On Dropping Out of Grad School

So, I’ve decided to take time off and away from academia. It is unbelievable to me that I would be one of the people who leave, because just a year ago I was absolutely enthralled with the opportunity to do my PhD in Philosophy. I was the student in my MA program who got upset the most with invited philosophers who told us just how difficult the lives of academics were and I argued with other students insisting on just how wonderful the whole experience could be. Then at the beginning of my second semester in a PhD program something cracked and the dream began to fall apart.

Let me start from the beginning.

I did my MA in Philosophy at one of the universities in Canada and honestly the experience was one of the best times of my life. A good graduate program is a very unique environment where you are surrounded by peers who are as passionate about the field as you are and the bunch of you get to do some awesome things together. We all worked as Teaching Assistants for the same course, took the same graduate seminars, and read some incredible books together. For two years I felt surrounded by some of the smartest, most thoughtful and open-minded people I have ever met. I am happy to say we became close friends as well.

I worked on the topic I loved and lived: it was more than an intellectual pursuit to me, it was the way to be in the world, an ethics we should to strive to follow. There was no question about whether or not I wanted to continue doing this at a PhD level, I was certain that that’s what I wanted to do. At the time, I was not concerned with the prospects of getting a job with a PhD in Philosophy and all the challenges the lifestyle of an academic entailed. I wanted to do the PhD because I found the process to be enriching and worthwhile in its own right: I was growing and developing as a human being in the ways I did not think were possible.

I figured if I could spend another 4-5 years doing something I really loved and even if at the end of it I could not get an academic job (because of how bad that market is at the moment), then it would mean that I continued my relationship with philosophy for as long as I possibly could and then I would have to look for other things to do with my life. This approach really helped me with the difficult process of applying to PhD programs and writing the GRE and always wondering exactly why I was interested in doing all of those things.

I was lucky to get into several PhD programs in the States, some of them fully funded. After long and exhausting deliberations, I decided on the program, spent the summer planning the big transition, and moved to one of the cities out east in the US to start the program. My MA has both prepared me for many aspects of doing the PhD, but also gave me a completely false impression of what graduate school was really like.

The work load was much more intense. The program was larger and the students were at different points in their education, careers, and personal lives. The cohort that entered in my year was very small, so I found myself not having anyone I could talk to about the experiences of the first year in the program. The PhD students who were in their 3rd or 4th year could no longer relate to my experiences: they’ve survived it and so would I, and just wait and see how difficult it’ll be when you study for the comps, teach your own courses, write the dissertation, and so on… It seems that people tend to find the challenges they face at any present moment to be absolutely the most difficult thing they ever had to do.

There were a number of other environmental factors that have probably affected my experience: I found the rent to be more expensive than what I had anticipated and the stipend was just not enough to live on, I could not find ways of boosting my income since I had the status of an international student and was not allowed to work outside of my university, my partner continued to live and study in Canada and the long-distance relationship was taking its toll on us. I also struggled to really enjoy the city I ended up in (possibly, because all of the other things that were happening simultaneously, like my partner not being there with me, etc.).

My biggest concern with the program was the fact that studying philosophy was reduced to a grind and a bit of a rat race. The work load was impressive (something my MA did not prepare me for) and reading philosophy was reduced to the number of pages you had to do in a week, the number of hours it took you to do it, the comps you had to pass, and so on.

The conference going was stressed as important, since, presumably, the more you present and publish, the better your chances are at getting a job. And a good department would care how many of its graduates get jobs. I saw students write papers they didn’t care about because they could not give the work their full effort because they were studying for the comps during the same semester. Those papers were then submitted to and accepted by conferences and the said student would proudly flaunt the fact to others. I was frustrated that people were suddenly proud to go and present the work they did not care about just a month ago. Why would a philosopher share things she did not care about with others? Well, because she was under pressure to add a line to the presentations list on her CV.

I saw students who were not sleeping and struggling to keep up with demands of the program. The most frustrating part was that when I tried to bring this up in conversations with other students, the response was that I shouldn’t worry about how I felt about philosophy now; instead, I should just get through the course work, comps, and teaching requirement as soon as I could and not worry about how it makes me feel. Everyone hates it. You’ll like philosophy again when you get to work on your dissertation. Don’t think about it, just do it.

I couldn’t believe that I was told not to “think about it,” while all of us here were in the business of thinking. By end of January I felt miserable and uninspired and I could not imagine feeling like that for another 2 years of coursework until the time I could start working on my dissertation. The process of studying philosophy that I found to be so enriching a year ago was slowly eating away at my soul. There was nothing inspiring about it anymore. And it seemed like everyone else was okay with it.

I left so that I could give myself the chance to imagine my life without philosophy. I love philosophy, but I think that I would better understand what philosophy means to me when philosophy isn’t the only thing that I know. I left so that I could come to know other things. I left so that my experience of philosophy remained that of thoughtful wonder and joy, rather than that of miserable semesters of “just doing it.”