On Enjoying Grad School

I loved my time in grad school, and I’ve never regretted going.

This was a much easier thing for me to admit last year, when I was a contingent writing instructor with a Ph.D. in literature who had given up on the tenure-track job market after five years of failure (three years of interviews, two years of nothing) and then spent the next five years in a holding pattern, trying to turn my meaningful but precarious job into some kind of career.

I know as deeply as anyone that grad school guarantees nothing. But that didn’t retroactively sour my good experience. Instead, it intensified my memory of the sweetness. Even my obligatory piece of anonymous viral quit lit in The Chronicle was a love letter to lost grad-school joys. “I’m giving myself free rein to hate ‘the market,’ " I wrote , pseudonymously, in these pages back in 2010, “but I will never trash talk the memory of graduate school: the way it feels to get caught up in conversation, the way students surprise and delight you, the way an adviser’s kind comments melt you like chocolate, the way your name looks in print, the way brilliant people can sum up a seminar in a sentence. In the words of Ira Gershwin and the voice of Fred Astaire, ‘No, they can’t take that away from me.’ "

During my decade as a failed scholar, refusing to disavow my love of grad school felt like a kind of necessary if perverse perseverance. It meant: I’m not one of those obnoxious people who believes in academia just because it happened to work out for me. It meant: The years of my youth were not just a means to an end.

Now things are more complicated. Much to my surprise, I recently got a tenure-track job. I wasn’t on the job market, but I happened to see an appealing job ad on the Facebook page of a friend of a friend — a job in creative writing, a field I’d written a book in but hadn’t trained in, hadn’t been to a conference in, hadn’t even taken a class in since high school — and I applied for and got it. Like a spinster who suddenly wakes up married, I’m now having to make sense of my unrecognizable new identity. After spending so many years as a former grad student who failed to get the job I trained for, I am suddenly a professor who will hopefully be mentoring grad students for the rest of my career (though I’ll be mentoring M.F.A. students rather than Ph.D.s).

My own grad students, present and future, are my main motivation for writing another essay about loving grad school, even though I know so many people suffer from its well-known ills: the sometimes inadequate or unequal financial support, the often difficult advising dynamics, the usually nonunionized labor conditions, the chronically nonexistent job market, the competitiveness, the claustrophobia, the depression. It’s obvious why many people hate it. But as a graduate educator, I have a responsibility to make sure that misery is not the whole story, and luckily I know from experience that it doesn’t have to be.

Admittedly, some of my reasons for loving grad school are atypical.

I lived with my parents during college, and whenever a paper was due I had to fight my five siblings for access to the family computer. Space was at a premium, and I couldn’t always count on having my own room, so for a while I was sleeping on a mattress at the top of the stairs with only a curtain for privacy. I had grown up with financial insecurity in the air I breathed.

When I got to Princeton, in 2002, I had five guaranteed years of a $13,500 stipend (plus summer funding, plus benefits) which I supplemented with part-time jobs, and I felt as if I’d won the lottery. I was making more money than my mom ever made as a licensed practical nurse, and more than my dad made doing construction in lean years. I had a room and laptop of my own, and I got to do a lot of fancy things for the first time: go to restaurants regularly, buy a brand-new, brand-name bookbag, travel to conferences and archives on Princeton’s dime. I felt happily, if temporarily, catapulted into the cushy middle class.

But my joy in grad school wasn’t just an effect of the unprecedented financial security. After a relatively unsocial commuter-student college experience, I was suddenly awash in friends who loved reading and writing (and talking about reading and writing) and parties and picnics and camping trips and trips to the city and trips to the shore. These friends became, and remain, my world. We are now scattered across the country and continents, but our friendships are rooted in the intense and time-rich grad-school years when we saw one another almost every day.

I was also blessed in mentors. I had four people on my committee, three women and one man, all of them brilliant and kind. One adviser who knew I was struggling with my dissertation met with me every week to give me writing feedback and pep talks while he was on sabbatical. I look back on that fact with awe and a little horror. But his generosity wasn’t wasted on me — it meant that I was able to break through and write. And it was typical of him: He is generous to all of his students, the recipient of many teaching and mentoring awards. Each of my advisers encouraged me to speak up, publish, apply for things that felt out of reach, take risks, believe in my abilities. In different ways, they modeled not just academic life but life: How to deal with self-doubt and anxiety. When to prioritize the personal over the professional (and vice versa). How to create community; how to deal with complicated colleagues and devastating breakups; how to find strength in prayer, baking, walking, or rest.

Now that I’ve spent over a decade devoting substantially more time and energy to my students than I am contractually required to (I live in constant awareness of my debts to my teachers and to the universe), I understand that lavish mentoring isn’t necessarily a drain on mentors. It can be part of what makes a sometimes grueling profession meaningful and sustaining.

My appreciation for my advisers’ steadfast mentoring is particularly deep because in many ways I was (or thought of myself as) a bad grad student. Though I won fellowships, presented at conferences, and published academic essays, my dissertation process was protracted and tortuous. I took an extra semester to come up with a topic and then wrote the shortest prospectus in the history of the department and the shortest dissertation the university would allow. (I double-spaced all my block quotes and used the biggest font I could.) I changed dissertation topics at the end of my fifth year and took eight years to finish.

