graduate school is just a metaphor

Many months ago at a house party in New York City, a friend I respect and admire asked me what I had gotten out of grad school. I stumbled through a series of clichés and then, hearing my own utter incoherence out loud, promised to write something that assembled my thoughts more clearly on the matter. She nodded and told me she looked forward to reading it. (Spoiler: while I don’t think anything that follows this sentence is particularly coherent, it is hopefully not as trite as whatever I mumbled that night.)

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to put pen to paper. Perhaps it’s something like impostor syndrome, except the impostor syndrome was real in my case, because I actually am leaving my PhD program, conspicuously PhD-less. Or maybe it’s because I haven’t really been able to summon up the honesty to admit the “real” reason(s) I’m leaving, and I’m afraid that when I force myself to write about it, the resulting piece will reveal more about my own ugliness than any trial, real or imagined, that I experienced in academia.

After all, academia was simply one more thing that happened to me amidst a long list of much more important happenings: an insufferably drawn-out U.S. election, my mom’s frantic renovation of the bathroom, a flowering of violence at home and abroad, a gLobAl pAnDEmiC, a new season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, my family ties falling into disrepair, settler-colonial violence against Palestinians, my father’s company slowly marching towards bankruptcy. In short, all the mundanity of catastrophe. There seems to be very little narrative meaning in a 23-year-old’s brief failed stint in graduate school, even to that 23-year-old himself. People describe universities as bubbles, and I think they’re right in two senses, the first being something that protects its inhabitants by delineating a clear boundary between itself and the outside world, and the second being a bubble in the sense of something that sells itself on an unsustainable, imaginary vision of its own importance.

As my political theory professor put it, “vaingloriousness abounds in academia.” As much as this hallowed Ivy League institution might prepare me to wield power, I also recognize how this place inculcates within me a desire to fetishize a credential unquestioningly. I’m a person who spent the majority of his life chasing certainty in the form of accumulating accolades instead of really asking what it was that I fundamentally cared about. My mistake was thinking that the journey to get a PhD would finally force me to answer all the difficult questions I had postponed, instead of realizing that I had merely found a way to trick someone into giving me five more years to delay self-realization.

That’s not to say I didn’t grow or learn anything during my time here. Exactly the opposite is true: I have learned more about myself and what I want to do in my life during these past 2 years than I have in perhaps any other period of my life. But almost none of what I learned was something I found in any of my classes or conversations with my advisor. Embarrassingly, I didn’t even manage to form any close friendships while I was here; people here are much too smart to be fooled into liking someone who has elected to place himself in a permanent state of unease. Failure, as always, is instructive: I can confidently say that graduate school was “not for me” (or at least, not for the person I am right now). Even if on paper I was not remarkably unproductive — I was, after all, able to write a paper or two, one of which I was actually proud of — I was, affectively, often a complete disaster, more than I’d like to admit. Any research meeting or meeting with my advisor induced incredible levels of anxiety, followed by immense relief when nothing cruel or horrible was said about my work (or lack thereof). I experienced bouts of (admittedly self-diagnosed) depersonalization. At some point I had to make a promise to myself to spend just five minutes a day on research, the only alternative being complete academic and psychological paralysis.

Regardless of whether these experiences were normal or whether graduate school is “supposed” to be hard, the fact is that there is no inherent valor to be found in subjecting yourself to a miserable experience. The urge to be impressive inevitably loses its power, and at some point, it became clear that I had to reorganize my self-concept on something more durable. Slowly and painfully graduate school forced me to admit to myself that the size of my ego is mismatched to my current abilities, and that in the present moment my most pressing duties are to re-learn so many things that I thought I had mastered already: how to be a reliable friend, a responsible member of my communities, a good son and brother.

Even the term “graduate school” conjures up a false universality of experience. In reality, graduate school is basically just whatever your advisor says it is. Depending on who is charged with overseeing your academic career, you can be endlessly busy and stressed about deadlines, or, if you’re like me, endlessly bored and stressed about seemingly not having any deadlines whatsoever. I discovered that what I liked best about the freedom afforded by graduate school was how easily it turned into freedom from graduate school. I spent more than just my free time in book clubs, mentoring undergraduates, fleeing to North Carolina for an idyllic month in the woods to write.

People describe graduate school in ways that are full of contradictions, at least to my pea-sized brain. We are told that being an academic is to subject yourself to a publish-or-perish rat race filled with endless bureaucracy, and yet the university is also seen as one of the few bastions of intellectual freedom. For some reason, taking six graduate-level electives, of which I am confident I will retain almost zero content, makes me a “Master” of computer science. The university claims to care about the mental health of its students, yet there is no official institutional policy for altering how graduate student progress is measured during a three year global pandemic. “Fully-funded” students are pressured into winning fellowships worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, of which the vast majority will vanish mysteriously into the coffers of the universities they attend, displacing money they were ostensibly already guaranteed.

In light of all these contradictions, there are a couple of valid reactions to graduate school in the short and long term. In the immediate term, you can either laugh or cry. In the longer term, you can recognize it for the game that it is and choose either to play or walk out. The people I most admire in graduate school — my advisor, my older and more mature peers — mostly choose to laugh and have committed to playing the game, acting in accordance with hidden rules they’ve aptly discerned. In my case, of course, I decided that, in the words of the great Gemma Collins, I’ve had enough of playing games.

Graduate school is a metaphor. Ultimately, its function is to hold whatever projections you have onto it long enough for those projections to materialize or fizzle out. In my observations, questions of brilliance or aptitude or cunning are pretty irrelevant compared to how able you are to convince yourself that whatever meaning you’ve assigned to this place is true. Hating your job (or in my case, the specter of software engineering jobs available to me post-undergrad) is not logically equivalent to finding meaning and success in graduate school. Making it in grad school usually means one of three things: 1) you are desperately chasing a tenure-track/prestigious industry research job to the point that you’re willing to do anything to obtain the PhD as a necessary credential, 2) you are so in love with whatever you study that it provides enough personal satisfaction to offset whatever personal and financial costs are associated with committing to your program, or 3) you are all-in on the grifter mindset and want to do the bare minimum to collect your stipend without getting kicked out. To be clear, I don’t think any one of these paths is more noble than the other, but I do think it helps to be honest about which one best matches your situation.

I’ll end by telling a personal story. The point when I decided to leave graduate school was sometime in the summer of 2021. I had just gotten off of a Zoom call with my therapist, during which I had identified a nebulous but persistent anxiety in the back of my mind about my parents’ financial situation. Almost immediately I dialed my mom’s number. Walking home, I told her that I wanted to know everything about our family’s finances, and that if my parents needed me to, I would be happy to leave my program with a Master’s if it meant that I could provide them with financial support. She started to cry, telling me that she had just hoped that one day I would “figure it out” without her needing to ask me explicitly for support, and I began to cry, too. In that moment, the illusion that the world needed me to get a PhD gave way to the reality that my family needed me, and I needed them. When I tell people I left my PhD program so I could make some money and support my parents, the operative word is “support,” not “money.” The money flowing in one direction hides the fact that support flows in both.

What does it mean to graduate from school for people who have already graduated from something? In other words, what was my graduate school experience a metaphor for? All I can say is this: if you needed a degree to tell you that you are now an adult, you probably weren’t one to begin with. At least for me, adulthood began when I realized that I needed to stop outrunning the fact that I am still someone’s child.