...is 20/20
(Warning: spleen-venting ahead.)
Dear 2006 Me,
A few weeks ago, you finished sending out your three applications to PhD programs. You are fed up with living in Bowling Green, Ohio. Your wife is very nearly done with both her master’s degree and the courses she needs to take her certification exam. (You don’t know it yet, but she’s going to be pregnant in a few months.) Mostly, you are in your middle twenties and want something more from your life. You consciously chose to apply to doctoral programs only in the places you’d like to live (Minnesota, Texas, California). You’re not entirely convinced that more school is what you need.
Trust your doubts. Don’t go to graduate school. (Don’t take your guns to town, Bill, leave your guns at home, son, don’t take your guns to town.)
Seven years later, you’ll have two kids. The older one is brilliant and a lot like you, but he’s got special needs. The younger one is somehow an extrovert and unbelievably full of joy when she’s not pleading for attention. You’ll finally be finished with your degree, and you’ll be applying for jobs with about the same enthusiasm you had for your PhD applications. You don’t get to pick and choose where you apply, though, because the job market for junior academics is absolutely horrid and you have to apply for every thing you think you might have a shot at. Also, the hiring cycle is really slow. Also also, you took a job last summer with an odd calendar and inadvertently locked yourself out of an unusual and very good adjunct opportunity. You spend your days taking care of your three-year old daughter, taking your son to appointments, and occasionally making it to the gym to try and work off the five or ten pounds you have gained from fatherhood and turning 30.
You won’t miss teaching. You won’t miss being in classes. You’ll miss having a life. Talking to adults who aren’t your wife or service providers.
Your graduate program will let you down. You will finish in part to spite the people who made the process so much more difficult than it ought to have been. You’ll have your dissertation and some more letters after your name and roughly the same job prospects as you do right now. You will be thinking very hard about getting a job outside of academia because you’d like to have some say on where you raise your family, and because you haven’t read a positive story about education in (literally) years. “Mid-thirties” will be staring you in the face as you try to start a career.
So don’t go to graduate school. Get started on that career now. Think about hanging around another year or two in Ohio, even though you hate it, because the woman you love is going to get just as fed up with Minnesota after a few years, and resent having to be the fully-employed breadwinner while her children change from babies to kids. (She won’t be cruel about it, and she won’t be vindictive, but you’ll hear it in her voice every time the subject comes up. And there’s nothing either of you will be able to do to change it.)
Hell, maybe it’s even time to take the risk of pursuing your writing in a serious way. It’s the one constant that’s held up all the way through school. Maybe music was a detour. Because I can tell you now, from 2013, that you don’t spend a lot of time listening to the music you write and teach about. Enough, perhaps, but you’re not in love with it. You do, in fact, spend a lot of time wondering why this kind of music is still being made, what people are trying to say, and who they think might be listening.
Just don’t go to graduate school, because you’re not really going to get what you’re expecting to get out of it.
Dear 2006 Me,
A few weeks ago, you finished sending out your three applications to PhD programs. You are fed up with living in Bowling Green, Ohio. Your wife is very nearly done with both her master’s degree and the courses she needs to take her certification exam. (You don’t know it yet, but she’s going to be pregnant in a few months.) Mostly, you are in your middle twenties and want something more from your life. You consciously chose to apply to doctoral programs only in the places you’d like to live (Minnesota, Texas, California). You’re not entirely convinced that more school is what you need.
Trust your doubts. Don’t go to graduate school. (Don’t take your guns to town, Bill, leave your guns at home, son, don’t take your guns to town.)
Seven years later, you’ll have two kids. The older one is brilliant and a lot like you, but he’s got special needs. The younger one is somehow an extrovert and unbelievably full of joy when she’s not pleading for attention. You’ll finally be finished with your degree, and you’ll be applying for jobs with about the same enthusiasm you had for your PhD applications. You don’t get to pick and choose where you apply, though, because the job market for junior academics is absolutely horrid and you have to apply for every thing you think you might have a shot at. Also, the hiring cycle is really slow. Also also, you took a job last summer with an odd calendar and inadvertently locked yourself out of an unusual and very good adjunct opportunity. You spend your days taking care of your three-year old daughter, taking your son to appointments, and occasionally making it to the gym to try and work off the five or ten pounds you have gained from fatherhood and turning 30.
You won’t miss teaching. You won’t miss being in classes. You’ll miss having a life. Talking to adults who aren’t your wife or service providers.
Your graduate program will let you down. You will finish in part to spite the people who made the process so much more difficult than it ought to have been. You’ll have your dissertation and some more letters after your name and roughly the same job prospects as you do right now. You will be thinking very hard about getting a job outside of academia because you’d like to have some say on where you raise your family, and because you haven’t read a positive story about education in (literally) years. “Mid-thirties” will be staring you in the face as you try to start a career.
So don’t go to graduate school. Get started on that career now. Think about hanging around another year or two in Ohio, even though you hate it, because the woman you love is going to get just as fed up with Minnesota after a few years, and resent having to be the fully-employed breadwinner while her children change from babies to kids. (She won’t be cruel about it, and she won’t be vindictive, but you’ll hear it in her voice every time the subject comes up. And there’s nothing either of you will be able to do to change it.)
Hell, maybe it’s even time to take the risk of pursuing your writing in a serious way. It’s the one constant that’s held up all the way through school. Maybe music was a detour. Because I can tell you now, from 2013, that you don’t spend a lot of time listening to the music you write and teach about. Enough, perhaps, but you’re not in love with it. You do, in fact, spend a lot of time wondering why this kind of music is still being made, what people are trying to say, and who they think might be listening.
Just don’t go to graduate school, because you’re not really going to get what you’re expecting to get out of it.
posted by J.D.J.P. at 2:23 PM
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