The Enemy Inside

Who is the greatest enemy to a PhD candidate when it comes time to finish? (Hold that thought.)

Between the xtranormal video extrapolating on the ugly underbelly of pursuing a PhD in the Humanities, the numerous warning articles in American Scholar, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the New York Times explicating the steady downward spiral of English as a field that spends, but doesn’t make, money for universities, and the economic realities facing newly minted English PhDs (assuming they finish), it is no wonder that so many once-idealistic, wide-eyed, expectant believers that they will be the exception to the hard reality rules simply stop before crossing the finish line.

Truly, starting a PhD program is exciting, hopeful, intellectually stimulating, and full of potential future promise. But about halfway through, usually after comprehensive exams, once the student is ABD (All But Dissertation), those early, exciting, hopeful idealisms start to crumble and give way to the unpleasant reality of an eight percent job placement rate. 

That’s my unscientific analysis of Auburn University’s English PhD program’s success rate for placing newly minted PhDs into tenure-track university positions right out of the program (and honoring full disclosure, I received my PhD from Auburn and am counting myself as one of the eight percent).  The program matriculates approximately eight students per year. I began the program in 2006. Going back a few years and extending to the year I graduated (2010), let’s call that 50 students in the program. As of today, I can name four (with the help of a friend who started in the program as a Master’s student, so was there longer) who got tenure-track university jobs right out of the program. A couple more that we thought of have since gotten TT jobs (I think), but that’s still only one or two more. Going with the original four, that’s eight percent. 

To put eight percent into perspective, think of it as 46 students who matriculated as PhD students and then either didn’t finish or did finish and did not get a tenure-track university professor position. Where are they? Many are instructors, the well-documented , underpaid, overworked temporary faculty in hundreds of universities and colleges across the land. Some go to the private sector, some to the non-profit, some to the government, some to Japan or Dubai to teach English for two years, some go to law school or medical school, and some go to Starbucks, Gap, and McDonald’s. With four, five, six, seven or more years of stress, self-doubt, $50,000 or more of debt, and an ever-diminishing chance of landing that plum job, the longer they remain outside academia. 

It is a BRUTAL system. And the brutality is never revealed to you from the moment you set foot on campus until the day you become ABD, when the stakes increase because now you’re in deep.

To put eight percent into an even finer light, let’s look at some other percentages in life.

Women have a 12% chance of developing breast cancer.

You have a 10% chance of finding a job on a megajob board online.

You have a 65% chance of developing hemorrhoids by the time you’re 50 years old.

You have a 47% chance of winning at American roulette in a casino.

Let’s review. You have a better chance at developing breast cancer, hemorrhoids, finding a job online, and winning roulette than landing a tenure-track job as a professor at a university. And roulette is called gambling. I would argue that getting a PhD is also gambling with your money, your future, your relationships, your happiness, and your life. 

So, amidst all of this noise, how exactly DOES one finish a dissertation and then graduate, regardless of what the next step plan might be? Back to my original question at the top of this post:

Who is the greatest enemy to a PhD candidate when it comes time to finish?

My snarky response might include blaming the student’s committee for either being too absent, or too harsh, or too laissez-faire. Or perhaps the graduate coordinator and advisor, whose job it should be to inform incoming students about the harsh realities of their true potential as marketable professionals in academe. Or how about those students’ undergraduate professors, who often encourage young people to go ahead and pursue the degree without even hinting at the dark river of sludge floating beneath the shiny, happy surface.

However, I don’t believe in blaming others, although all of these people can be held at least partially responsible for withholding evidence about the ultimate reality shock that stuns most PhD candidates right around ABD time. Instead, I suggest that a PhD candidate’s worst enemy is herself. And we are really good at sabotaging ourselves.

Our minds are not like yours. We enjoy reading, sometimes obscure texts that confuse most people and other times texts that aren’t written, causing our non-English colleagues to scratch their heads in confusion (at which we scoff mightily at their evident lack of understanding of our nouveau conception of what a “text” really is). Not only do we love reading, we love writing about those texts and our own ideas and the world around us. We are idealists and believe we truly are exceptional. But that’s the bubble. That’s coursework and warm, fuzzy grad student meetings in the lounge over coffee where everyone is snuggled up with their favorite theorist and fantasies of teaching those obscure texts to graduate students for the next 30 years.

Once we become ABD, the bubble bursts. All of the potential warning signs about the impending harsh reality about to smack us in our elevated consciousness have been ignored (that lone undergrad prof who did suggest it was not for everyone; the department head who warned that your recommendation letters must be BEYOND GLOWING and SPECIFIC; the advisor who hinted at potential success outside academia). The warnings may be far and few between and not delivered with anything close to consistency, but they exist, like mini-mushroom clouds of doom to rain on our PhD parades – and we gleefully ignore reality until the bubble bursts, we become ABD, and suddenly, we are on our own and terribly alone.

Once you pass your comprehensive exams and become ABD, you are solely responsible for writing your ticket to the degree – the dissertation. Generally a book-length tome (200-300 pages) that showcases the breadth and depth of your understanding of your field; it’s a start, not a finish. The dissertation rarely becomes a book in its current form; rather, it must go through several transformation stages after you land that tenure-track job so that you can use it to be promoted to Associate Professor, the holy grail of academic job statuses (because becoming a full Professor requires sacrifice of your first-born last I heard). 

The reason dissertations rarely leap into book form is because they are inherently imperfect, scattered, disjointed ramblings that are barely coherent to anyone who knows anything about that field. The audacity, the arrogance, the sheer moxie that it takes for us, as new scholars, to proclaim that we have an important contribution to make, to lay out an argument built on the more experienced minds in the field and then to explain how those folks got it wrong, to present a perspective that is somewhat new and challenging to the status quo, is almost mind-boggling in its egocentric glory. But that’s where I think a lot of really smart people get stuck…because they aren’t arrogant, audacious, or egotistical…they are scared, they are worried about pissing off a committee member or senior scholar in the field…they are afraid of being wrong and imperfect and disjointed and scattered and looking a damn fool.

If I may offer a bit of advice, having been through the grind of academic hazing that is writing a dissertation… you must accept your own imperfection of thought, you must know that your committee will give you some good and some terrible advice and make demands that are ridiculous and infuriating, you must understand that no one is going to read this dissertation in its entirety except you, your committee chair, and possibly your mom (if the introduction doesn’t confuse her beyond recognition).

Here’s the big, bad secret: The dissertation is a means to an end. That’s it. So if you are on the fence about finishing, concerned about your committee members being mean or stupid, worried about sounding dumb…don’t. As my chair always told me (and she was one of the reasons I was able to grunt through and finish), just bang out the pages. Get it written. Sloppy, ugly, and disjointed are the best you can hope for. Hobble across the finish line with an imperfectly written document, sit in the auditorium and enjoy being hooded at graduation for your effort. And if you don’t have an academic job lined up, don’t sweat it. Good writers who can research and analyze problems are needed everywhere.

You’ll find a job because the skills you have obtained in grad school are eminently transferable. But finish. 

You’ve made it this far. Don’t be your own worst enemy.

(I lovingly dedicate this post to my friends who are ABD and struggling to finish – you are not alone, you are in good company, and you CAN do this! I have faith in you!)