Dr. Dan (dmjg)

I defended my dissertation yesterday. I also put together a baby swing. Given my technical incompetence, I’m not sure which was the bigger accomplishment.

The defense not only went well, but was actually quite fun. Emily and Ellie came down and the latter was appropriately oohed & aahed at before and after the defense. My advisers asked good, challenging questions. No one was going for the jugular. And I have a good direction to go when I take up the project again (something I can’t think about right now).

The dissertation was a 3 year project, but defending really signals the end of being a graduate student (I’m already off the UofC webpage and on the Carleton webpage (now that I’ve defended, I’ll be upgraded from Instructor to Assistant Professor or, as like to call it, Ass. Prof)), so I count it as the end of a 7 year journey. The arc of graduate school is strange. The first two years are fantastic — you feel legitimized by having got into a good program; you’re surrounded by other people who are interested in the same thing as you; the dreaded job market is for those weirdo senior grad students whom you only see now and then; and you learn so much so fast. But the start of grad school also signals the beginning of the insecurities that are simply a fact of life for most academics: I haven’t read as much as so-and-so; my writing isn’t as good as it should be; everyone keeps talking about so-and-so like s/he’s the most important thing in the world and I’ve never even heard of him/her (in my case, it was Stanley Cavell). But those feelings, at least for me, took a back seat to the feeling that I had, in some sense, made it. And that felt good.

Years 3-4 is the transition period (to put it in labor-terms) and it was the most difficult time for me (just like real labor!). You’re no longer taking classes and you’re asked to do something that you have never done before and that nothing in your education to that point has really prepared you for, viz. writing a book length manuscript which contains something original. Not everyone has trouble at this time, but many do: no deadlines, no firm committee, no real idea what the hell you’re going to say. I mean, no idea. Deciding what to write on was perhaps the most stressful part of the past 7 years; it took me more than a year, and one topic change, to figure it out. There were a number of sleepless nights where my mind would not shut down, preferring to chew away on various topics I was thinking about: is there a project there? What, exactly, is the point? Is that way of construing things going to hang together? These thoughts never go away — it’s how one’s project gets sharper and more focused as you go along — but they’re exhausting and, on some days, paralyzing in the early days of writing a dissertation.

One of the more interesting aspects of this time, and a source of difficulty for me, is that your professors start to treat you more like a peer and less like a student. You had firm deadlines (well, supposedly) while taking classes and a predetermined, general topic (even if you get to decide the precise issue you’ll write about). The profs are, usually, experts on the topic and your paper (usually) is really only a tiny tiny poke at some much larger issue, so you can get a sense very quickly whether you’re on the right track. None of that is there when you start to dissertate — there are no real deadlines;  it is entirely up to you to decide what to write about; and, within a relatively short period of time, you will be as much, and in some cases more, of an expert on the topic you’re interested in than your advisers. This means that you are very much on your own. Now I actually ended up enjoying this (it made me more productive), but it took me a little while to realize that the game had changed. To the extent that I thought about chucking it all in, it was during these years. The self-doubts I described above are front and center at this point, except they’re morphed somewhat into a single tune: I’m not smart enough, I’m not smart enough, I’m not smart enough. (And the chorus:) Who cares about this crap anyway?

If you’ve settled on a good topic, years 5-6 are, perhaps, the best: you have some momentum in developing your project; you (or at least those of us at UofC) get to teach a course of your design; you’re starting to feel like you know what the hell you’re talking about, at least with regards to your subfield; and the end is somewhat near. But this brings its own, distinctive stress, since the end game of grad school is the job market. The terrible, dreaded, vomit-inducing job market. For a taste of the misery, spend some time reading the archives from years past at this blog.

I have nothing systematic to say about my job market experience, except that I couldn’t have done it without Emily who kept me relatively calm and distracted (“Hello! Someone’s having a baby.”). I remember the very low lows — no interview at Queen’s this year; no job offer from Toronto; and, perhaps the single most gut clenching memory of the whole thing, sitting in my hotel room in San Diego after giving a not very good job talk at UCSD and simply wanting the entire thing to be over (a special shout out to two of my advisers, Dan Brudney and Jason Bridges, as well as a former prof. Michael Green, for helping to pick me back up after the UCSD trip). And I remember the very high highs — learning about getting APA interviews,  particularly at some of our “heart” schools (Carleton, U of Toronto, Fordham); learning about flyouts in early January; and, of course, learning that I had got the Carleton job (I was informed by e-mail. I ran down the street to the gym to tell Em. We jumped up and down like little girls. The trainers were not impressed).

All in all, I have had a fantastic time in graduate school. And I’ve been told that I will look back at this time and wonder why I didn’t spend more time here (limited/no teaching; fantastic peers; no administrative duties). I’m sure that’s true. But right now, I feel oh so ready to move on. And I’m done!

Oh, and I got the following, awesome message of support from Ryan Blitstein (who has a fantastic article on health disparities in America over at Miller McCune. Go read it.) before yesterday’s defense:

Indeed, I will.