We have this idea that smart people belong in school. It’s as though we think that somehow school is the very best use of their talents, their ideas, their innovation. We think smartness is rarified, special, different, and so it must be kept in a place that is rarified, special, different.
If the last twenty years have taught us anything, however, it’s the power of smart people outside of school.
Steve Jobs? While I wouldn’t want to sit next to him at a cocktail party, I’m not sure anyone can deny that he’s really fucking smart. Atul Gawande? Really fucking smart. Joan Didion? Really fucking smart. Thich Naht Hahn? Really fucking smart.
All of these people — and countless others — have changed the world by bringing their smartness to bear on questions, contemplations, and innovations outside the classroom, outside the lecture hall, outside the lab, outside the venerated halls of thinkers. And we are better for it.
So why are we holding on to the idea that the place for smart people is school? And why are we telling ourselves that if we’re smart, we must necessarily go for the highest degree possible?
So often, that degree is supposed to reassure us that we’re smart. It’s supposed to be the unassailable proof that we’re smart, so that if we screw something up, if we make a mistake, if we try something and fall flat on our face, we can still point to the degree to prove that we’re really smart, underneath whatever just happened. And we’re mostly convincing ourselves.
What if we were able to sit in ourselves and have confidence in our own smartness, enough to follow our hearts to what we really want to do instead of what we’re expected to do? What if we were able to trust that screwing up while we experiment is, in fact, part of our smartness? What if we would could bring our smartness to bear on whatever it is that makes us passionately, excitedly happy?
For some people, yes, that will be academia. But not everyone. And if you’re in academia or contemplating academia because you’re smart and people think that, therefore, you belong in academia, please, consider what you want and where you fit into the world.
Because we need your smartness. It just may be even smarter to put it to use elsewhere.
Thanks to Jo VanEvery and Sam Ladner for the Twitter conversation that sparked this!
I told you a while back that my wife is starting graduate school in the fall. Theological school to be exact, and last week we went to the first orientation meeting.
In some ways it was entirely standard: These are the classes you need to take in your first thirty hours, here’s how you register, here’s how the money part of it works, please don’t mess up your student aid, really we’re all here to help you so please ask for help before you drown.
What wasn’t standard (for me in my experience of academia, not for them) was the praying, the references to the Holy Spirit, and the singing. (I’m pretty grateful my entering class did not sing at orientation. I heard them sing later, under different influences. It was all for the best.)
Two things stood out for me, though, in this orientation, two things that I think academia as a whole could do better to emulate.
Thing the first
First, the entering students were told to think about what they would have to give up in their lives for graduate school. This wasn’t particularly original, but the tone of it was. When I’ve heard this advice before, it was in the spirit of lovers throwing themselves at the feet of the beloved — you should want nothing more than this, and anything less than total dedication is a sign that you don’t love it enough.
Here, though, the advice had a different cadence. This is likely the only time, they said, when you have the opportunity to do nothing other than study. Most people who get the PhD in this field do so while working as ministers, so they’re part-time students while juggling full congregations. This three-year period really may be the only time to immerse themselves so wholly in the intellectual and spiritual engagement with the subject.
In some ways, this is also true of non-theological-graduate school — despite all of our myths to the contrary, professoring is anything but sitting around and thinking Great Thoughts. Publishing, teaching, and service are all necessary and even rewarding, but they aren’t the same as immersing oneself in the field and swimming around gladly. The early years of graduate school may be the only time that’s possible, with all of the stress and pleasure that come with it.
What this amounted to, in her orientation, was a focus on the experience and goals of the students themselves. Discipline, I’ve heard said, is remembering what you really want, and they talked about focusing on what you really want and prioritizing that during this period.
That raises the question, though, of what you really want. It’s a question too few graduate students ask themselves as they get caught up in the flow of graduate school and the expectations and ambitions of advisers and professors and administrators.
