to squash that.
Grad school is not the only way to be a person who makes a difference in the world. Grad school can actually make you feel like you can't make any difference at all in the world.
I talk to a lot of grad students because I am a non-tenure-track faculty member, and I just don't fit the mold, and I don't supervise students. So, I'm a semi-safe person to talk to in my department and in my field. And a lot of students come to me saying, "I don't know what to do." Indeed, we have a lot of grad students who wind up in a crisis of some sort or another while they are in grad school. And I say wind up, because few of these crises are self-inflicted and a lot of them are systemically inflicted.
The sub-text of what many grad students say is, "I feel trapped." This is realistic. Graduate school is indentured servitude. We pay these students hardly anything while they are overworked and subject to an individual faculty member's willingness to connect them with their future (or not). Let's stop pretending they are supposed to feel like they have any control in this.
At the same time, what I tell every student who seeks me out is this: it's really vital that every day, you wake up and choose to be a graduate student. [2] It's important to know that sometimes things work out. Sometimes you get bailed out in a really important way, and you get a chance to try again.
But sometimes, you decide that you need to stop being a graduate student, for now, for a while, or for always.
And that is an okay choice to entertain. Because sometimes, it's the choice you absolutely need to be considering. You can feel stuck because of the circumstances. But, as long as you retain a sense of your own agency about what you need, you can attend to what you need in the world and who you are trying to be. What you considered doing before you came to grad school is certainly something to think about.
But also, you can consider what you need to do now.
What I'm saying is: the people who are most at risk in this system should not be the people who have to make the changes needed to make the system better. [3] Sometimes, what you need to do is get out of a bad situation.
Meanwhile, some of us (like non-tenure-track faculty) may have only a small, relative bit more privilege. But that relative difference does mean that some of us can influence some things somewhat more than a student might be able to. If we want students to feel like they have the agency to make change in their degree programs, universities, and the world, we need to ensure that students do not feel like they have to be the ones who make things better. (Especially because a lot of times they categorically can't.) In those cases, we need an offramp that we can offer students, so they can leave if they choose to. [4]
NOTES
[1] This 'Diverse Faculty Panel' was sponsored by our Graduate School and now-demolished Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. You can watch a full recording of our panel discussion here.
[2] I know some students don't have quite the same flexibility in those choices. (Many students are here on a visa to be a graduate student, and there's a lot more in the balance there.)
[3] Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein has my favorite take on the conundrum of grad students trying to make academia better, and what's at stake if they don't prioritize becoming a technical expert first. If I ran our first-semester cohort course for master's or PhD students, this would be required reading (toward the end of the term, when the morass of grad school is more apparent).
[4] I'm really emphasizing student choice here. Getting pushed out, fleeing toxicity, self-mentoring through a grad degree when you've been more-or-less abandoned, and the like, are not situations of student agency. We need to stop masking them as such (see again Dr. Prescod-Weinstein on abuse of grad students). Instead, we must take responsibility and programmatic action to offer students internal alternatives and options to leave when they opt to. One tool for that is the climate survey that I co-led with numerous faculty, students, and postdocs in our department. We published it so there's a starting point for other departments wanting to understand what needs work and what needs to be sustained in their own units and programs.
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