On Grad School And Mental Health

I originally wrote this post as a response to this article.

This is a great article, and an important one, but I would add something. You shouldn’t in any way take this to imply that I think anyone who’s suffering serious psychological stress because of a doctoral program should just “toughen up,” because that’s not what I mean. But, I think there’s something to be said, in addition to the article’s recommendations, for preparing yourself for the reality of what a doctoral program is going to be like before jumping in because “Yay, free tuition!” or “It’d be cool to be a doctor!” or because you’re not sure what to do with your life because you’ve always been in school and you’re not sure where to go next.

I’ve experienced a lot of the stresses the article mentions and have known many, many other people who have, but I also remember from my own experience in grad school that there were a significant amount of grad students in and around my program who had begun their doctoral program simply because teaching for their tuition seemed like a good financial deal and they were at a point in their 20s when they weren’t quite sure what else to do with themselves. Four years of relative financial stability sounded great! Hell, that’s why I accepted a position in my M.A. program, so I get it. But you can get away with that with an M.A. program in some cases. I did. Less so with a doctoral program.
I was aware from the get-go how difficult my doctoral program was going to be. I came in with a strong idea of what I wanted to study and what my dissertation was going to be about. I knew (almost) from day one who I wanted on my dissertation committee. I was prepared to put in godawful hours for four years and had accepted that I would not be likely to even get a decent-paying job at the end. It was still really hard. Many people came in with absolutely none of those things figured out. I can’t imagine how hard it was for them. Many of those people never finished, and suffered needlessly (it seemed to me) in the process.

So, a few things. First, if you want to take on a doctoral program for the value of the knowledge and skills you’ll gain and the experiences you’ll have while completing it, then go for it. Don’t sign up for the future sake of some assumed employment that you hope to receive at a later date and have that be your motivation. You’ll almost certainly be disappointed in the kind of job market we’re facing now. I had a stressful and ultimately great time in my program, but remained realistic throughout about my likelihood of getting a tenure-track job or even an adjunct job after getting the degree. It made a huge difference, I think, in how stressed I was on a daily basis for those four years. Accepting that what I was doing then might be the extent to which I ever progressed in the field helped me appreciate what I was working on at the time and kept me from worrying about the future overmuch. In short, if a doctoral program is just a means to an end for you, you should probably avoid joining it.

I was lucky enough to get a tenure track job after two years of searching, and let me tell you it does not get any easier. Worrying about committee service, teaching an absurd load of classes, playing department politics, staying current in your field and giving presentations, seeking out opportunities for initiatives that will separate you from the rest of the pack come promotion time…well, let’s just say that I’ve worked harder in the last two years at this job than I ever did as a graduate student. It’s only because of the mental structures I built as a grad student, the ones that helped me learn to minimize stress and manage tasks reliably, that I can function in this job without being miserable. Imaging a future tenure-track position as a relatively relaxing paradise is deluding yourself, and if the doctoral program is more stressful than fulfilling the “real” job will be as well. To use an appropriate metaphor, if you were in a psychologically abusive relationship with another person, you wouldn’t expect it to suddenly become fulfilling and supportive when you reached your fourth anniversary, would you? Why would this be any different? It’s not.

Which leads me to my last point: if you are struggling in the midst of a program, seriously consider getting out. There’s no shame in moving on to something else if it isn’t working out for you. I was able to get through because of my aforementioned preparation and a certain degree of mental flexibility. If I hadn’t been allowed to do things on my own terms, if I hadn’t had a large amount of control over my schedule, over my course content, and over the content of my research and the makeup of my committee; if I had been paid less; if I hadn’t had a largely supportive cohort of friends and a lot of great mentors, I would have quit. It wouldn’t have been worth it. You need to know where your threshold is and decide ahead of time on what you’re going to do if you’re driven past it, not after you’re already at your wits’ end.

Simply put: know what you’re getting into ahead of time and don’t be afraid to back out if it’s not working for you. Certainly, all of the things recommended in the article are useful suggestions, but you can also better avoid falling into a psychologically abusive cycle in the first place by honestly confronting the reality of doctoral programs rather than embracing the romanticized and ultimately destructive myth of “the scholarly life” that we’ve collectively inflated for so long. Nobody does this on purpose, of course, but it’s an easy thing to do without realizing it and it is at least partially to blame for the huge gulf between expectations and reality that lead many grad students down the dark paths described in the original article.

