Welcome to Grievances on Air. This podcast is an exploration of the difficulties and
benefits of inhabiting grad school.
By sharing these experiences, we hope to provide information for anyone considering entering
into this journey themselves.
Beyond that, through the staging of our particular narratives and perspectives, we want to create
a collective space for processing the myriad emotions involved in the long process of grad
school.
Grief, joy, growth, enchantment, disenchantment, frustration, and maybe even triumph, to name
a few.
Your hosts, Mel, Riley, Amy, and Vidula, will share their individual experiences about
grad school.
Interspersed between these segments, you'll hear reflections from our colleagues' collective
and independent experiences, discussing the ups, downs, and everything in between of navigating
the institution.
What I wish I could tell myself before entering grad school is that a PhD is not a predetermined
path.
There are as many options, opportunities, resources, careers, and journeys as there
are graduate students.
So I would tell myself that shifting away from the expertise model of grad school is
a healthy and valuable way to explore my role in higher education and its unexpected little
twists.
You want to explore your specialized research interests in grad school and how they inform
your work writ large, though grad school is also a time to connect with your aspirations
in line with those interests, and that may or may not be within the traditional professoria.
I'm just totally okay.
I wish I knew how much grad school would come to feel like adulthood deferred.
This is fine sometimes to not have a quote unquote real job and to spend my time thinking
and reading and teaching and all that, but other times it feels lonely and childish.
It was easier to avoid in the earlier years, but now my friends are getting married and
having children and my family members are asking me my future plans and I feel embarrassed
almost to not know what my job will be in a year or if I'll even have a job.
The hardest part about all of this has been the precarity and lack of a clear future,
which seems ironic given that I entered into grad school because it gave the illusion of
stability.
What other job can you get when you're 22 that will promise to pay you for six years
and give you health insurance?
At the time, this seemed like the jackpot and it also seemed like it would be familiar.
I wouldn't have to find that real job anytime soon.
I wish I had known how much things change over five or six years and that the familiarity
of being a student could get old.
But then I also wish I knew that the job of grad school didn't have to be my whole life
and that life is actually really good outside the academy.
I saw somebody once derisively say that grad school is just for people who want to extend
their adolescence.
They meant that as an insult, but I think they're actually right and it's just and it's
not a bad thing the way that they said that it was.
You know, if you are somebody who maybe is a little bit more uncertain of the path that
you want to take, grad school can be a great way to extend like the timeline that you'll
take to figure out what it is that you want to do while also doing something that is productive
in the meantime.
So long as you're not like in a financially ruinous situation because of it, it can be
a great way to basically extend many of the benefits of adolescence, like sort of finding
yourself understanding what is important to you in life and that sort of thing.
The main value of grad school for me hasn't been anything strictly academic.
Sure, I love my dissertation project and I love the reading and the teaching and the
thinking, but I'm most glad to have had this time.
In the past six years, I've taken up several hobbies and learned a number of new skills
totally unrelated to writing.
For example, every month for the past 18 months or so, I've chopped about 10 pounds of cabbage
and radish and made a batch of kimchi.
I go to the gym often.
Sometimes I run, sometimes I rock climb, sometimes I swim.
Last year I bought a bike and in between editing my dissertation chapters, I'll go on sunny
meandering rides through my neighborhood.
I learned to make sourdough last year, a few years late from the pandemic, but nonetheless,
it has been a gift to learn so much, and about myself too.
Ironically perhaps, the greatest thing I've learned is that I don't need to be an academic
the way I once thought I did.
Yes, I like the work and my project, but I like all the things that it has allowed me
to do more.
The value of grad school has been learning that life is not grad school, but instead
it's making bread and petting my cat if you might be able to hear purring if you listen
carefully and being with my friends and loved ones.
It's corny, I know, and I realize that this also contradicts my gripe that being in grad
school feels like adulthood deferred.
I like this deferral, I like having this time.
I guess both can be true though, and I feel ambivalent.
Ultimately, I am glad that I went to grad school, it has been a great joy of my life
to have so much time and to have spent it in this way, even if I'm now ready for it
to be done.
I also wonder sometimes if this is how everyone feels about what they did in their 20s, and
if this is a function of getting older more than anything specific to the academy.
I wish I knew before I came to grad school how responsible I would be for my own education.
I thought that my professors would be invested in preparing me to be a scholar.
I thought they would feel responsible for preparing all the grad students in their department
to be competent and rigorous in their fields, and I thought they would care about all the
students they admitted equally.
And it turns out to be that a lot of us are admitted because we're cheap labor.
