The Trauma of Post-Graduate Education. Or, micro-moments of negativity resonance

If you are hoping this will be a post on graduate school and trauma, it's not. But don't despair; I'll write on that subject soon. For this entry I'd like to write on the trauma of graduate school. ​

This subject was brought to my attention by several events this week. My roommate had a friend from out of town staying at our apartment and going to a wedding in the area. She asked me about my work. I told her that I was finishing up a PhD and she commented, "I wanted to do a PhD but I just couldn't handle it."​ She has a husband doing a PhD, so I know she knows the costs of doing such a degree.

I think I know exactly what she meant. She wasn't referring to the reading load or the public presentations. She wasn't referring to doctoral exams or writing one's first syllabus or all of the rejection of the publishing process. She was talking about something else, something that is not in most graduate school curricula, but that is in most graduate programs.​ Something I'd like to call "micro-moments of negativity resonance."

I borrowed the term from an article that defined love as "micro-moments of positivity resonance."​ The concept was named by Barbara Fredrickson. In an article about Fredrickson's research, the journalist Emily Esfahani Smith explains the concept like this: " love is a connection, characterized by a flood of positive emotions, which you share with another person—any other person—whom you happen to connect with in the course of your day."

What I'm talking about  in graduate school, the reason my roommate's friend said she couldn't handle graduate school, are the small, daily, sometimes trivial ways that graduate students are treated as if they are not adults, as if they are an inconvenience, as if they are a disappointment. In the same way that micro-moments of positivity resonance can be shared with anyone, so their negative variation need not come from someone in a significant position. They can come from your colleagues, or junior professors, or administrative personnel.

These moments might include unnecessarily harsh emails, condescending comments, the assumptions that folks make, the competition among colleagues, the refusal to give someone the benefit of the doubt. Or, as a wise friend of mine says, the systematic failure of folks in the academy to "imagine a charitable explanation."

I'm sure these things exist in a number of occupations. But when they are paired with very low compensation (we're talking beneath the poverty line), extremely high work loads, no job security (I've reapplied for funding every year and in some cases every semester) and no promise of future employment, they are the feather that is sure to break the camel's back.​

After six years of these micro-moments, I see now that there are a number of structural issues which encourage these sorts of negative interactions. But I'm not talking about those right now. I want to just identify this as an issue and say that it is an unacceptable working environment, one which takes huge amounts of emotional energy to endure. ​

My advice to young graduate students (unfortunately) is that these events should be expected, and planned for. In coming posts I'll give you my opinion of how to do just that. But for now, let me just say, if you are a graduate student, I suggest you err on the side of being extremely kind FIRST TO YOURSELF and secondly, to others. I simply don't see any other way to make it through a program this rigorous with a shred of personal or intellectual integrity.​

What is Political Science? Reflections on Intellectual Honesty

I asked a friend of mine, a talented writer, to be my writing coach. I wanted her to read through several chapters of the dissertation and give me feedback on common errors that I make and issues of writing style that I should improve.​

But she gave me much more than that.​

By instinct or the grace of God, she highlighted all of the sections where my writing was the clearest, my argument the most well-laid out and my writing the strongest. The results shocked me; they were all the sections that I was going to delete "because that's not political science."​

Somehow, through my graduate training, I got an idea in my head of what "Political Science is." I also got it in my head that whatever it is, it has nothing to do with my instinctual way of dealing with information, of processing or interpreting data. So what did I do? I frequently wrote work, and then erased the sections where my voice was the strongest because they "were not PS." Lord knows how many papers I have deleted the best sections of, out of my mistaken beliefs.

Later, when my chair got a hold of the diss, he commented that the Introduction (one of the chapters my friend helped me with) was "boldly and beautifully written." And that's when it hit me.

Authenticity shows in scholarship. The best work is intellectually honest for the scholar who produces it.​

During my graduate career, I made my life so difficult, by assuming that what came naturally to me was somehow "wrong" when really it is the only way to go about this enterprise. ​Now that I feel free to say what I think, there is an ease in my work. That's not to say that there isn't hours and hours of editing, rethinking and reframing. There is. But the effort is now at saying exactly what I mean and being more precise with language, rather than shoving myself into a box that I didn't fit well in to begin with.

Following advice

I had a student in the very first class I taught, Introduction to Comparative Politics in Spring 2012 who had an interest in getting a government job. He was a freshman and came to me for advice. After speaking to him, it became apparent that he was interested in studying Arabic. I suggested that he go to ALIF for the summer to get a jump start on language study and get this, he did. He spent the summer of 2012 studying Arabic in Morocco. And then he kept studying Arabic, while a student at UF.

This year he took another one of my classes, Politics of the Arab Spring, in Fall 2012. It was a difficult class. I designed it with seniors in mind hoping to provide them with a writing sample good enough to get into graduate school. The final paper assignment required evaluating the fit of a scholarly theory to a particular case. He brought me several drafts of the paper and asked for comments. I hope he won't mind me saying so, but the first draft was not very good. Neither was the second or the third, but he kept coming back. I will look at a paper as many times as a student brings me an updated draft and he took full advantage of that. By the end of it, he had a pretty damn good paper and was one of the only students to effectively integrate "data" gathered through social media. Plus he had a clever title.

During this time, I helped him apply for a grant to study abroad for a year. It was a long shot, since he is only a sophomore and in the end he didn't get it. We met for coffee a few weeks ago to discuss what to do next. And that's when he told me he was going to get a job in retail for the summer.

"Retail!? What?"​

​I was unhappy. A student who wanted a job working for the government, living in Tampa for the summer (location of US Central Command) and working in retail. I just couldn't stand it. I told him to send a resume and cover letter to every government contractor in Tampa.

​I give a lot of advice, so I didn't necessarily expect him to do what I said. But yesterday I received a great text from him, saying that he had found an internship with a contractor and was really learning a lot.

This student really impresses me for a number of reasons, but his path especially highlights one thing: if you are persistent, and you follow advice, something will come together. Why? Because he takes himself seriously, and because he kept putting himself out there.

The other lesson is for professors, and I don't have time to elaborate on it now. Just remember students are taking our advice!