What an important question, anon! I don’t know if what I have are “thoughts” and I’m almost certain
What an important question, anon! I don’t know if what I have are “thoughts” and I’m almost certain that “advice” would be false advertising, but I can offer a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions that don’t even have the good grace to wait for a spot of tranquility to be recollected in. The tortuous shape of this previous sentence ought to provide you with some sense of how unqualified I am to answer this; but if you promise not to give any more weight to what I say than “person on the Internet talks about personal experiences”, then… here are those personal experiences.GRAD SCHOOL IN ENGLISH IS a vastly different experience for students depending on what institution they are at, what subfield they concentrate in, which professors they deal with on a daily basis, and a thousand other unique circumstances. Yes, we study texts (and even that’s not a blanket statement I would put any money on), but it’s people that admit us, teach us, learn from us, evaluate our work, create the conditions of our work, approve us for fellowship funding, talk about us to other professors, hire us, fire us, place us in tenure-track positions. Life is a rich tapestry of people, and so any one student’s experience in a grad program is most likely to differ greatly from another.I think it might also be useful to take a diathesis-stress model into consideration here. Even if grad school were a very particular kind of stressor, everyone is predisposed to react to it in different ways! So even if you were to enter my program, do what I do, and have my advisor for your advisor, you could very well find that experience to be 100% better or 100% worse than I did. It really sucks that you can’t tell for sure whether grad school is a good fit for you or not until you’ve been in it for about a year– a lot of people I know have been dropping out lately, and are happier for it. I’ll do my best to talk in safe generalizations, but “should I go to grad school or not?” is, of course, only a question you can answer for yourself.THE PROS OF GRAD SCHOOL mostly have to do with the fact that you are your own boss. Especially in the humanities where you aren’t part of a lab, your advisor is mostly there to point you towards resources and inform you about the up-to-date inner workings of the field. You choose your own interests, create your own projects, and set your own hours. There’s no one looking over your shoulder at all hours of the day and yelling at you for doing a bad job.It’s also a relatively slow-paced environment. You’re not racing against the clock to save someone’s life, unless there’s some really harrowing subfield of English that I didn’t know about. There are deadlines, and certainly most conference papers are written on the plane en route to the conference, but overall it’s not a frenetic life.The flexibility of your schedule means that you can be more attentive to self-care. If you’re physically ill, you have the right to stay home and recuperate; it’s not like there are clients that absolutely require your presence at the office. If you’re having a psychologically garbage day, you can always put your work aside for tomorrow. Any professor that doesn’t make allowances for how taxing grad school can be on emotional health – or doesn’t trust a grown-ass adult to understand and honestly represent their own condition – has shitty empathy skills and is thus an immediate failure as a professor of the humanities.I think nearly everyone that applies to grad school in English is sincerely passionate about literature, so I’ll skip the “you get to do what you love for a living!” pitch here. For one, I don’t feel that way about English, not exactly – I mean, I love it a lot, but if I loved it that much it would be too closely linked to my self-esteem and I would be too stressed out about it – and moreover, I think that rhetoric often forces students into accepting unhappiness as a matter of course. Just because you like reading and grad school involves a lot of reading doesn’t mean that you need to be thankful for a situation that might actually be making you acutely miserable.You get a stipend, which ought to be enough to live on, in most cities. Don’t enroll in an unfunded terminal MA program unless you have more money than you know what to do with, or unless you badly need the experience before PhD level work (if so, there’s no shame in that! I suppose there’s also no shame in having stacks of money lying around your home, either).THE CONS OF GRAD SCHOOL mostly have to do with the fact that you are your own boss. I never thought I was one for routines and schedules, but during my years in grad school I’ve been steadily adding rituals on top of each other just to keep myself sane and marginally productive. I’m inclined to be lazy, so a day can devolve very quickly into “I was in bed until 2PM and then it was too late to do anything but watch old West Wing episodes and eat a bag of walnuts for dinner” unless I’m careful. The worst thing is that a day like this doesn’t even make you feel relaxed or recharged, you know! It’s a vicious trash circle.You are also almost certain to have your emotional health assaulted. What I’ve been struggling with for the past couple of months isn’t exactly a mental health issue, and isn’t caused by grad school– but I’m someone with no