In the summer of my final year in graduate school, I experienced a health crisis.
I had a blood clot in close proximity to my heart, lungs, and brain, and it required multiple
procedures for doctors to remove it.
Weeks of hospital stays, numerous other surgeries, and long periods of uncertainty dictated my
life that was once consumed and governed by my academic work.
Until this point, I had bought into the idea that getting a PhD was about prioritizing
my work and serving the institution.
I was more worried about the start of summer classes than I was with having to live my
life outside of school and take care of myself.
How would I construct my syllabus?
Did I upload my slides to Canvas?
How much writing could I get done today?
When I faced the reality that my body and my brain, the center of my knowledge, was
in peril, I was forced to reconcile with the fact that I was reproducing and buying into
the machine that is the academic institution, and that it was having very real material
consequences on my well-being.
This revelation was exacerbated by the lack of flexibility I found in the larger expectations
of my institution.
Being encouraged by administrators to remain on normative time when I was realizing how
precious my time was, reminded me that the academy is so often beholden to its own productivity
rather than to the actual successes of its students.
As cliché as it might sound, this experience reminded me anew about how academia is made
inhospitable, how it leaves so little room for personal struggle, how it asks us, over
and over again, to commit ourselves to the backbreaking work of serving a fraught mission.
This is, in my experience, one of the most distressing aspects of graduate school, and
it is the very thing that I wish I knew before entering my program, that the larger institution
cares very little, if at all, about the scholars, academics, creatives, and people it intends
to serve.
One thing I wish I knew before starting grad school is how important support networks are.
So I had the opportunity to attend the graduate preparation program six months after starting
my program, and I built some good friendships there that has lasted throughout my whole
time in grad school, and it's been very important.
There are things that we can't control.
For instance, there was this COVID pandemic, and I think that friends are very important,
that they help you to navigate through also academics.
So yeah, that's one thing, very important thing.
So paradoxical, grad school taught me how to care more deeply for the people around me.
In the face of hostile environments and situations, I learned to care more intentionally for my
friends, my students, my colleagues, my family, and for anyone outside of the insular academic
bubble.
Having cohort mates who rallied around me when I was bedridden, making me and my family
meals, checking in, sending support, that was not an academic thing, but a human one.
And so I draw from them when I say that I prioritize community over productivity, and
that that has been the most valuable thing that I've learned in my time in grad school.
In a more practical sense, and a sort of less trauma dumpy one, I found a lot of value in
the skills I've gained from my program.
Having new ways to research, understanding how to communicate using digital, visual,
and oral tools, and getting to practice multiple genres of writing have all been beneficial,
especially as I think about life after my degree, and as I consider what skills I've
developed in my grad school experience holistically.
I think grads aren't taught often enough about how our skills can translate beyond our areas
of specialization and beyond our academic self.
And so if listeners take anything from my experience, I hope it's that you understand
your value outside of the institution.
I'm new to grad school as well as new to the United States.
Since the time I have been here, I'm constantly learning new things about the American education
system, academic culture, American culture in general, as well as its diversity.
There are many things I wish I knew about grad life before coming to the United States,
and I believe the list is just going to be longer.
I'm going to step back a little bit here and share my inhibitions around even applying
to a grad school.
I believed only high achievers were accepted in grad school, especially in a first world
country like the USA.
Second, I did not think of myself as someone whose research interests were both worth pursuing
as well as I had the caliber to pursue it.
Since in academia for a very long period of time, you or your community is the subject
that is being studied and not the other way around, you don't have the confidence of
thinking, oh, you know what, I can also turn the gaze around.
One thing that I have learned in the short period of time that I have been here and interacting
with other graduate scholars across disciplines is that my research interests are valid.
What puzzles you in society is not just because of your lack of knowledge, which in itself
is not a bad thing, like you can not know about certain things and still be okay with
it.
And I mean, it is just an opportunity for you to learn more.
If you spend time with your research questions that you have and work on them and identify
what is lacking in research, then your research interests are worth pursuing and you are very
much capable of pursuing them.
This has been my biggest learning and listening to research interests of other graduate students
across disciplines has been like, I need to stop doubting myself and in my research project.
So that has been a biggest learning for me and I wish I had more confidence when I started
the research project or even before applying to graduate school, maybe I would have applied
a little sooner.
One of the things I wish I knew before entering my PhD program was that it is more like a
job than my bachelor's or my master's were.
So it can be really easy to fall into this trap of feeling like you are still in school.
But really it is the beginning of a professional career ranging from the habits you form to
the way you conduct yourself among peers and professors and advisors to the connections
that you make along the way in professional venues.