On Living In Places Nobody Likes

I’ve been wanting to write a post like this for awhile, in part from a desire to constructively critique what I see as an unhelpful attitude in hopes of making it better, but also in part from a desire to, if I’m being honest, just straight-up complain about something that bugs me. Hey, this is the internet, after all.

In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit writes that “When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back.” I haven’t lived in a lot of places in my life, but I’ve moved around more than most people I know well, which is to say that within the context of my friends and family, at least, I see myself as a bit of a vagabond. And Solnit’s is probably the best single-sentence explanation of what I’ve learned through my relocations about the relationship between people and places.

I like it because it captures both the good and the bad. Like any relationship, if you give very little to a place, you’re likely to get little in return. If you give a lot in the form of negativity (distrust, discontent, etc.), you’re likely to get those feelings echoed back to you. On the other hand, the more willing you are to give a place a chance, to assume the best (or at least hope for the best), the more likely that place will be to give you a chance to find a meaningful niche within it.
Why bring this up? Well, the last few places I’ve lived are places that are seen as being...umm...not ideal by many of their residents. So I’ve had a lot of time over the last decade to both a) listen to other locals talk about how much the place where I live sucks, and b) think about why, if said place’s sucking is so apparently obvious, I still enjoy living there.

Lindsey and I have talked about this a lot, especially when we lived in Pullman together. In my eyes, Pullman is a pretty typical college town that commits the Apparently Unforgiveable Sin of not existing within a half-hour’s drive of a thriving metropolitan area. In a country where gentrification, suburban sprawl, and exurban sprawl have made it increasingly difficult to find places with legitimate local character, apparently what a charming city nestled within the geographically-fascinating Palouse and featuring a functional downtown needs is to be closer to a mall. Go figure.

Anyway, what Lindsey said once during one of these conversations has always stuck with me. I’m paraphrasing, but it was something along the lines of “Pullman is a great place, you just have to make your own fun.” I think that’s been true of most places I’ve lived in my life, and I think that it’s just as much an explanation of how and why I’ve come to appreciate each of those places in their own ways as it is an explanation of why others find it easy to hate them.

Pretty much every time someone complains about small-town life, the complaint ends with “Well, if it was just more like Chicago...” or “I used to live in Portland before I came here, and...”. I’m generalizing, obviously, but there’s typically an implication that if Small Town X was more like Big City Y, it wouldn’t have anything wrong with it. Now I admit to being in the apparent minority of people who enjoy small town life over big city life, so I’m biased, but this implication seems to be built on shaky foundations. Typically, it’s based on “culture”: the small town has no culture, and the big city does. If there was more “culture” in the small town, it would be better. I can appreciate this line of thought, to a degree. I like live music. I like the arts. I like seeing these things, and not having to travel five hours to do so. But more often than not, “having no culture” really seems to boil down to “not having places where I can go to spend lots of money.”

Complaints about there not being a fancy restaurant in town seem to be less about the quality of the food and more about not being able to publicly drop a hundred bucks on a meal every Friday night. Complaints about there not being a cocktail lounge in town are less about the cocktails and more about not being able to be seen at a cocktail lounge. We’re all working within the cultural assumption that to be successful is to be able to have (and be able to spend money on) particular types of experiences, and when our living situation doesn’t allow for those types of experiences, we get nervous. In the absence of the established narrative, it’s hard to demonstrate that we’re successful members of society in the ways that we’ve been taught to.

That probably sounds a little snarky, so I should say that I don’t mean this point as an attack on any particular person or people, but instead as a general observation: complaints about small town life by people who are accustomed (or want to be accustomed) to big city life often revolve around the lack of “culture,” and the shortage of options for an “art scene” or a “nightlife,” both of which are tied pretty inextricably to conspicuous consumption, whether particular individuals recognize that connection consciously or not. Generally speaking, what you’re really asking for when you’re asking for “more culture” is more ways to spend more money, and more ways to be seen spending that money. As much as I love going to concerts and drinking martinis, living in small towns has really helped me appreciate how just as much fun can be had at a much lower price point, with the only real loss being that you might not feel quite as cool posting on Facebook about the night you spent marathonning Full House episodes and eating cheap pizza as you might uploading photos of eating architecturally-unsound hors d’oeuvres at a $50-a-plate Greek restaurant. But who cares?