I’d argue, though, that it’s a crucial question — no matter where you are in the process. What do YOU want from this experience, this process, this degree? Why is that important to you? And how can you arrange things to meet your own goals and expectations.
Thing the second
In contrast to programs that ask you to declare your subspeciality as you walk in (more and more common these days), this program admitted from the outset that as students experienced the program, their goals, their ambitions, and their career paths would change. Because they would be learning and growing.
This is another one of those things that varies (um, like everything, really), but the impetus in most graduate programs is the Creation of Professional Academics. Everything is geared towards that end, despite the long history of degree overproduction and despite the obvious evidence that not everyone wants that outcome for themselves.
There is no way to go to graduate school and remain unchanged. It’s too long, it’s too immersive, it’s too mind-bending. But it was refreshing to see a program acknowledge and plan for the fact that people will change in ways they didn’t expect. They will become people they didn’t foresee.
All of which is to say, if you’re starting out, expect your own unexpected growth. And if you’re already in or through, it’s okay that you changed in ways that didn’t fit the linear model.
Everything in its season
Both of these themes suggest something else as well: That there will be a point at which you add things back in, because your goals are met, your changes experienced, your life in a new place.
I’ve seen too many academics come up for air and realize that they’re unhappy, not because they hate their jobs, but because they have lost contact with all of those other parts of themselves — their creativity, their joy, their playfulness, their sense of fun, their ability to relax.
It’s easy to defer them. You’ll relax once the dissertation is defended. You’ll return to your hobbies once you have a job.You’ll embark on that new thing that looks fascinating when you have tenure. There’s always something else pressing, something else important.
But if you’re unhappy, it’s worth looking at what you’ve given up, and what it might be time to add back into your daily experience of life. Because no matter where you are in the process, this IS your real life. This is the only one you have. And if you’re unhappy, it’s time to make change.
I read a fascinating post the other day about the difference between a manager’s schedule and a maker’s schedule. Here’s the gist of it:
There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.
When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done.
Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.
When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.
For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.
Naturally, this made me think of academe. (What else do I think about, you ask? Good question.)
The problem of both
One of the challenges of academia is you’re never just a manager or just a maker — you’re both.
In your role as teacher, adviser, and administrator, you’re on manager time. Tasks can usually be broken down into half-hour intervals, and often we’re grateful to break them down into shorter intervals just to put some boundaries around them and avoid drowning. (See: grading.) Meetings abound, and you’re generally running hither and yon with a few stops to chat with people doing the same.
In your role as researcher, however, you’re on maker time. Sure, running a database search for relevant articles may be able to fit into manager time, but brainstorming, reading, thinking, and writing are all tasks that work best when you’ve got nice chunky slots of uninterrupted time.
Which means it’s kind of no wonder that most academics bemoan an inability to get research done. It’s not just avoidance or bad time-management. It’s a lack of the kind of time that best allows for getting that work done.
Yes, people do manage it
I know some rockin’ mama professors who manage to schedule time and work on their research and writing with focus — and they get a lot done. If you can do that, power to you.
If, however, you need longer stretches of time in order to get momentum on your project, knowing that is half the solution.
The other half is finding / making those stretches of time appear at regular intervals.
Planning, planning, planning
It’s easy to get caught up in the “as soon as I do X” sort of thinking. As soon as I’m done with this grading, I’ll make time. As soon as I’m off of this committee, I’ll make time. As soon as this personal problem resolves, I’ll make time.
The problem is that this isn’t so much “making” time as “finding” time — and believing in a mythical future when there won’t be as many demands on the time you do have.
That may work in the “as soon as the semester is over and I can hibernate for three months” situation, and in fact, frontloading all other work during the school year and keeping the summer free for research works for many people. (Beware the need to teach for summer salary, however.)
But if summer brings kids home from school or the need to teach or family obligations or whatever, then making time is your best bet.
