The ABD Question

I'm waiting for the electrician...so I thought I would just add something which has always troubled me in terms of the Ph.D., the issue of being ABD and so on.

I think there is a huge mystique regarding the Ph.D. One of my colleagues exemplifies this. She has an MA in her field; there is no PhD offered in her field. Over a 20 year career, she has published scores of scholarly articles; she has written a book with a major academic press (Hopkins); she is routinely asked to speak at universities etc. But she is often apologetic about her lack of credentials, saying, "Well, I don't have a Ph.D. so..." and she will then hedge something she is doing/saying on that basis. Ironically (and this is an interesting comment for people asking about the value of the Ph.D.), I think this has held her back in terms of promotions etc.

On the flip side, I routinely meet people who are impressed by the Ph.D. on my business card and who then accord me respect without my doing anything except give them a business card. It's ludicrous. However, it is very effective and it has been very helpful to me (I am a really petite woman with a fairly quiet voice and, I think/know, that I would have a difficult time establishing myself early on in professional encounters without those three letters on my business card).

What has been important to me, though, is to have a strong understanding of what the Ph.D. means and DOES NOT MEAN. It does not mean that I am the smartest person in the room. It does not mean that I get to skip steps that other people have had to take in their careers (I made the mistake of believing that when I first looked for a job). It does not mean that I should be the leader in any meeting. And so on.

I think if I got caught up in the hype and believed what many people seem to believe about the Ph.D., I would become pretty arrogant and that would be a serious problem for me in my career.

But I also think that if I had gotten caught up in the hype while in grad school, I would still be there. I had a lot of friends who got caught up in the hype and who believed that the dissertation was supposed to be...I don't know...the ultimate and most brilliant final word on a subject and that it should be written by a genuis. That is pretty paralyzing.

For me, what helped was the fact that I grew up with a mom who wrote books for a living (and a dissertation is less than a book in my view!); that helped me to understand that, at best, I was writing a rough draft for a book and I'd watched my mom and her friends turn these out routinely on deadlines, publishing with great presses, and winning awards. It also helped, to be honest, that my older sister was a Rhodes Scholar, who despite a love for history did not go to grad school. Here was a smart person and someone who was (what can I say? I am a younger sister) way smarter and way better read than many of the people I met who were acknowledged scholars in the field (so how hard could it be to write a dissertation if people whom I knew and who were not, in my view, the smartest people on the face of the earth had done this?). I also looked at the careers of two historians whom I admired tremendously. One never published his dissertation (I read it and thought it was just okay---it was clearly the work of a junior scholar) and the other had published his dissertation but this was far and away the least important and least read of his scholarly works (it was an okay book---far, far from groundbreaking and I think it may even have been out of print when I read it).

So all this made me see a dissertation for what it was: a preliminary study of a subject written by a very junior scholar. Once I saw that, I figured I could do it pretty easily...and writing my dissertation was, for me, pretty painless. I hated being a grad student but writing the dissertation was the best part of grad school because I genuinely felt I was doing a preliminary subject of a study which interested me. Nothing more, nothing less.

I also took a pretty hard look at my fellow grad students. The one I admired most was a quiet woman who had a young child. She finished her degree as I was entering the program; she did her research and then wrote and completed her dissertation the second year after she completed her exams (so two years post ABD and she was done). I asked her what the secret was and she told me, flat-out, "set a schedule, tell your advisor and stick to it." I did. She and I both completed our dissertations within two years of taking our exams (it really was not that difficult). She was the best role model I have ever had but she was not a very assertive person so very few of my fellow grad students looked to her example.

When I looked at my peers, I saw a lot of people who spent a LOT of time talking about their dissertations, who bought into the hype and who spent years ABD (some have never finished). These are not and were not very happy people---in large part, I think, because they always had the feeling that they had failed to complete a major project.

All this brings me back to the point re: leaving ABD. Some people can walk away from grad school without finishing their dissertations and be completely happy but ironically the people who do this are the people who see the dissertation clearly for what it is: a rough/preliminary draft of a study in your field. People who buy into the hype and believe that the dissertation is supposed to be a work of unparalleled genius tend to be the ones who feel that they have failed.

Anyway...just some thoughts while waiting for the electrician.
Lexi