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It’s been one year since I was tossed from my PhD program. Yes, somehow only a year. Feels like several.
I considered doing a thread about “things I’ve learned” but honestly there’s no grand lesson to take away from this experience. People want you to frame it in terms of personal growth or achieving new professional things. I’m not. It just flat out sucks.
If you are considering leaving your PhD program or are being forced out like I was, I will say: don’t expect support from other grad students or faculty you’ve worked with. They might be supportive, but people usually tend to stick their heads in the sand.
The support you might see on Twitter doesn’t match the attitudes you will see IRL from faculty and students. They are more concerned with preserving their idea of the status quo and your new reality disrupts the worldview that’s necessary for academia to operate as it does.
No one wants to think “it could happen to me.” Seeing it happen to someone else can be damaging to your own productivity, potentially inhibiting your ability to finish the degree. Having tunnel vision and ignoring what is happening to someone else is just self preservation.
But this attitude just gets replicated as PhD students become faculty and watch students in their own departments go through the ringer. If you can’t empathize with your fellow students, odds are you won’t be able to empathize with your own students later.
See also: no one from my dissertation committee reaching out to me after the decision had been made and only receiving 17-word replies after I reached out to thank faculty for their time and support while acknowledging the unfortunate outcome in this situation.
I will say that having a year of distance has helped me see some of the ways in which I fell short while still being able to acknowledge the ways my declining health negatively impacted my ability to produce what was wanted of me, and how that was used against me.
However, seeing now what I could have done then to reach out to faculty as I continued to struggle with my health and the cognitive decline that came with it does not make me think the outcome would have been different because I was no longer wanted in that environment.
Being able to see the writing on the wall is an invaluable skill because it allows you to exit on your own terms. I did not exit on my own terms because I had hoped for some degree of understanding and prayed for some improvement with my health. This was a mistake.
Faculty in general are not great at practicing understanding despite the fact that they themselves pray for it from editors who are waiting on reviews and revisions or from tenure committees when life circumstances get in their way. And yes, not all faculty not all of the time.
If there was anything I wanted people who identify as academics to take away from my experience, I guess I would say: practice understanding and extending kindness whenever possible because you don’t know when you will need others to extend that kindness and understanding to you.
I don’t wish anyone from that program ill-will. I do however still feel like I had stipulations placed on me that other students did not have in similar circumstances within the same program and that those stipulations were to my detriment. Be consistent in how you treat students
Some will say “But Mike, why don’t you get over it?” I would love to move on from this situation and have tried doing so for the last year but the non-academic job market has not worked out in my favor. Transitioning out of academia is not as easy as programs want you to believe.
Especially when you invested five years in a PhD without any hard documentation to show for it! But I am optimistic that things will change in my favor, at least eventually. I’m still bitter and I’m still disappointed in people’s actions and attitudes. But it won’t last forever.
I’m sorry if you read all the way to the end of this hoping for some nuggets of truth. I wrote it out for me, not to make others feel better about how they might have treated me or others in similar situations. That’s work you have to do on your own.
This experience hasn’t made me a better person or a stronger person. I’ve faced enough adversity in my life to have developed resiliency and character before this. There’s no bootstrap narrative to be found here. My life is materially worse off because of this.
I’m sorry if you want this to have a happy ending or if you want me to tell you I’m better off without the PhD. Neither is true. I worked hard in my MA so I could pursue a PhD at a good university, and worked at it for 5 years. I’m not better off without the degree I wanted.
It’s a sentiment I hear pretty frequently. It might be true for other people but it’s not for me. I often wonder if people who have a PhD and participate in this system say that to make themselves feel better about my situation. I would rather you acknowledge that it just sucks.
Anyway: support your fellow grad students, track where those who don’t go on to work as faculty end up because those outcomes matter just as much as TT placements, and treat others with kindness.