That might mean setting aside one day a week for research and writing. It may mean sitting down on Sunday night and blocking out a morning or afternoon (whatever happens to work that week) and planning to get tasks done around it. It may mean clustering other tasks and activities so that stretches of time previously full become available.
Just how you, personally, will create maker time for your maker activities, will be unique to you and your life and priorities. But making time for your inner maker can relieve a lot of the “but I should be getting more writing done!” stress that’s endemic in the halls of the academy — and you’ll get more done, to boot.
There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.
When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done.
Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.
When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.
For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.
One of the hardest parts of deciding to leave academia from graduate school is telling your adviser.
After all, they’ve devoted (hopefully) countless hours to supporting your transition from baby-student to proto-scholar. Your academic success depends on their approval and satisfaction. For better or worse, the adviser often becomes something of a parent figure — less fraught, perhaps, but no less weighty.
All of that means that contemplating telling them brings up lots of gunk: shame about choosing to leave, fear about their reaction, maybe even anger about their part in your being where you are and needing to leave.
Why you need to do it anyway
Assuming your adviser isn’t an abusive asshole (and if they are, you can mostly ignore everything I’m about to say), there are several reasons it’s a good idea to tell them.
They need to know. Since they are, in some administrative sense, “responsible” for you, they need to know that you’re disappearing and that it’s because you’re choosing to leave, not because you’ve had a horrible accident and can’t answer your phone or email.
They need to know why. You won’t be the only student of theirs who questions academia. If they understand why you’re choosing to leave, they’ll be better able to advise future students.
They might be helpful. Although we tend to view our advisers primarily through academic lenses, they are, like us, fully-articulated people with lives that go beyond their office doors. They may know someone. They may be able to connect you with someone else who once did what you’re doing.
You need closure. Unresolved relationships feel pretty terrible. Whatever else your adviser is, they’re someone you have a real relationship with, good, bad, or indifferent. Giving that relationship (or that phase of the relationship) a period frees up your head to think about the future instead of about the past.
How to deal with the gunk
Like I said, knowing it probably needs to be done doesn’t make it any easier. There will likely be Big Feelings. This is totally normal.
The best way I know of to deal with Big Feelings is to uncover and examine them. Yes, it’s scary. But it also makes them much less powerful.
We often resist uncovering our deep-seated shame and fear and anger because we’re afraid they’ll take over. We’re afraid we’ll never get back out. We’re afraid they (and by extension we) are irrational or silly. But every feeling we have is rooted in a real, true, human need — for safety, for acceptance, for autonomy, for creativity. In other words, even if the form of the feeling is silly, the feeling itself never is.
Uncovering and examining is a two part process. First, you write down as much as you can — what are all of the fears or beliefs or whatevers attached to this feeling? Second, you ask yourself questions about each and every one of the fears and beliefs. Is it true? What’s the evidence that it’s likely to happen? What would you or could you do if it did happen?
By doing this, you bring things into the light and you connect to your own capacity to handle things. The combination of demystifying the dark and realizing that even if something terrible happened, you’d be okay (you aren’t going to die a pauper in a box next to the river, for example) helps make everything seem a little more manageable.
Make a plan
Figuring out a few things ahead of time will make the whole experience less scary and more doable.
- What do you need to in order to help you have this conversation in a good way? What will help you feel calm and centered and strong going in? Maybe you need to meditate first. Maybe you need a friend to remind you of all the reasons you’re doing this. Maybe you need to write everything down. Maybe you need to role play it so you aren’t having to think on your feet. Do whatever you need to.
- What is your goal and how will you achieve it? Sure, your goal is to tell your adviser, but are there other goals along with that? Often, we secretly want people to agree with us or approve of our choice — and that’s a goal you can have, but one that’s less under your control. Maybe your goal is to get out without crying. Maybe your goal is to provide feedback on the department. Maybe your goal is to reassure your adviser. Focus as much as possible on goals you can control, rather than goals that involve trying to make someone else do or feel something.
