The impending publication of the book based on my doctoral dissertation will mark an end of an important stage – that of my graduate studies. It is very symbolic that a book on the Bildungsroman genre will be a culmination of my development as an academic.
The graduate studies stage lasted for five more years after I graduated. This happened because I didn’t learn everything I needed to become a scholar and had to continue learning long after getting the diploma.
One reason I didn’t learn as much as I should have in grad school was that I was expending a lot of time and energy on my own psychological problems. When you don’t solve them, all you can do is maintain an endless cycle of compensatory behaviors that leave little space for anything else. The most powerful of these problems was the obsessive inner monologue telling me that women should not be spending all this time reading books and doing intellectual things.
Another set of problems was external. There was a grievous lack of mentorship in my graduate programs. For instance, we were taught that reading what other people in the field were doing in their research was an impermissible waste of time. Not only wasn’t reading literary criticism considered work, our professors made us believe it was a useless hobby of lazy people. I was well into my tenure track when I heard about the concept of the scholarly base and realized it was not only work but actually a professional obligation to maintain this base. Time management, long-term career planning – I had no clue how to do any of these things.
It is only today that I feel that I’m fully ready to graduate.
Clarissa's Blog 
Had a similar experience, although not quite as bleak on the academic level. I think the greatest difficulty, academically, was that potential mentors really couldn’t jump from a conception of the ideological structuring of reality in modernity to a sense of African meaning, where reality was at your doorstep, raw and wild.
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Also I had a lot of people telling me I couldn’t communicate during my research time, emulating my father’s early put down of me, in his expressed belief that I could not be sophisticated as I misused the English language.
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// The most powerful of these problems was the obsessive inner monologue telling me that women should not be spending all this time reading books and doing intellectual things.
From where has it come from? Weren’t both your parents proud of you studying for the 3rd degree?
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I have one very feminist and one very patriarchal parent. Hence the eternal conflict. 🙂
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Mother is the feminist?
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El,
I would have guessed father is the feminist.
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Clarissa, does your graduate school publish dissertations and theses, or make them available online? I know that some universities do that (the state school in my town, for example, puts all dissertations and masters theses online).
I thought about that when I read your post because, earlier in the summer, the American Historical Association proposed a 6-year “embargo” on making completed history PhD dissertations available in digital form, presumably because they (or the academic presses and publishers) think that having a dissertation available online (for free) hurts the market for a book based on or growing out of that dissertation. (I don’t find that argument convincing, but ymmv.)
And I realize that you are not an historian. 🙂 Still, just curious.
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Clarissa, I forgot to congratulate you for finding a way to publish your manuscript without the help of your mentor, like some people we know did.
Also, I was surprised to read that you had to deal with this inner monologue during grad school. You certainly did not give the impression of someone who struggled with such concerns. But then, I remembered this morning that I had a similar inner monologue that bugged me during grad school, something which I never shared then: men in their late twenties should bring money to the house and provide for their families. I had this in my head all the time even if I knew it was completely stupid and even if I was the happiest man on earth in a classroom or at the library. This also explains why I graduated before submitting my thesis. You see, I became a VAP before I submitted my dissertation, and because of that I felt financially independent from grad school. This also explains why I wanted to celebrate when the DGS signed my `resignation` form, while I felt absolutely nothing when I got my PhD a couple of months later.
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Graduation is good!
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