Career Stages: Graduate Studies

For the past three years, I’ve been trying to write a dissertation, which is more or less like trying to write a book–but for three or four very persnickety readers.

Dissertations require lots of basic life skills that other people seem to come by natively, things like the ability to keep a neat desktop, organize and retrieve random bits of paper on which important details are written, spend a number of hours consecutively researching the same topic instead of veering off into social media or other – vastly more fascinating – research topics.

The most traumatic (and memorable) experience I had in this regard was of writing a paper on Thomas Hobbes for a “Theodicy in the Western Traditions” seminar. I had never read Hobbes before, so I read all ten volumes in the Molesworth edition of Hobbes’s English Works and over thirty secondary sources on Hobbes’s thought before I wrote a single sentence in Microsoft Word.

When you look up this number online, you’ll find it associated with a business model and manager structures. But I first heard this ratio from a dancer.

People say the combination of physics Ph.D. student and ballroom is an odd one. They say that it’s unusual to find the artist and the scientist in one body. But Robbie Fraleigh manages it without any conflict. He says that he doesn’t know how to do grad school without the dancing.

I visited the Trade Winds Asian Market on a rare summer evening where time slows and places itself like infinity in your hands. I wanted to make green coconut curry before the summer ran out; summer always seems to run out before it has any right to do so. A friend and I drove to the market and wandered the aisles of unfamiliar labels and food types. We pondered the notations in Chinese characters of which green stalks were lemongrass and which was the Thai basil.

Normally, I’m a heavy sleeper. But I woke up the other night and rolled over to a more comfortable position. But I did not fall back asleep. Instead, I began to think about the rent on my new apartment due in a month. I began the math of incoming paychecks and other bills and repeated the infinite lament of the graduate student stipend. I did not sleep for another hour.

We've gathered some of our most read and appreciated material on navigating graduate school here. If you're looking for encouragement/grad school survival advice individually or for your campus group, check out these five options.

Well, congratulations—you’re going to graduate school! So—this is your future self, writing from a decade ahead to let you know that you’ll have a lot of fun. On the other hand . . . it won’t all be easy.

In my role as a campus minister over the last 15 years, I’ve had the privilege of helping students embrace the value of simple, flexible, and defined spiritual disciplines.