- What do you need to recover? No matter how well it goes, it’s going to be a wee bit stressful. So plan on ways to take care of yourself afterwards. Maybe you need time by yourself. Maybe you need a good cry. Maybe you need a drink with a friend. Maybe you need a run. Whatever you need, plan ahead so you can have what you need.
A few things to remember
Their reaction, whatever it is, goes far beyond you and this conversation.Like everyone else, they’ve got a lot going on in their lives, and their reaction is going to draw on all of that — most of which has nothing whatsoever to do with you.
Their reaction doesn’t determine whether or not your leaving is a good idea for you. Your adviser, however brilliant, doesn’t know the whole of you, and he or she cannot predict the future. You’re a much better judge of what should happen in your life than they are.
It’s going to be okay. However they respond, whatever happens next, you are going to be okay. It might not be fun, but in the end, it will be okay. As a favorite signature line of mine says, if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.
Those of you who’ve left, what advice would you give people about telling their advisers? What helped you?
How does your job fit into your life? More importantly, how do you want your job to fit into your life?
When we’re stressing out about our place in academia, whether it’s the identity-based stressed of “what do I want” or the logistical stress of “how do I get a job I want / how do I make this job work,” it’s really really easy to let everything else slide until that’s the only thing we’re thinking about, talking about, or engaging.
And then the trouble really starts.
All the other pieces
Lots of things go into a healthy, whole life — primary relationships, family, friends, hobbies, spirituality, community. If you sat down and listed out all the things that are important to you, I’m sure your career would come up, but I’m equally sure it would be one thing among others.
When one part of our lives is feeling off the rails, it’s tempting to believe that if we could only figure that one out, if we could only get it right, then we’d be happy. Then we’d be satisfied. Then we’d be comfortable and pleasant and fulfilled.
Honestly, the mono-focus of academia only exacerbates this tendency. How many academics do you know who have few interests outside their jobs, few friends outside their colleagues, few activities that don’t involve campus?
But however distressing any one part of our lives is, it’s the whole that matters. And while our careers and jobs are incredibly important to our whole lives, so are many other things.
Put it in context
You are more than an academic. Really.
Go ahead — write down all of the other roles you’re actively fulfilling these days: parent, partner, rock climber, flautist, beer snob, gardener, yogi, fountain-pen enthusiast, chicken farmer, writing group participant, marathoner, family member, volunteer, mentor.
What have you done for them lately?
Blend, baby, blend
The ruling metaphor of the late 20th-century life was “balance” — all those images of fitting it all in at once, having it all, finding that point at which everything fit.
You know what? There’s too much room for failure and too little room for success in that metaphor. Get caught up in a project, and whoops! There goes the balance. Have a life crisis? Whoops! There goes the balance.
“Blend,” on the other hand, allows for more than two things at once. “Blend” suggests that you’re cooking up something fantastic. “Blend” is about more than a single point in time, so you’re not looking at this moment, you’re looking at the composition of a week, a month, a season, a year.
Keeping struggles within the big picture
I bring all of this up because when I talk to clients, I see how easy it is for them to slip into an obsessive focus on whatever piece they’re trying to figure out right now. Everything is about the job search, everything is about figuring out whether they want to stay in academia, everything is about dissecting this job that’s driving them batty.
That means they never rest. That means they aren’t being able to lean into any other part of their life that is working and gain strength and confidence from it. That means they’re focused only on the thing that isn’t working, that’s hard and challenging.
That means they’re fucking exhausted.
I don’t know about you, but I make really crappy decisions when I’m exhausted. When I’m exhausted, I make decisions just so I can be done and I can stop making a decision already, because I’m too burnt out to be able to continue. That’s not exactly the way to a well-chosen life.
