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.