ten things i’ve learned in ten years of having my PhD
i defended my dissertation ten years ago this week, which feels like yesterday and also approximately seven lifetimes ago. in honor of that milestone, here is a list of ten things i've learned in my doctoral life:
all that you Change, Changes you - this is the most everlasting truth of the PhD process for me. most days, i am not directly working in the intellectual spaces of my research, but the ripples of that work are everywhere. it changed me. i, in turn, changed the places and spaces in which i did that work. that change is undeniable, living proof that the work i did, and continue to do, matters.
you get to celebrate forever - the end of the dissertation process felt like, in all honesty, an anti-climatic, stress drenched race against an administrative clock. i wanted a confetti shower and parade, and instead i got hours and hours of heartache about margins and grace periods. but, ten years on, i've had so many chances to celebrate - the first piece of mail with my title on it (and every piece thereafter!), having parts of my research published, seeing it bound on my shelf, being able to use that research in all kinds of situations - that it has eased some of the disappointment of the actual end.
you get to change your mind - when i started my PhD, i was SURE that i would be a tenure-track professor. midway through, i KNEW i would work in a teaching and learning center. ten years on, this business is both a completely logical evolution of my PhD experience and also not at all what i planned. you get to keep changing your mind, especially as you try things out and learn through living. and that’s just the career part of the PhD! you get to change your research, your frameworks, your viewpoints, and your understandings - all of it - because that change means that you’re actually processing and using what you’re learning through the process, and that’s the whole goal.
your career path is your own, especially as time goes on - i was told directly that to not pursue a tenure track job was disrespectful to all the faculty who worked to train me during my degree. i HOPE that people have opened up to more diverse career paths in the intervening decade, but it was life changing when a mentor told me “they get to have opinions, you have to live it” about my career path. i was genuinely devastated to feel like i let people down in the first few years of building this business, but i would have been more devastated to take jobs that didn’t fit what i wanted just to avoid letting people down. and the more time that passes, the less that rejection stings.
your life was, and will be, going on the whole time - in a lot of ways, the PhD process is like a timewarp, a temporal bermuda triangle where you swirl in the uncertainty of it all, feeling like no time at all has passed. but time indeed was passing, and my life was going on that whole time. the pressure to put things off - vacations, time with family, relationships, friendships, caretaking, other goals, hobbies - until “after” was so high, but i am so grateful that i didn’t completely stop living while i got my PhD. i wish i had lived more, even.
intellectual community is worth fostering - the thing that i miss the most about my time in the PhD program is how (relatively) easy it was to think WITH people. from reading and discussing texts together, working on projects, workshopping each others’ papers, going to conferences, getting excited about research together, talking through the sticky spots, the intellectual community during the degree was worth investing in. i missed it when i graduated, but because i knew what was possible, i was able to search for it and build it again outside, too.
colleagues and friends are two different categories, but those that sit in the intersection chefs kiss - my program was small-small (i think we peaked at 10 people total while i was there) and it took me a minute to realize that i wanted to be collegial with everyone, but didn’t necessarily need to be best friends with everyone. it was really useful for me to treat my work like any other job, with work/life boundaries, with regular working hours, and a community that was separate. but when you find that sweet spot, of people whose work you adore and whose vibes and values are even better?? that’s the good stuff right there.
stay curious - academia is built on expertise - cultivating it, performing it, evaluating it. but i would wager that almost all of us are there because we also like to learn. holding onto my curiosity (how does this work? what does this mean? what would happen if i did this? what is it that they’re doing?) made it possible to keep learning, and thus, stay aligned with the parts of the process i really liked to begin with. when it came time to do expertise-based things, they were easier because it came out of research and skills that i actively learned, and didn’t just bluster my way into, and that made me more confident and comfortable. not knowing something is survivable, and in fact, might just be the thing that unlocks a whole new path.
skill building can be hard to see, but you are doing it - it wasn’t until my fifth year that i realized i actually was really good at project management. i didn’t realize how much my writing had improved until i had to teach those skills to undergraduates. i didn’t realize how much better i was at reading, teaching, taking breaks, and balancing coffee and water intake over the course of the day, because those skills built slowly, without a lot of fanfare. but build them i did!!!
it means what you want it to mean - i can go weeks without thinking a lot about my degree. there are other seasons where i can’t find a single hour that isn’t impacted in some small or large way by the work i did to get my degree. sometimes i feel such an amazing sense of pride in the accomplishment and determination and community i built to get me there. other times it feels like such a small part of the work i actually do as a coach and business owner and parent and friend and partner and gardener and writer. right after i graduated i felt so much pressure to make the degree worth it, to have a job and build a career that makes crystal clear how important the degree was and is. now, it’s easier to see how it’s bound up in who i am as a person, and as a scholar, but it’s not the whole picture, either. it is what it is, in a gloriously freeing way.