Disclaimer from present me: I wrote a few months ago, before I had the chance to distance myself from the grad school experience, so it might seem brutally honest. But it should be. Grad school isn’t for everyone, but hardly anyone says that. So let me be the one to say it loudly, proudly, and with my old wounds–now almost healed–exposed.
So, I know
this might not be a popular opinion, but that’s what these blog posts are for,
right?
Grad school
made me a worse person. There’s no doubt about it. I arrived here not knowing
what to expect, and let me tell you, it kind of wrecked me. The thing is, I
didn’t realize I was being wrecked until I was too deep in the process to get
out. And by that time, all I could do was tread water and try to keep myself
from drowning.
I’m sure grad
school is a great thing, for a lot of people. I’m sure it’s the answer to their
prayers and the road they need to travel to get where they want to go. I
thought it was both of those things for me as well, but when I discovered it
absolutely wasn’t, I had nowhere to turn. Everywhere I looked, I saw people
happy, or at least faking being happy, within the system. No would admit the
inherent flaw that we all saw, that we all put up with, on a daily basis: grad
school makes you miserable. Even when you enjoy it and feel like you belong, it
can still make you miserable.
And then
there’s people like me. Determined (too late of course) that I actually don’t
belong in grad school, but nevertheless stuck here until I finish my degree.
What does
someone like me do?
The thing
about grad school is, there is so. much. work. Even if you only took breaks to
shower and eat—forget sleep, there isn’t time for that—you would never get all
the reading done. To put it simply, it is impossible. Yet when I mentioned
above observation to fellow grad students in the department, even a friendly
professor, all I got in return was a “Welcome to grad school!” with a complicit
smile. It seemed like everyone but me was in on this big secret. The secret
that would make it all worth it in the end: all the misery, all the self-doubt,
all the late nights and early mornings. But the farther I went, the more I
realized that there was no secret. Everyone around me was faking. Faking that
they had done the reading, faking an ‘intelligent’ comment, faking that they
were happy.
Anyone who
knows me knows that I am a no-bullshit person. What you see is what you get,
and I don’t apologize for being honest. Never have, never will. If you can’t be
yourself, then who can you be? And where does that leave you?
So many
graduate students think this system is okay, that they just have to put up with
all the—for lack of a better word—crap and it will all be worth it in the end.
But my question is, has anyone ever questioned the system? Maybe the system is
inherently flawed but no one has had the time to even question it. Well, here I
am. And yes, I am a product of this system—I will graduate in May with my
Master of Arts in Hispanic Literature. I could have stayed on for my Ph.D.,
essentially another five years in the system. But I am breaking free. I am
running away, and I will find a job where my Master’s degree is enough.
Contrary to what the system says. Because, like any system, when it is told
that it isn’t wanted, that it isn’t necessary, it makes you believe that
without it, you will fail.
When you’re a
grad student and you express the idea that maybe the Ph.D. isn’t for you after
all, you’ll get one of two reactions from fellow students and professors. The
first is a look of shock, quickly covered up or not, followed by a contrite
admission that it might not be for you, but it’s definitely for them. The
second is a kind of self-righteous half smile and a half-hearted “good for
you”, which basically means that they knew you weren’t cooked up for it anyhow.
There’ll be less competition once you’re gone, anyways.
Well I’m here
to say that I’m escaping the system, and anyone else who wants to is free to
join me. Because contrary to popular belief, grad school didn’t make me a
better person, nor a better student, nor more intelligent. Sure, I know a lot
of things about Hispanic literature. You wanna know what year Gabriel García
Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude won
the Nobel? Or when The Time of the Hero by
Mario Vargas Llosa was picked up for publication in Spain by Seix Barral? Or
the differences between Quevedo’s and Góngora’s use of the baroque in their
poetry? I got you covered. But the accumulation of all this ‘knowledge’ has had
detrimental effects not only on who I am, but my relationships with the
important people in my life.
Grad school
has made me a more selfish person. Or more self-absorbed, I should say. While I
was reading studying for my Master’s exam, I told myself that as soon as my
exam was over, I would return the calls/texts/Skype dates that I missed; I
would take an interest again in my friends’ and family members’ lives. Months
and months turned into more than a year, and when I took my exam, and then
passed, I found that I had forgotten how to be a good friend. A good sister. A
good daughter. And for what? With the mindset that it was okay to be a little
more self-absorbed because I had to read, or had to study, what had I become?
What had I forgotten along the way?
Hand in hand
with his mindset was the idea that I had so much to do that I had to everything
as quickly as possible. Read a book every two days, finish that response paper
in no more than an hour…the list goes on and on. My Master’s career quickly
turned into a race, and the two things I loved most in life—reading and
writing—slowly but surely lost any semblance of pleasure at all. The irony was
not lost on me; I had wanted to go to grad school, especially for something
like literature, because of the common adage “Do what you love and you’ll never
work a day.” Now that I was in the thick of it, I realized this was simply not
true.
As the sheer
amount of reading I had to do in order to prepare for my exams dawned on me, I
began to lose motivation. When the mountain of work never goes away, does not
even diminish—ever, no matter how work you do every day, the challenge becomes
daunting and ceases to be a challenge that can be vanquished, and instead
becomes an unrealistic task that will never be completed. That being said, I
did finish my reading list. But more importantly, I lost not only the
motivation to succeed along the way, but also the motivation to do well. As
long as it got done, I did not care how well it was done, because I had a
hundred others things to do after that.
Perhaps the chief
manner in which I came out on the other side of grad school a worse person was
that somewhere along the way, I lost my self-confidence. Or it was stolen from
me. I prefer the latter, mainly because I didn’t realize I no longer had it
until it was gone. The eye rolls and perfunctory sighs from fellow grad
students had done me in. I no longer wanted to, or cared, to participate in
class discussions because of the repercussions of said commentary. So what?,
you’re probably thinking. Who cares about what they think? The problem, was I did. In my eyes, because they were
second year Master’s students (or even Ph.D. students) they were right and I
was wrong. So did I really have my self-confidence stolen, or did I merely
sacrifice it to those who I thought (wrongly) were better than me?
All of this
translated into a very depressed me. I no longer knew who I was, or what I
wanted. What I thought I wanted turned out to be wrong, so how could I be
trusted to know now? I hadn’t thought about who I was for a really long time—I
hadn’t had time for it. And now I just didn’t know. I had left undergrad and
went to Spain to teach English, where I traveled the world and came back with
what I thought was a unique experience. Turns out, at least in the field I
chose to do my Master’s in, my experience was anything but unique. In fact, it
was categorically run of the mill. Everyone had a story similar to mine; all of
a sudden, I was no longer an interesting person. I was just a person. A person
with no identity.
By the time I
realized all of this, the end was in sight for me. I had decided that what I
had sacrificed along the way was not worth what I got in return, and I began
the process of collecting the pieces of my shattered identity and putting them back
together to figure out what was left. Every day I am becoming more like the
person I was, and there’s nothing wrong with that.