So if you’re in that space, make a conscious effort to bring back into your lived experience all those other things that are important. Go hike in the mountains. Go stare at pretty paintings in the museum. Go dancing. Go to coffee with your best friend and critique all the outfits that come in the door. Go read something entirely mindless and unenlightened. Go wrestle the dog. Go on a date with your partner. Go color with your kid. Go catch up on all of the blog posts and forum posts for that beloved hobby you’ve been neglecting.
In short, take a break. Blend the rest of your life back in. You’ll come back energized and more clear-headed and more creative and more optimistic.
Really.
The inimitable Sisyphus, who has been looking for a job for a while now, describes an all-too-common situation in academia:
A while back I had decided that I need to just give it up and move back into my parents’ house, but then little things keep popping on the horizon that look like possibilities, and I think, hey, I might be able to get this one and why bother dealing with moving if I’m going to be moving somewhere permanent soon anyway? Then that oasis turns out to be a mirage, and I keep crawling along.
Anyone who’s struggled with finding a job has had this experience — the just-missed, the nearly-there, the what-if. It’s the incrementalism that kills you. “But this next one won’t take much effort, and what if it’s the one? But this next one won’t take much ….”
So how do you decide enough is enough and it’s time to move on?
Give yourself the gift of a limit
The problem is, there’s no clear cutoff. There’s a limit to how many times you can take the bar exam, but there’s no limit to how long you can spend looking for a job.
And that means you have to create limits for yourself.
This is most easily done at the beginning. How long are you willing to do this? One year? Six months? Two years? What feels reasonable? What feels like enough time to find out what’s what?
And then you mark it down somewhere, make a date with yourself to reassess.
It doesn’t mean you have to stop at that limit. It only means it’s a point at which you stop, you look around, and you see what there is to see.
A few things you might see
When you do stop to look around, there are a few things that are worth thinking through.
- Has anything changed? That is, has something happened externally to improve the situation? Has something happened internally to improve the situation? What’s different now than when you set off on this particular phase of the adventure? What does that suggest about moving forward?
- How close have you come? If you’re repeatedly getting almost-there but not quite, it may only be a matter of time. If you’re knocking on door after door and not getting much response, it may be better to cut and run.
- Do you still want it? We can be creatures of inertia and bull-headed to boot. Do you still want this or is it now mostly a matter of pride? If you got the job tomorrow, would you be exhilarated or would you think, “well, shit”?
And now what?
Depending on what you find when you stop to look around, you may want to set another “let’s look around” date and keep going, or you might want to take this opportunity to choose something else. What else is appealing? What else can you do?
That’s not to say either is an easy choice, just that you have the choice. But you won’t consider your choices unless you give yourself the time and space to do so.
What if the beginning was a long, long time ago?
If you’re in the midst of it, see if you can take a break right now.
Ask yourself the questions above. How long have you given to this? How long are you willing to give to this?
It’s really easy to be motivated by pride and it’s shadowy sister, shame, to just keep pushing through, to keep trying, to make one last effort for the 57th time.
But stop and look. What do you want now?
Also? This sucks. And it’s not you.
Whereever you are in the process, though, and whatever choices you make when you stop and look around, know these two things.
This process blows. It’s distressing, demoralizing, and crazy-making. The process itself, the time it takes, the amount of work, will make your head explode even if you’re successful. And if you aren’t getting the offer you want, then it’s even worse.
And finally, it’s not you. You’re fabulous and wonderful and smart and talented. The system is pretty broken, and “success” here looks a lot like “sheer, unadulterated luck.” Sometimes we have it, sometimes we don’t. It doesn’t have to mean more than that.
One of academia’s very favorite myths is that everything within it is based on merit. Only the best students are accepted to the graduate program. The best students get fellowships and scholarships. The best students get the best jobs. The best work gets published. The best candidates get tenure.
