“Why did you come to graduate school?”
The question came from “Dr. Jason,” my graduate adviser at “Elite National University.” He and I were sitting in his office, getting to know one another at the beginning of my graduate work in English. Dr. Jason intended only to make small talk, but everyone in the profession should contemplate his question. If only about half the people who begin a graduate program in the humanities actually complete a Ph.D., and only a small portion of those get tenure-track jobs, and only a few of those jobs match the research focus of doctoral training, why do people go to graduate school?
I can’t answer for people who pursue advanced studies in other disciplines or even for everyone who seeks a Ph.D. in English, but I can explain why I became a graduate student.
First of all, I plead ignorance. When Dr. Jason asked his question, I could’ve replied, “Why wouldn’t I come to grad school?” I didn’t say that, but I might as well have, because I was that naïve. Wise people may explore the downside of earning multiple degrees in the humanities before they apply for admission, but I didn’t, and I’ve no good excuse.
I also have no one to blame. When I asked my undergraduate professors at “Flyover College” to write recommendations for me, not a one of them mentioned the potential pitfalls, but why would they? They had gone to graduate school themselves and come out winners, so my plan matched their own career choices.
Perhaps my professors didn’t warn me, however, because they knew they would be wasting their time. I felt so excited about graduate school that I wouldn’t have taken negative advice seriously, even if my adviser had insisted that I read Thomas H. Benton’s “The Big Lie About the ‘Life of the Mind.’” When it came to advanced studies, I lived the life of the imagination.
Because I majored in English, not chemistry or accounting, I didn’t base decisions on facts. Instead, I constructed the world in terms of narrative. My life was a story, and I played the central role. The story began at college, where I wasn’t the top English major, but I did well enough in my courses and published several pieces in the campus literary magazine. In my imagination, those minor achievements foreshadowed academic triumph. If the chair of the English department had handed me reports by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Council of Graduate Schools, and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching about the difficulties of finding a tenure-track position, I would have interpreted those challenges as a holy grail worthy of a hero’s quest.
Next, I must confess something more ridiculous. I went to graduate school because I wanted a romance that paralleled that of Elizabeth and Darcy in a nerdy sort of way. Alas, my undergraduate attempts at romance fell short of the Jane Austen ideal.
One interesting young woman, a history major named “Harriet,” saw the world in terms of facts. I told her that to me, history was a bunch of fascinating stories. Harriet said, “Stories are a waste of time.”
“Maureen,” a music major, wanted to live life like one big musical comedy. I’m tone-deaf.
“Colleen,” a chemistry major, asked me out for dinner. During the meal we established that she found literature boring and hated my favorite movies. Colleen could name no favorite movies of her own because she “didn’t keep track of such stuff,” but she did follow professional wrestling. We never had a second date.
Clearly I needed to find someone who appreciated stories, and since she hadn’t appeared at Flyover College, where would an English major look next? In graduate classrooms, libraries, and lounges, of course.
Now for a third confession. Although I wanted to do something mature like form a permanent loving relationship, I also went to graduate school because I had a childish desire to put off starting a career.
That desire came from stories I heard about people who had actually entered the working world. While a friend without a college degree became a groundskeeper, another friend who had earned a B.A. in English got a similar position with a lawn-care service—a contrast that suggested I might have wasted my time in college. Other English majors I knew took jobs as clerks of various sorts. Those jobs weren’t awful by any means, but they weren’t terribly different from jobs I’d had in college and in high school—again suggesting I’d blundered by choosing English. What’s more, those jobs hardly compared with the excitement of reading about Ahab’s obsession with Moby Dick. By immersing myself in graduate studies, I could fantasize about a great career for years without having to hunt one down.
Although I wanted to live in the realm of the imagination and deny facts, that other world intruded from time to time. The most benevolent of those intrusions came from an accounting major whom I’ll call “Bitzer.” While I viewed my life as an exciting narrative unfolding daily, Bitzer envisioned his as a well-thought-out business plan. One day when we were chatting in our dorm, Bitzer asked me the obvious question: “What are you going to do with a major in English?”
“I’ll go to grad school and see what happens,” I told him.
Bitzer said, “You ought to go to the placement office and see if they can save your butt.”
The placement office at Flyover had a poor reputation, but I realized that Bitzer’s version of the world might have some validity, so I attended a talk by a visiting speaker who helped people in the humanities start careers outside the nonprofit sector.
“Don’t market yourself as an English or art or music major,” he advised the five or six students who showed up. “Think of yourself as a toolbox full of skills, and figure out which employers need your skills.”
I liked the image of the toolbox because it made me think of Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen when he cobbles together junk to turn his boat into a torpedo. But when I checked my own toolbox, I didn’t know what to do with the contents. I could interpret literature. I could do research. I could write. In fact, I’d sent out pieces of writing to journals and received more than 50 rejection slips. One of them was personalized and handwritten, which a professor told me was an honor to receive. Somehow, though, I couldn’t imagine applying for a job and saying, “I’m good at rejection.”
Graduate school seemed like the only place for my qualifications.
On the day that Dr. Jason asked why I had come to graduate school, however, I could hardly reply, “My toolbox is empty,” or “I’m still single,” or “I want to avoid adulthood,” so I said simply, “I like to read.”
Dr. Jason frowned: “You may have come here for the wrong reason.”
I intuited that the topic of motivation for graduate studies at Elite National U. worked like an old-fashioned understanding between gentlemen: If you had to ask for details, you didn’t belong in the club. Nonetheless, it was my turn to talk, so I asked, “What would be the right reason?”
Dr. Jason drew himself up and said, “To become a literary professional.” He told me a story about a time during his graduate-school days when a paper he had written received applause from his fellow students in a seminar. He went on to publish it.
Dr. Jason’s tale differed so much from my own shallow motivations that I needed some time to absorb it, but eventually I understood that my graduate professors’ focus on publication resembled Ahab’s fixation on the white whale. Nothing else mattered. If someone had stated that as a simple fact when I was an undergraduate, I would have laughed it off as absurd, but now that I was in graduate school, Dr. Jason wisely spoke the language an English major would understand. He told me a story to help me match my narrative to that of graduate school.
Today, when I work with my own advisees, I encourage them to take courses that include practical writing so that they have more options than I did, but if they want to go to graduate school, I ask them what they imagine it will be like. They invariably say that advanced studies will be like a series of the best seminars they’ve had as undergraduates, only a lot more fun. I assure them that I hope they have a great time, but I also inform them that there’s more to graduate school than just reading and writing. To illustrate that, I tell them my stories.
(Editor’s Note: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 of this series are online.)