family or personal history of mental illness, I have a great support network, I don’t let professional performance affect my happiness, and EVEN SO, I can think of a hundred ways in which not being in grad school could have made (could be making) my situation better.The worst enemy here is impostor syndrome, which you probably know about. I think the only reason why I have been immune to that particular problem is that – like I mentioned above – my academic work isn’t tied to my self-esteem. There’s some benefit to not doing your favorite thing for a living! But that makes me an outlier, and all of the absolute best scholars I know have grappled with impostor syndrome no matter how much professional success they’ve had.There’s very little sense of immediate accomplishment, which is why so many PhD students in English take up knitting. Most of your days will be spent leafing through endless mountains of reading material, and you’ll maybe write a couple hundred words if you have an article or a paper due soon. At some point you’ll decide to go to bed, but when you turn the lights off, there’s nothing you can touch to prove that you did a whole day’s worth of work. You know you could have done more. You always could have done more.Remember that hypothetical professor with shitty empathy skills from earlier? They are not the norm, but they do exist, which is why it’s so important to attend an institution that you feel comfortable at. “Intellectual rigor” is like, whatever, okay. Fuck that noise. Don’t put yourself through five+ years of agony just because you were under the misapprehension that a decent human being couldn’t also have high standards and give you useful advice. Your advisor doesn’t need to make you feel like shit about yourself to help you improve, and working under someone like that is the shortest path to having a complete breakdown.You are not guaranteed a job. Well, it’s not like one would be guaranteed a job anywhere outside of academia either, but… very few positions will be open for your chosen area of interest (whatever it may be), there will be too many qualified people, and if you are lucky you will probably end up with a professorship in a state that you never even thought you were going to drive through. Job search season will fuck up every single one of us.Too many people around you will think you aren’t doing “real work”, which will hurt even more because on many days even you will feel like you aren’t doing “real work”. Not only is this demeaning and insulting, it is also dangerous because it leads people (some of them in administrative positions, in charge of your well-being!) to assume that you do not require the support that others do. How can you be unhappy when you decided to apply to be there? How can you be tired when all you do is sit and read? Sometimes you don’t know how to answer these questions, but what you do know is that you are unhappy, and tired, and you’ve been staring at a computer screen for sixteen hours too afraid to type anything because everything you type will be wrong and you are sick to death of words and none of this makes any sense and you just want to burn your room down and move to a cabin where you have a circular saw and a plank of wood that will help you make something beautiful that does something you understand.SO I GUESS WHAT I MEAN TO SAY IS, grad school is a place where you are given more freedom to take care of yourself than lots of other places, but you really have to take that responsibility into your own hands. You’re going to have to insist that you deserve happiness, and that what you’re doing is worthwhile. I’m a big believer in feelings of validation, but there’s not much of that going on in grad school.Grad school in English has precious little to do with English, because presumably anyone who dislikes the discipline isn’t thinking of sinking more than half a decade into its pursuit. The things you will have to wrestle with, whether before application or after acceptance, are things that have to do with living a life while also coincidentally doing academic work on the side. Is this a city that I would be okay with living in for this long? Are these professors people that I can be vulnerable with? Can I hold myself accountable for my own productivity? Will I be able to recognize when I need to pause, step back, and take a breath?Anon, the thing that I really just want all of us to come back to is our own happiness and health. Nothing else matters half as much. I’ve complained a lot in this post, but I do it because I hate the romanticization of intellectual labor; doing this doesn’t promise us happiness, and suffering is not a virtue.Am I happy doing this? Yeah. I really really really like teaching, so I’ve decided to put up with a lot of bullshit for that look on a freshman’s face when close reading starts to make sense to them for the first time. That doesn’t mean the bullshit isn’t bullshit, though.I’m always here for any more questions– for instance, about the technical and nitty-gritty aspects of grad school, if you’ve already made your way through the whole will-this-make-me-happy minefield. “How do I do all of my reading?” YOU DON’T. “Do I have to buy all these books?” NO. “What if I’m in danger of missing a deadline?” DROP TO YOUR KNEES AND BEG FORGIVENESS, BUT IT’S GOING TO BE OKAY.Godspeed, friend! -- source link
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