So I wish I had realized earlier that this time really is the beginning of a career and
it helps with everything from skill acquisition to confidence to think about it and approach
it that way.
Since I have just begun my grad life, I believe I will be able to understand its value only
at a later stage.
However, I can speak about what in the past few months have been the most valuable thing
to me.
As I reflect on the last quarter, which was my first quarter, I can only think of friends,
colleagues, faculty who have been supportive and encouraging, thus making my transition
to grad life easier and challengeable.
I have felt secure and less homesick in their presence.
But perhaps the most important thing for me in the kind of support I have got is that
many of my colleagues, friends have recognized the impact of ongoing war it has on so many
of us in so many different ways, or just being mindful of the structures of inequality across
globe.
They are sensitive to my concerns, they have provided me the space to vent, have shown
solidarity and understanding that is so rare to find in other workspaces.
This has also given me the confidence to occupy academic space and I just hope I can also
provide the same kind of support to incoming graduates in next year or subsequent years.
I started grad school back in 2017.
I am from Puerto Rico, a set of islands in the Caribbean that are officially understood
as a US territory.
Many of us would say colony instead of territory.
Only two days after I completed my cross-country transplant to California, Puerto Rico was
hit by Hurricane Maria, a devastating event that we are still grappling with today.
Because of the degree of devastation, I lost contact with my family, my friends and most
of my community.
It dawned on me little by little, I didn't know anyone in California yet, and I was effectively
cut off from my community.
It was a hard and isolating time, but I was able to persist.
If I could go back in time, I would tell myself how hard it can be to build a new community
in a new place, not just because of cultural and linguistic differences, but because of
the difficulty of really knowing who's who, as it were.
People's deep values aren't exactly something that they write on their foreheads.
It takes time to figure out who it is that is surrounding you and try to find your people.
Coming straight from undergrad as I did, it took me a while to understand this shift.
Some people, and perhaps most people in the institutional space, are simply your colleagues
and not anything else.
Perhaps because of this, I would also tell myself to really value and care for the people
you find that you can actually trust with the deeper and more intimate parts of yourself,
but to be careful of who you extend this trust to.
So the valuable things that I took away from my grad program are, first, and this is something
that I kind of had an implicit sense of but I wish I had been more intentional about,
is meeting a community of people who are interested in intellectual topics similar to your own,
or even just in general.
Grad students are kind of weird and fun because they are really fixated on interesting and
dense topics.
If you're the kind of person who really connects well with people who are super curious about
the world and curious about the world enough to devote years and effort of their life to
it, then a grad program is a great place to meet other people who are like that, because
not a lot of people are like that as it turns out.
Like Riley earlier, a lot of the unforeseen value of grad school for me has been in what
I've been able to achieve outside of the official curriculum.
Even though it's not exactly a well-paid venture, once you learn how to juggle the
obligations of your day to day, you can actually end up with quite a bit of extra time on your
hands.
Of course, the mandate of the institution is to produce, produce, produce, but I realized
early on that if I let myself see to this demand, there would not be much left of my
soul by the time I was done.
For many of us coming from lower incomes or international locations, grad school can be
a first opportunity to experiment with having a room of one's own, in Virginia Woolf's
sense.
With this space, time, and strategic use of money, I've been able to expand my craft
as a musician and a poet.
Two years ago, while I was back in Puerto Rico on fellowship, I published my first book
of poetry with a wonderful publishing house on the main island, and I also had a book
presentation in San Juan, well attended by friends, family, and a few strangers.
Aside from that, all the music that you've heard throughout this podcast has been produced
by me.
The very fact that we've produced this podcast as a part of a university workshop and that
I'm able to use these skills that I thought were outside academia, now for a sort of academic
project, this fact might signify that things are changing and that there might be more
room for our souls in the institutional space beyond the neoliberal mandate of endless production.
Regardless, I'm not holding my breath.
At the end of the day, grad school is a job, and untangling it from my personal identity
has been very relieving for my self-worth and my work-life balance.
All right, everybody, that's our show.
I wanted to take a second to thank these people that shared their voices and their insight
with us.
These are Tara, Lorenzo, Chelsea, Juan, and my dear friend Mo.
I also want to thank my fellow hosts, Amy, Riley, and Vidula.
This is Mel.
Like I said earlier, I produced this music and I largely produced this podcast.
Last but not least, I want to thank you, our listener, whoever you are.
I hope that you've gotten something out of us.
All right, I guess that's it.
I hope that you've gotten something out of us.