Well, you probably do, at least a little bit. I do, at least a little bit. There’s the rub.

And this is where it all links back to Lindsey’s point. Cities, and other large urban areas that have the economic infrastructure for it, thrive on letting you trade your money for a sense of identity. They tell you what makes you a successful, happy member of their community, and that usually (though not always) happens to involve spending lots of money on stuff. I’ve spent a few weeks in Portland. I’ve spent a few weeks in Seattle. I’ve spent a few weeks in Chicago. I’ve spent a lot of time in Cleveland. And I could easily tell you how people in those cities behave. I could tell you where you get your donuts in Portland. Where to get a drink in Seattle. Where to get pizza in Chicago. I’d be generalizing, sure, but that’s sort of the point: there’s a template for these places, and if you’ve been there even a few times, you’re familiar with at least some of it. If you asked me what a Chicagoan does, I’d have a ready answer, despite never having lived there. If you asked me what someone from Klamath Falls does, I’d have no idea what to tell you, and I’ve lived here for almost three years. We...go look at the falls, I guess?

Photo from here.

Cities tell you who to be. Do you have to be that person? Of course not, but having a prefabricated sense of place provided for you can sure be nice. And I think that is, in many cases, what people are upset about when they decide that they hate a place like Pullman or Klamath Falls: take that ready-made identity away, and people have to actually work to find their place in a community, they actually have to think about building identity. Hell, they might even have to do something uncomfortable to find meaning, like going to moon rock bowling night with a weird coworker or talking to a Republican. The horror!

Despite what my above italics might imply, I totally understand the allure of having all of these things sorted out for you by a place; however, I strongly believe that it’s actually a very valuable experience to figure these sorts of things out on your own. Like with most things in life, the journey is just as important than the destination, if not more so. Figuring out who you are in the context of a new place seems much more beneficial and self-edifying to me than just plopping down in a new place that’s full of opportunities to do things that you would have done anyway, in the same way you would have done them anyway, like shopping and eating at the same old chains. Two of the things that really helped me grow into Klamath Falls when I first moved here were “shopping around” for a mexican restaurant I liked by trying a bunch of the local places and creating new running routes while learning about the geography of my neighborhood and the nearby parks in the process. There were some duds in both cases (turns out taco trucks generally don’t have vegetarian tacos), but overall it was way more fun and more productive than just having my old patterns reinforced.

This is the cycle that Solnit describes in Wanderlust in action. In a place where I wouldn’t have had to work to find my own fun, so to speak, I would never have bothered. Giving nothing, I would have received little, if anything, in return. The city itself pushed me, in this instance, and I’m glad it did. But it also took some effort on my part, of not just throwing up my hands and sighing and thinking “No taco trucks with veggie options? What a backwards-ass shithole!” which is the equivalent of many people’s reactions to places like Pullman and Klamath Falls.

Anyway, I’m repeating myself at this point. So let’s wrap this up. There is one other thing that seems to frequently factor into people’s complaints about particular places that I think is worth addressing here, even if it’s sort of a minefield: politics. POLITICS!

Politics.

Everywhere I’ve lived since I started grad school (eastern Washington and southern Oregon) has been predominantly conservative politically. And yet, because of what I do for a job and because of my own personality, beliefs, political leanings, etc., most of my friends and acquaintances are pretty liberal-minded. Not all, by far (and that’s part of the point of this...point), but most. So the other predominant complaint I’ve often heard about these small towns is that they’re filled with intolerant, unempathetic conservative shitheads (I’m paraphrasing). A few problems with this:

1. While it’s demographically true that most people in, say, Klamath Falls lean toward the conservative end of the political spectrum, I’ve seen little evidence that the percentage of that majority that are intolerant, unempathetic shitheads significantly exceeds the percentage of people who are shitheads pretty much anywhere else. And in places where I’ve lived where the liberals are the majority, there are just as many intolerant, unempathetic, liberal shitheads grumbling about the conservatives. Which brings me to my second point...
2. Politics in this country these days has become a team sport in the worst way. My personal beliefs would probably be categorized by most as swinging hard to the left, but the truth is, I try to see where everyone is coming from. When I think back to getting together with a bunch of liberal-minded grad students at a bar and griping about how the conservatives are ruining the country (which I’ve done many a time), now I realize two things. First, that complaining about someone else being intolerant and unempathetic based solely on their professed political team, you yourself are being pretty obviously intolerant and unempathetic. Second, that these sorts of judgmental get-togethers absolutely affirm the stereotypes conservatives often hold about “ivory tower” liberals...and reinforcing that particular stereotype is not useful in any way.
3. We all have to live together locally before we can function well globally (or, in this case, nationally or even state-ly). As I hinted at above,  I have a lot of friends and family who lean more toward the conservative side of the spectrum. But they’re nice people, so who cares? There are a lot of people I’ve met who share my political leanings but they aren’t nice people, and so I’m not particularly inclined to associate with them. To expand this out a bit, in terms of on-the-street, day-to-day interaction with the community, Klamath Falls is far and away the friendliest and most welcoming place I’ve ever lived. I’m aware that many of the people I meet and chat with on the street might (gasp!) disagree with me on the legality of abortion, or might (oh no!) be from the other side of the tracks, or might even (my god!) currently be homeless, but they’re all pretty goddamn friendly, and I like to think that that counts for something.

This is all to say that while I certainly understand the desire to live in a community of like-minded individuals (and believe that that’s an imperative if you’re from an oppressed group who is more likely to be treated poorly in a politically unfriendly environment) in my experience, I’ve found living among difference to be challenging and often instructive. Sure, it would be nice to live somewhere with more vegetarian options, or to live in a place where open mic nights and poetry readings were the norm instead of the exception, but there’s also a value to living among people who don’t share your values. Those people aren’t going anywhere, ever. So what do we gain by continually trying to create “communities” that make sure “Us” stays separate from “Them”? Evidence shows overwhelmingly that the best way to understand and accept someone of a different race, orientation, nationality, or political perspective is to spend time getting to know them. And yet being in a community that forces us to do this is seen by so many as undesirable. I certainly understand this knee-jerk reaction, but there’s already so many ways these days to turn our little corners of the world into echo chambers where we’re the scrappy underdog who sees through the bullshit to the truth. This is especially possible online, and I can’t help but suspect that social media has something to do with our increasing distaste for having to live near people who are unlike us in the physical world. Extending this echo-chamber mentality to our real-life neighborhoods, to our towns, to our cities, is disastrous to our sense of community. And yet it seems to be what most people want.

So, I live in a place that is not much like me, but I work at putting myself into it. And the self that I get back is a self that’s a little more willing to accept difference every day. I try to understand, for a small example, that a taco truck not selling vegetarian tacos isn’t a political statement or a personal assault on me, but just an acknowledgment of the local demographic. I try to understand this and just find a different place to eat instead of posting a negative Yelp! review and patting myself on the back for scoring another point against The Conservatives in “the culture war,” whatever that is.

Despite globalization, despite the internet, I believe that we live locally first. And, locally, people are people first, and they are ideologies,  moralities, and politics second. There are some good people here, and I’m trying to learn how to be one of them. That’s all.

Why It's Hard To Be Excited About The Nationally-Ranked Cougs

I’ve been meaning to write a post on this issue for a long time. I’m not feeling especially articulate at this exact moment, and I haven’t learned anything new recently that’s changed my understanding of it, but reading the linked article above coupled with watching the growing enthusiasm of many of my Facebook friends as WSU’s football team climbs up in the rankings made me feel like maybe it was time to finally get some of my thoughts down.

As someone who has enjoyed watching college sports (especially football) for thirty-four years and someone who has taught college students for over a decade, it’s become increasingly clear to me over time that college sports (especially football) function mostly as a business designed to benefit a select few financially while hurting universities, university students, university faculty, the cities universities are located in, and most of all, “student-athletes” in many different ways. College sports (especially football) do this by providing a product that’s really goddamn fun to watch, a product that’s created on the backs of extremely cheap labor. Actually, “extremely cheap” doesn’t really capture it, since student-athletes are forbidden by the very people who could, in theory, pay them to receive any sort of recompense for their performance. There are a lot of dimensions to this problem, and it exists in a lot of sports, but in the interest of not turning this into a mandatory TL;DR, I’m going to focus on one sport - football - and three big problems I see with the system that student-athletes play that sport within.