And then there’s the flip side: If you didn’t get in to the program of your choice, it’s because you weren’t good enough. If you didn’t get the assistance that would have enabled you to actually get through the program, it’s because you didn’t work hard enough or you weren’t smart enough. If you didn’t get a job, it’s because you weren’t savvy enough, weren’t skilled enough, didn’t publish enough or strategically, didn’t have the right people behind you. If you didn’t get published, it’s because either your work was crap or you weren’t persistent enough. If you didn’t get tenure, you’re clearly not cut out for this system.
Even when we choose to walk away, these stories of failure dog us. (In our own minds, if nowhere else.) Leave before tenure? It’s because you couldn’t hack it. Decided not to go on the job market because you didn’t want to stay in academia? You wouldn’t have gotten a job anyway. Decided not to finish graduate school because it’s making you hate the universe? You weren’t smart enough to finish.
Excuse my language, but this is all a fucking load of steaming crap.
Even a cursory look around the academic landscape will reveal dozens of people you know personally who are brilliant, savvy, hard-working, and persistent and who have not “succeeded” in all of the ways academia suggests they will, what with all of those meritorious traits.
Brilliant and well-published graduate students who can’t find a job to save their lives because the job market sucks.
Smart, interesting researchers who don’t get published because their work doesn’t quite fit the neat little boxes of disciplines and journals or because they aren’t in the middle of the latest hot topic or trend.
Fabulous researchers and teachers who didn’t get tenure because they got caught in the gender politics of service.
I’m not saying that merit has no place in academia. But I am saying that, by the time we’re even as far as graduate school, absent true outliers, the differences between the “best” and the “worst” are, in some ways, often too small to be meaningful. Academia has been winnowing the pool since kindergarten, after all.
I am saying that the myth of merit doesn’t do us any favors. It doesn’t make most of us feel expansive and energized — it makes us feel small and scared and clenched. It doesn’t motivate most of us — it makes us avoidant and procrastinating and miserable. It doesn’t build us up — it makes us live in fear that, any day now, someone is going to figure out that we aren’t as smart as they think we are, and then they’ll kick us out.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t see a lot of merit to that situation.
We need to be suspicious of the myth of merit. We need to pay attention to how much outright luck contributes to “success” and “failure” in academia. We need to cut ourselves some fucking slack and begin to imagine that we are, in fact, smart, capable, wonderful people who, for various reasons, had a certain set of experiences with academia, some of which we had something to do with and some of which we didn’t.
We have a lot of baggage around the idea of a calling, we people of this century.
Sometimes, the whole enterprise seems, well, self-indulgent and stupid. My mother’s father, for example, wouldn’t have recognized the question. He fought in WWII and sent money home to his family, he worked in the quarry, he volunteered at the fire department and the police station and the water station, he raised three girls with a wife he loved, and when they retired, he dragged my grandmother all over the country on special elder-tours. By all accounts he was satisfied with, even pleased with, his life, without ever engaging the idea that he needed to live out a special mission.
Sometimes people take it too far. I’ve watched more than one college near-graduate refuse to take a job on the grounds that it wasn’t inherently fulfilling to them, blithely neglecting to remember that the only way that works is if someone else, who isn’t necessarily thrilled with every moment of their job, either, subsidizes the project. (I suspect this is rarer now than it once was, the economy being what it is.)
And sometimes it sounds just a bit too religious for our intellectual, post-humanist selves.
Most of us, however, end up somewhere in the middle — longing for a sense of meaning, connection, and purpose while simultaneously not being convinced that anything we’re running up against is It.
It’s like we believe that what we need to do is just find our (avocational) soulmate, and then everything will be fine, everything will unfold after that, but this avocation has a bad sense of humor, and that one is too uptight about money.
This is why leaving academia can feel like divorce, right down to the question of who keeps which friends. We found our One True Love, but what happens when the shine is off that particular rose? Does that mean we’ve failed? Does that mean we’re doomed to marginal happiness ever after?
Just like there’s probably not one person in the whole world who will automatically make you happy forever, there’s no one calling that will make you happy forever. Rather, there’s no simple conception of your calling that will make you happy forever.
