Just a quick reminder that I’m holding a free teleclass on surviving graduate school tonight at 8ET / 5PT. You can sign up here.
I’m really excited about this one — we’re going to be talking about how you can take charge of your relationship to graduate school, and thus make setting priorities, choosing how to use your time, and interacting with others all quite a bit easier.
If you’re interested but can’t attend in person, sign up anyway — I’ll send the audio recording out afterwards.
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.
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.
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.
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.