I recently finished my first year in a tenure-track position at American University in Washington DC and I have been thinking about what kinds of things I wish I had known when starting a PhD. Here, I aim to give advice for students just starting PhD programs in hopes of helping more students “get to the other side” of graduate school. Fair warning: there’s a good amount of pessimism here, but I’m nevertheless ultimately optimistic about the path of the PhD for lots of folks.
I should share a bit about myself as these are my thoughts about graduate school and beyond. People have different experiences depending on their temperaments, goals, and social identities. I thus first recommend that students seek lots of advice in this pursuit. That said, I have found that many scholars, especially from underrepresented backgrounds, share my experiences.
I grew up in a smallish town (St. George, Utah) in a small working class family. Neither of my parents finished high school. Their parents did manual labor and sales. I applied to only two colleges and was fortunate to be accepted to one with generous scholarship support. When I started college, I did not know what I wanted to study or that graduate school even existed. While I was aware of professional graduate degrees (law, business, medicine), I had literally never heard of a PhD or doctorate. Nevertheless, I ended up applying to PhD programs thanks to the encouragement of a professor and support of the Ronald E. McNair Scholars Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program. I went to graduate school for a PhD in philosophy, a discipline where women and first generation students are still very outnumbered. I finished my PhD in 2016 and went on the academic job market three times (2013-2016).
In case you haven’t been told: very few people who start graduate school actually finish the PhD and even fewer land stable tenure track jobs. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in 2013 that only 50 percent of graduate students finish the PhD and I suspect the numbers are even more disheartening when disaggregated by race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability, etc. I think it’s important to highlight these grim statistics not as a deterrent, but rather to give a realistic picture which students can then navigate.
My aim in this essay is to help students prepare for what lies ahead so they can get to the other side quickly and in one piece. If you are lucky you may even thrive as a scholar, but I don’t think it’s helpful to set thriving as the goal, or more specifically, academic thriving (personal thriving is still very important!) The idea that grad school is “all your favorite parts of undergrad but even better!” is often inaccurate and subscribing to the idea can generate anxiety and depression when it turns out to be false.
Thus, I encourage students to focus simply on getting to the other side. This is primarily because graduate school is often terrible for mental health. Rates of anxiety and depression are higher in graduate school compared to the general population and talk is building of a “mental health crisis” in academia. In addition to a self-selection issue (perhaps anxious and depressed folks are more likely to steer toward academia), graduate school exacerbates mental crises for several reasons:
Challenges in graduate school