Your calling, just like your marriage, your relationships, your life, and you yourself, is always growing and evolving. You’re always learning more about it. New possibilities are always opening up. And that means that what was right five years ago isn’t necessarily right now, and what’s right now isn’t necessarily what will be right five or ten or twenty years down the road.
Because so many of us experienced our fields and our work as a calling, it can be brutally troubling to run up against dissatisfaction. Because we felt called to academia, realizing that call is no longer there is painful.
I don’t want to suggest that those losses shouldn’t be mourned if you’re experiencing grief. I do want to suggest that you open up your conception of yourself to see what you’re being called to now.
Parker Palmer talks about your calling as the place where your deepest desires meet the needs of the world. In other words, while there are any number of things you’re probably good at, and while there are infinite problems in the world to solve, the particular configuration of your heart and this moment illuminate what you’re being called to now.
What are you being called to now? How well does that calling work within the structures of academia?
One of the many ways people get stuck in the varied halls of academe is by confusing what is essentially a job with a calling.
Professoring? It’s a job. It has a regular paycheck, clear (if also somewhat tortured) expectations, regular reviews, and the possibility of getting fired, at least until tenure, and even then, if the economy goes far enough south.
But academia has long thrown the mantle of calling over the realities of the job. There’s a particular academic myth that suggests that the Life of the Mind is a sacred path, and as such we who trod it should accept all manner of challenges, forks in the road, sleepless nights, and witches disguised as beautiful women. We are the elite priests who have been chosen to carry on the tradition, and our glory is in the upholding of the tradition.
For some people, that myth works. For them, research and teaching is a sacred path, one they would follow even if they weren’t paid. For them, academia is a calling, one that swells their hearts and whispers celestial songs even in the darkest hours of indexing footnotes. The difficulties of the job get subsumed into the story. For these fortunate people, calling and job have intersected seamlessly.
For many of us, though, there is no grail here. There’s no holy path; there’s only trying to figure out how the hell we’re going to pay the mortgage and do research this summer, since we’re only paid for nine months and summer teaching, however lucrative, really puts a crimp in the “write four chapters” plan. Teaching doesn’t feel like victory or exaltation.
If you take on academia as a job, with all of the boundary issues and challenges to negotiate as any other job, that can be fine. Sure, it has its special hells, but what job doesn’t? They’re problems to be solved and moved on from.
But when we confuse the two, things tend to go extra-badly. When we confuse the two, setting time-boundaries around our work looks like lack of commitment. When we confuse the two, taking time to nurture an infant looks like a like of discipline. When we confuse the two, we become the failed Knight, instead of an everyday person in an everyday job making everyday choices for our everyday lives.
Now, far be it from me to denigrate callings. Callings are amazing things, impulses that can sustain us through many a dark night and difficult time. Callings, when our lives are aligned with them, can give meaning to even the most annoying day.
But callings are vague things. You can’t write them neatly in the census form explaining what you do and thus who you are. And because they’re so vague, callings can manifest in many different jobs.
Maybe you’re called to help impoverished children graduate from college. Sure, that may involve being a professor. But could also involve raising money for a small school, writing innovative curricula, creating after-school programs, or creating outreach programs. There’s no telling how that one calling could exist in the world.
So I want to ask you this: Right now, do you need a calling or a job?
The answer might be both. Right now, you might be craving both meaning and a stable paycheck, and that’s important to know. But your answer might be one or the other. Maybe, right now, you’ve got meaning out the wazoo, and all you want is consistent work. Maybe you’ve got a job you’re okay with, but you’re craving meaning and a sense of your work connecting with something bigger.
Whatever your answer is will help determine what needs to happen next, because figuring out your calling and finding a job are distinct tasks. Getting a job won’t necessarily illuminate your calling, and figuring out your calling doesn’t usually come with medical.