Meanwhile I was doing a thousand other things that buoyed and educated me: auditing a slew of extra seminars in different fields and departments, serving as a “resident graduate student” in an undergrad dorm, tutoring at the writing center, participating in the college’s interfaith Religious Life Council, going on a civil-rights tour of Alabama, organizing in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and canvassing for Obama, teaching Sunday school and playing piano at my church, teaching in an after-school program at local public high schools, teaching in a summer program for first-gen and low-income college students, teaching in the university writing program, co-leading the grad-student pedagogy seminar, leading the grad Americanist colloquium, hosting weekly gin and tonic nights.

Throughout grad school, I thought of myself as an amateur — a kinder word than impostor; a word based on love. (For a while, I even wanted to write my dissertation on amateurs.) A friend jokes that I was actually a scammer, getting paid to be a scholar while doing everything else instead. But unbeknownst to me, I was doing exactly what I needed to do to get ready for post-Ph.D. life in a post-job-market world.

My approach to grad school might have been terrible preparation for a tenure-track R1 job, but it turned out to be excellent preparation for everything else. After the 2008 financial crash made Plan Bs more necessary than ever, I discovered that my grad-school years had equipped me to win a full-tuition scholarship to divinity school; to be a contender for academic administration and residential-life positions; to teach a wide range of students from high school to grad school; to become a freelance journalist (my first HuffPost and Los Angeles Review of Books editors were grad-school mentors and colleagues); and to write and publish a nonacademic book. Even though I didn’t consider myself a writer until many years after I got my Ph.D., grad school gave me the connections, credentials, and confidence I needed to get my words into the world. It also taught me skills and practices that are essential in many kinds of work: how to face a daunting task that demands everything you’ve got; how to deal with evaluation and rejection; how and when to rely on others.

Even now, years later, my grad-school experience continues to pave the way for me professionally in ways I couldn’t have anticipated. My grad-school adviser provided her spare room for an informal writing residency when I needed a peaceful place to write my book proposal. Grad-school friends read and edited every page of my manuscript before it went to press. And my next book is getting written with the help of the women in my writing group, whom I met in the first year of my Ph.D. program, 16 years ago. The practical, intellectual, and emotional support system I found in grad school will sustain me as long as I live.

Some people are born with access to the life they want to live; some discover it in high school or college. I got it in grad school.

Although certain aspects of my story are unusual, good grad-school experiences are not as rare as you might think. When I crowdsourced positive stories on Facebook and Twitter, my mentions and DMs were instantly flooded. I was looking for common threads, and I found them. Though the hundred-plus respondents had attended all sorts of universities, from Alabama to South Florida to Pitt to Princeton to CUNY to Harvard to Idaho State, in fields as varied as history, education, media studies, genetics, neuroscience, and public health, the same three themes came up over and over again: affordability; supportive intellectual community; and high-quality mentoring.

Of course there were many sarcastic or concerned comments as well. “Cue ‘the shortest book in the library’ jokes,” someone snarked, while a current grad student asked, “Why write a piece like this from a position of authority and power when it could be so clearly misinterpreted by those who can effect needed change for so many grad students? There’s more wrong than right with graduate education right now.” Fair enough. But reflecting on my own good experience and reading about others’ have also illuminated many of the ways that grad school can and should be changed for the better.

First, good grad-school experiences often correlate with sufficient material support. While certain kinds of academic solidarity might be forged in the trenches as groups of students battle the common enemy of an abusive professor, an unjust university administration, or the wolf at the door, it is easier to work and flourish when you have enough money to pay your bills and are treated with basic respect. Many respondents cited adequate stipends and good health care as primary factors in their good experiences; some also cited maternity leave and subsidized housing. As universities grow ever more dependent on grad-student and contingent labor, it is essential for all of us to fight for fair pay and benefits for grad students as well as for the adjuncts they often become.

Second, we need to tell more-complex stories about grad school and class. Too many people seem to assume that attending an inexpensive or fully funded program is less lucrative or prudent than the other things a person could do with their lives, but this is not always the case. Sure, in theory I could have made more money as a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or astronaut, but given my abilities and interests, that was never in the cards. As a grad student and later as a non-tenure-track instructor, I enjoyed substantially more money and job security than I’d grown up with, and about the same as I would have experienced as a minister or journalist (the other career paths I seriously considered). For me and for many others, grad school offers short-term financial security and an affordable, versatile professional credential. Even if we don’t become professors, it’s a path that makes sense.

Finally, there should be no shame in being a “bad” grad student, i.e. in prioritizing nonacademic personal and professional life as well as (or even instead of) an academic career. The collapse of the academic job market is terrifying and tragic. It can make even the best grad-school experience sometimes feel like being on a conveyor belt headed toward a cliff. But it should at least liberate us all from the delusion that academia is a meritocracy worth sacrificing everything for. In a world where even the most laser-focused, hyper-productive perfection doesn’t necessarily result in a desirable academic job, it makes sense for students to approach graduate education not as a straightforward professional apprenticeship but as a stretch of time and labor that needs to be made meaningful in its own right, and turned into a gateway to many possible and unknown futures. Those of us who are graduate educators need to figure out how to support and celebrate our students on their nonlinear, unpredictable paths — regardless of whether these paths look anything like conventional success — with the hope that no matter where life takes them, they can look back on their time in grad school without regret, and maybe even with affection.

Briallen Hopper is an assistant professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York. She is the author of Hard to Love (Bloomsbury), out in February.