Unsolicited Advice
This August, already beyond weird in myriad other ways, marks the first time in nearly a decade that I’m not technically a student. Although I haven’t really “gone back to school” since the fall of 2017 (the last year I taught), almost all of the rhythms of my life are marked by the academic calendar. I was a student from ages five to 22, took a two-year hiatus, and then began teaching high school. After two years of that, I returned to graduate school, a process that culminated with my defending a dissertation this past June and receiving a Ph.D. at the beginning of the month.
It would be untrue to say that I just kind of fell into grad school. Going to school is basically the only thing I’ve ever been good at, and my solution to most problems is doing homework. I am also a peevish contrarian, a nerve-shredding pedant, a tireless bore, and an insufferable scold about the exact moral and ethical deficiencies that I myself embody. What I’m saying here is that I have all the personality traits of an academic. So it’s not exactly shocking that this is the path my life took.
But having graduated from college on the eve of the previous economic meltdown, I also saw graduate school as a safe harbor to wait out the devastation. You know, the same line of thinking that leads people to dump a pitcher of water on a grease fire. In 2011, I was dumb enough to believe that the American economy might actually improve someday, and with it the fortunes of higher education. And so, I packed up all my Elvis Costello records and headed out for Champaign-Urbana and then Athens with the goals of 1) drinking a lot of cheap beer, 2) watching a lot of college football, and 3) eventually being able to make dinner reservations under the name “Dr. Wilson,” however that might happen.
As we enter the third major economic collapse of my lifetime (in the year that I turned old enough to run for president), I’ve seen the advice of “go to grad school!” pop up in various places. I don’t think this is categorically terrible advice for the same reason I don’t think you can categorically tell someone not to have a lobe of their liver removed. Sometimes it really does need to come out! But I also think people could stand to be more clear-eyed about what going to grad school entails. Before I went, all I really knew was that it was like undergrad, but (sometimes) longer and more detailed. That sounded like a pretty solid deal to me. Between doing something boring in the real world and doing something annoying in a fake one, I will take the latter every time.
And so, I have decided to start a blog about graduate school. Sometimes I will give advice based on my experience, sometimes I will interview my friends (all of whom are smarter than me and have better ideas) and share their advice, and sometimes I will re-litigate petty grievances from conferences that no one remembers. I am doing this for the following reasons (in no particular order):
This Squarespace site comes with a blog, and it seems silly not to use it
I want other people to know more about what grad school/academia will be like before they start than I did
I am trying to stave off depression by working on a low-intensity project now that my dissertation is done
Please note that there is no planned schedule for updating. It will be mostly as I get around to it. Also, I do not promise that there will be anything insightful anywhere in this blog. Finally, note that there are likely to be posts that have nothing to do with graduate school at all and are just rants about Georgia sports or some other tedious nonsense. But I promise to do my best to make whatever it is entertaining.