But as you’re thinking about it, remember this. There’s no job outside (maybe) “minister” that is inherently both calling and job. Any job can be part of a calling, and any calling can have lots of different jobs over time. If you want both, you’ve got to figure both out.
So tell me — how have you experienced this job / calling conflation in academia? And what are you needing right now in your life?
Writing a dissertation is well-known to be one of the hardest parts of graduate school. Not only is it something you’ve never done before, it’s a huge project, it’s lonely, and it’s supposed to be your entry into the field.In many ways, it’s your academic debutante ball.
No pressure or anything.
When I was in the middle of writing, my fabulous director collected all of her graduate students and made us read a slim but incredibly useful little book, Eviatar Zaruvabel’s The Clockwork Muse: A Practical Guide to Writing Theses, Dissertations, and Books (affiliate link).
Zeruvabel is writing from the perspective of someone who had, at the time of this book’s writing, written some two dozen books. As you might imagine, he had a lot of useful advice for breaking down large, amorphous projects into doable sets of tasks. Two things, in particular, were especially helpful for me.
Kinds of time
Zeruvabel suggests that we all have A, B, and C time.
A time is our best writing and thinking time, the time when we’re freshest, most brilliant, and most able to engage difficult and undetermined tasks. B time is still productive, but it’s not your best time. Maybe you’re a little tired and worn out, maybe you’re distracted. C time is nearly, but not quite useless, the kind of time that can only accomplish well-defined, routine tasks.
Writing tasks, too, fit into the A, B, and C mold. A tasks require synthesis, original thought, and creativity. This may involve brainstorming, writing a guiding outline, or drafting new prose. B tasks still require brainpower, but not as much brilliance or creativity — think reading through the research. C tasks are things like making sure all your sources are right — there’s a right and a wrong answer, and you’re just going through and matching stuff up. It’s boring, but it has to be done.
Zeruvabel’s brilliant suggestion is to first define what time is your A, B, and C time, and then match that time up with A, B, and C tasks. In other words, don’t plan to write new prose when you’re likely to be exhausted, and don’t waste creative thinking time doing low-level, repetitive, boring tasks.
Obvious, once you think about it, but incredibly powerful.
3 pages. And another 3.
The “clockwork” in the title refers to Zeruvabel’s assertion that, in order to write book-length manuscripts, you’ve got to lay down the expectation of divine inspiration and instead rely on regularity.
Now, that’s not to say that inspiration won’t ever hit — but it is to say that keeping on even when it isn’t appearing is the key to getting these kinds of projects accomplished.
Zeruvabel’s strategy for moving forward is simple: Break everything into what amounts to approximately 3-page sections. So, you’d map out Chapter 2 and realize you need to make 3 points. You’d then break each of those 3 points down into smaller and smaller argumentative sections until each bit is likely to be about three pages.
Every time you sit down to write, you take one three-page section and write it without worrying about transitions, beautiful prose, or perfect coherence. All of those things will come — because revising is a sight easier for most of us than getting things on the page to start with. When you’re done, you print it out and add it to the stack on your desk, on the theory that accumulated pages is motivational. (Full disclosure — I didn’t do this part, but your mileage will almost certainly vary.)
His point is that, by the time you’re writing a dissertation, three pages is likely nothing. You’ve been writing response papers and seminar papers and conference papers and who knows what else — all of them significantly longer than three pages. Because of that, it’s just much less daunting to sit down to write three pages than it is to sit down to write a dissertation or even a chapter.
Brilliant, but not a magic elixir.
I honestly think this book is brilliant, but it’s also not going to fix any and every dissertation-writing problem out there. It’s primarily a book to help people who are having trouble getting their hands around a huge and complicated project when they’ve never done a huge and complicated project like this.
It’s not going to help you figure out your topic or your field, and it’s not likely going to help you sidestep things like self-doubt, harsh internal critics, or unhelpful mentors.
But if what’s standing between you and the defense is a crisis of time- or project-management, give this book a whirl — and let me know what you think.
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