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Leaving Grad School, Redux
Jul. 8th, 2016 10:38 pmA girl I knew slightly from grad school is in my town for the summer, so we've been meeting up for coffee once a week - I think at first mostly because neither of us have any social lives, but it's actually proven unexpectedly rewarding.
In particular, this week we were talking about how she's been thinking about either quitting grad school, or leaving academia after she gets her Ph.D. We both evidently went into grad school with the same mental reservation - "If grad school turns out not to be for me, I can just quit" - which is possibly a sign that this major life decision is one you should reconsider, honestly; clearly a part of me knew from the beginning that this wasn't a great idea, but I went ahead with it anyway because I didn't have any better ideas and, after all, I'd always been good at school.
I don't regret quitting. It was a good time to get out, and it would have just gotten harder to quit if I'd stayed longer. And I also felt, at the time, that if I hadn't quit when I did I might have flunked out, not because the coursework was too hard but because I would have lost the will and therefore ability to do it. I imagined spending the rest of my life, an eternity, reading boring monographs in order to spend years writing my own soul-deadening monographs that five people would briskly skim in order to write about why I was wrong, and it all seemed utterly paralyzingly pointless.
So I don't regret quitting. But I don't think I realized how much of my self-esteem I had built on the not-nearly-as-impregnable-as-I-assumed foundation of being good at school until I quit school long before acquiring my intended degree. It destroyed one of the pillars of my self-esteem, and I haven't found anything else to replace it with.
So I felt some chagrin when she asked if I thought leaving academia would make her feel like a failure, because what could I answer but "Yes, probably, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it"?
But I think it was a relief to her to have someone to talk about this who absolutely saw it as a momentous and difficult and potentially crushing decision; I think people who aren't in academia often find it hard to understand how absolutely it can entangle your sense of yourself and your intellect and your intellect as the best and most valuable part of yourself. It can be hard to explain why it's hard to even think about leaving grad school, when leaving grad school is leaving academia which is leaving the promised land and the chosen people.
***
The conversation also made me think about how when I was thinking of quitting grad school, I really didn't talk it over with any of my friends - either in real life or on LJ - and I think if anyone had asked me (although of course no one could have, because how could they have known I was holding back in the first place) I would have said that I was sparing them all the boring angst. And that they wouldn't have been interested anyway.
It occurs to me, now, that sharing the boring angst is how you make deeper connections with people. And in any case, how good a friend is someone who can't bothered to put with any boring angst at all? Or, indeed, someone who thinks that all of your angst is boring?
(I think almost all of us have moments when our angst becomes so repetitively navel-gazy that it is boring - I know sometimes mine bores even me - so being occasionally bored by someone else's angst isn't necessarily a sign of being a bad friend. The problem is so-called friends who want nothing but good times, and no angst at all.)
Last time I was overly forthcoming to one of my friends about my angst, the friendship ended up imploding in lengthy and dire slow-motion. It took years. It was much more complicated than that and I actually have no idea whether or to what extent the forthcomingness was the problem. I'm still not sure what the fuck happened.
That whole drama wrapped up four years ago, so it's really time to move on. I think perhaps I learn a little too well from experience.
In particular, this week we were talking about how she's been thinking about either quitting grad school, or leaving academia after she gets her Ph.D. We both evidently went into grad school with the same mental reservation - "If grad school turns out not to be for me, I can just quit" - which is possibly a sign that this major life decision is one you should reconsider, honestly; clearly a part of me knew from the beginning that this wasn't a great idea, but I went ahead with it anyway because I didn't have any better ideas and, after all, I'd always been good at school.
I don't regret quitting. It was a good time to get out, and it would have just gotten harder to quit if I'd stayed longer. And I also felt, at the time, that if I hadn't quit when I did I might have flunked out, not because the coursework was too hard but because I would have lost the will and therefore ability to do it. I imagined spending the rest of my life, an eternity, reading boring monographs in order to spend years writing my own soul-deadening monographs that five people would briskly skim in order to write about why I was wrong, and it all seemed utterly paralyzingly pointless.
So I don't regret quitting. But I don't think I realized how much of my self-esteem I had built on the not-nearly-as-impregnable-as-I-assumed foundation of being good at school until I quit school long before acquiring my intended degree. It destroyed one of the pillars of my self-esteem, and I haven't found anything else to replace it with.
So I felt some chagrin when she asked if I thought leaving academia would make her feel like a failure, because what could I answer but "Yes, probably, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it"?
But I think it was a relief to her to have someone to talk about this who absolutely saw it as a momentous and difficult and potentially crushing decision; I think people who aren't in academia often find it hard to understand how absolutely it can entangle your sense of yourself and your intellect and your intellect as the best and most valuable part of yourself. It can be hard to explain why it's hard to even think about leaving grad school, when leaving grad school is leaving academia which is leaving the promised land and the chosen people.
***
The conversation also made me think about how when I was thinking of quitting grad school, I really didn't talk it over with any of my friends - either in real life or on LJ - and I think if anyone had asked me (although of course no one could have, because how could they have known I was holding back in the first place) I would have said that I was sparing them all the boring angst. And that they wouldn't have been interested anyway.
It occurs to me, now, that sharing the boring angst is how you make deeper connections with people. And in any case, how good a friend is someone who can't bothered to put with any boring angst at all? Or, indeed, someone who thinks that all of your angst is boring?
(I think almost all of us have moments when our angst becomes so repetitively navel-gazy that it is boring - I know sometimes mine bores even me - so being occasionally bored by someone else's angst isn't necessarily a sign of being a bad friend. The problem is so-called friends who want nothing but good times, and no angst at all.)
Last time I was overly forthcoming to one of my friends about my angst, the friendship ended up imploding in lengthy and dire slow-motion. It took years. It was much more complicated than that and I actually have no idea whether or to what extent the forthcomingness was the problem. I'm still not sure what the fuck happened.
That whole drama wrapped up four years ago, so it's really time to move on. I think perhaps I learn a little too well from experience.
