My Get Out of Jail Card

(**I wrote this over two years ago, when I was writing up my thesis. Somehow it was still sitting in my 'drafts' box.**)

My friend Anne says that the PhD thesis is the longest form you'll ever fill out. It's not as though anyone actually cares what is written in your thesis, so long as they aren't trying to find excuses to tell you you can't graduate.

I read in Nature a "graduate journal" account of someone who was finishing up her PhD. She said that completing a PhD was like running a marathon - and it felt good at the end, and she would never been able to do it without the support of her family and friends.

I think that's a really nice picture, but as much as I dislike running, I think the marathon analogy doesn't describe my experience accurately. Even I start to feel good after I've run the first three miles in any course. Grad school started to suck after the first few years.

I think doing a PhD is akin to being in jail. For some programs, where the length and the requirements to graduate are murky, you don't even know when you'll get out of jail. I feel completely trapped in my PhD program and feel like I'm being punished for a bad decision I made over 8 (gasp!) years ago. That bad decision was deciding to go to grad school. I had been working as a lab technician and wanted to get credit for the work I did for a change. It turns out that, while it's much easier for a grad student than a technician to receive due credit, being a grad student is no protection against intellectual theft and etcetera.

Unlike the author of the "graduate journal" entry in Nature, I don't feel all warm and fuzzy inside about my (not yet obtained) PhD. I'm not proud of my "accomplishments" in grad school, at least not the ones having to do directly with grad school. I do feel like I've grown and changed, but that was in spite of my experiences in the program and certainly not because of the mentorship I received. I'm quite sure that the ways in which I've developed as a person is not valued in my field of research.

So as I've been writing my thesis, and the paper that is also now required of me to graduate, I've been thinking about what Anne said. It really does feel like I am filling out a long, tedious, form. I could not be more bored. But I'm also starting to view the paper and the thesis as my "get out of jail card." Maybe that will motivate me to do what I need to do to get out.