On Leaving Academia--or Getting Out While You Still Can

I've spent the last several months reading and rereading leaving academia blogs. In fact, I have been lurking in comment threads, escaping into the fantasy world of leaving, and mentally and emotionally checking out of my life.  This is my coming out post.  I think I am finally ready to leave.   But I didn't get here overnight.

First, there was this classic piece from Professor is in. It IS ok to quit, and graduate school is a psychological prison of our own making:

"It is ok to decide that’s not what you want.  It is ok to make another choice.  There is life outside of academia.  But academia is a kind of cult, and deviation from the normative values of the group is not permitted or accepted within its walls.  You will be judged harshly by others and, to the extent you’ve been properly socialized into the cult during graduate school, by your own inner voices.  Making the decision to leave involves confronting that judgment, working through it, and coming out the other side.  It is long and hard and involves confronting profound shame.  I went through this.  I know."

Of course, Leaving Academia (with its promise of "From Grad School to Happiness") served as my guiding light for months.  During dark days and nights, I would read and reread the posts and comments, emboldened by the idea that there is employment, a life, and a future out there. I admit to sitting in a huge lecture hall as a TA (in the back dark corner so students couldn't see my screen), reading blog posts about getting out.   JC has been like the graduate student mentor and friend who wants you to know that it will be ok.

JC also introduced me to mama nervosa, which spoke to a whole other dynamic of my wanting to leave: my desire to start a family and move on to having a life.  I struggled with whether graduate school would be a more forgiving place to get pregnant and have my first child, but the reality of graduate school as a parent on TOP of the experiences of these ladies in dealing with an unrealistic job market, low pay for adjuncts and TAs, getting through comps, and the bullshit suckiness of graduate school has been illuminating beyond words.

During fantasy escapades through blog land, I luckily stumbled across Plan B Nation's recommendations for advice books and quickly snapped up Martha Beck's Finding Your Own North Star.  This book speaks to me in a way that no book has in a long time:  her concept of the essential self and the social self has helped me strip away the bullshit I routinely fed my therapist and myself to get clarity on what it is I really want.  I hate teaching, hate grading papers, hate writing papers, hate sitting alone and isolated in front of a computer, and hate going to lectures, and academic conferences (where great titles hide horrific and unwatchable panels).  I realized that getting the PhD and walking away to a non academic job would essentially assure me of having to write papers, and sit alone in front of a computer, when I could quit now and do something else.  Why was I staying again?

In my moments of rage, I found Penelope Trunk's hilarious and brutal take down of graduate school, which lifted my spirits and helped me feel ok about walking away from a program even though it is paid.  As she points out, the lost opportunity costs, and lack of benefit to staying are just too much.

So where does this leave me?  I feel like after several false starts (I even interviewed for a job and almost left  last spring), the reality of my situation is apparent.  There is no longer any rational for staying beyond fear and ego, a fact that I admitted for the first time a week ago.

I'm terrified of getting a job and worried I won't like my options. I am also terrified I will not get a job and be stuck here writing my comps next semester.  Now that I have decided to leave, I resent all the more every paper I have to grade, while still meeting with my committee about exams I hope never to take. I don't want to tell my adviser in case I can't get a job, but need to get the word out I am looking.

But mostly, like an addict, my deep-seated fear is that I won't and can't change: that I will stay, and still be here even though I know it is the wrong thing for me.  Now that I have started down this path, I hope I am brave enough to continue.

photo credit: temporalata

The Emperor has no Epistemological Clothes: Or how I learned to stop worrying and embrace inductive reasoning

Most stories like mine refer back to early childhood—like the kid who knew deep down he was gay, or the friend who was a late talker that turned out to be partially deaf. A "diagnoses" would suddenly bring everything into clarity, long forgotten experiences suddenly strung out like a strand of awkward pearls of self wisdom that hinted all along at what was wrong.  There was the inability to deal with mathematical concepts which found me applying a semester's worth of tactics that fruitlessly led nowhere as I explored across the page, rather than systematically following the steps to solve a problem in a logical and deduced way.  My lack of a favorite movie, food, band,  The fact that every time I rewatched a film was like seeing it for the first time.  My interest in replaying the same experiences over and over again. My brain felt fuzzy, a feeling that didn’t go away until I had spent considerable time in my graduate program.  I would read accounts of students finally diagnosed with dyslexia decades after the start of their problems in school.  Their struggles of not being able to wrap their head around the problem, of their own brain getting in the way, and the marked differences in how they saw the world compared to their peers resonated with me in a deep way.  But I had no such label—and while their struggles were mine in many ways, they understood the origin of their difference and for that I was jealous.

For months I joked that I was going through an epistemological crisis, and unloaded such onto a poor, overwhelmed PhD in the counseling department.  I felt more removed from graduate school, and more frustrated.  There was even the misguided day I marched into a committee member's office and declared that I was no longer an empiricist, and that the only research worth doing involved socio historical qualitative case studies or ethnography.  This constituted blasphemy in my department, but was met with a chuckle and a hearty "no you're not."   I left amazed that anyone could drink the kool aid so completely that they would refuse to believe me. 

One night, late at work on a paper it suddenly dawned on me.  I started my research on the wheel of science in the inductive rather than the deductive portion of the wheel.  My sense of sickness lifted and I had a label: the reason for my ill fit wasn’t just epistemological, it came down to my starting point.  My “learning disability” wasn’t a disorder at all but simply a reflection of how I saw the world and approached my research—differently form my department., and it explained why I did not fit.  This was a process issue.

I had been accused my entire graduate career of being too interested in the context of what I studied, and not focused enough on the underlying phenomenon.  I wanted to take personal experiences and observations and work toward exploring larger level phenomena.  I had spent the first three years desperately scanning text books for a theory, any theory, I could accept and stake my entire research agenda around.  Or a concept even, that could underlie my research.  My program wanted me to think logically and theoretically about a phenomena, and reason out from there. 

"You do know you are not really an inductivist?"  My husband asked that night, after I had burst into the room to unload my newly found knowledge.  He protested.  "You ask empirical questions, you just don't buy into how restrictively your program embraces deductive research.  They need to be more flexible."

He was right.  It still gave me comfort to recognize the source of my frustration, but it also reinforced one of the most important lessons you learn in graduate school.  That the world is not black and white, but a thousand shades of gray, and everything is nuance.    

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Why Permanent Head Damage?

When I was but a a wee one, sitting in an undergraduate intro course that I somehow ended up taking my senior year of college, a very wise Professor launched into "the talk."  This wasn't about the birds and the bees, or even the gentle conversation with struggling students about switching their major to something easier.  No, this was the graduate school talk.

"Take a good, hard look," my Professor warned, "at what graduate students coming out of your intended program look like, because graduate school is all about breaking you down and molding you into someone new.  You want to make certain that you want to be the sort of person that comes out on the other side."

Graduate school, he intoned, was a process of production. It did something to you, trained you to think a certain way, broke you down and built you back up.  And as a graduate student you needed to be intentional about that.

Welcome to Permanent Head Damage

This blog is about all things PhD:

• The debt
• The drama
• The training, process, and experience, all of which will leave you with lasting and 

PERMANENT HEAD DAMAGE