For one thing, the effect that college football has on universities financially is ten different ways of messed up. Perhaps the most insidious dimension of this is the one the early part of the article focuses on: funding athletics and new athletic facilities using student fees, and particularly student fees that non-athlete students are charged (at least somewhat) surreptitiously when tuition across the country is already skyrocketing, and students are already undertaking decades’ worth of loans just to attend average-quality schools who are better known for their football teams than their academic programs. Now, it seems, the universities themselves are in on this debt-juggling tightrope act, gambling their future financial stability (i.e., the value of their students’ tuition) on the hope that upgrades to their sports programs will successfully fund future, hopefully endless growth in enrollment and alumni donations. My thoughts on pretty much every university’s willingness to set “Infinite Growth, Forever” as its only “strategy” is a post for another day, but let’s just say that it’s pretty much impossible for any university to achieve this and that universities that bank on their “plan” for infinite growth working based on money they might pull in some day from a football team that doesn’t exist yet (or an 70,000 person stadium that doesn’t exist yet, etc.) is just digging themselves a deeper hole to fall into when they do inevitably fall.

The toll football in particular has on student-athletes physically has been well-documented. Why we wring our hands (if we still do) over concussions and the resulting mental illness and suicides in the NFL but don’t do the same for college players, who tend to be much more impressionable, less informed, and less capable of building a multi-million-dollar nest egg before injury drives them off the field for good is beyond me. But there it is.

But the facet of this issue that’s closest to my heart is the fiction that we’re talking about “student-athletes” rather than “athlete-students,” or even just “athletes” when we talk about college football players. These kids are brought to these schools, often on full-ride scholarships, not to learn, not to get an education so that they can make their way in the world after they almost inevitably fail to graduate up to the NFL, but to play football for the school more or less for free so the school can make more money and gain more prestige in eyes of possible donors. Granted, I only have experience at a few universities, but from what I’ve seen, the notion that student-athletes are supposed to, or are even able to take their education seriously while juggling it with football is a joke.

The linked articles in the previous paragraph affirm what I saw again and again in my years as an instructor at WSU: students unable to pursue the education that supposedly comes part-and-parcel with their coming to the school to play football because football ends up overshadowing everything else. It’s especially heartbreaking because many of these students are being recruited from foreign countries and/or low-SES situations to play, and in many of these cases, getting a free education is ultimately more important to them than playing football. Unfortunately, it seems, you get what you pay for.

This was brought home to me in particular one summer when I taught a class almost entirely full of incoming students who were also undergoing their first summer of training and practice with the WSU football team. Many of these kids had never dreamed of getting to go to college except maybe on the back of a football scholarship, and, as you might imagine, they were just as excited about attending college as they were unprepared for it. Their writing skills were atrocious, and by and large they needed a lot of remedial help with “simple” college-level skills like time management and note-taking. Many were absolutely ESL students (or whatever the acronym is these days) that would never receive the level of ESL assistance that their non-sport-playing peers would. Generally speaking, WSU actually had a pretty fantastic infrastructure for getting disadvantaged students the help they needed, but this just wasn’t a possibility for the football players. They were too busy with football.

Time and time again, I had last-minute cancellations from students scheduled to meet with me to get extra help, students who couldn’t make it to appointments with tutors because the tutors were only available during the hours that football was happening, students who missed class because they’d been to six hours of class and eight hours of practice the day before and just couldn’t stay awake long enough to make it to an 8am class, a few hulking, male students near to tears in my office because they felt that they just didn’t have time to devote any attention to their education, and suspected that if they complained, they might have their scholarships taken away (how likely this really was, I don’t know). It was explained to me by team staff in no uncertain terms a few times during this course that struggling student-athletes’ grades should just “get better” or else, as if I was an undercover detective caught in illegal intrigue instead of an educator. I didn’t give in to these “requests,” and at least a few of the students ultimately failed the class partially as a result. I heard from colleagues later, though I can’t verify the veracity of these reports, that those students more or less magically ended up with passing grades in the course after some discussions between the football team’s staff and the registrar, which is not only an undermining of the university’s supposed values but also a disservice to the students who would have benefited hugely from gaining the knowledge needed to legitimately pass those classes before moving on to football-less careers, whether it be right after college or (for a lucky few) after a stint in the NFL.*

Where I work now, we have no football team, which, while it’s a constant point of complaint for locals who “have to” root for either UO or OSU instead, makes education a lot more central to the mission of the school. We have strong teams (both men and women) in many other sports, but I find that their coaches and related staff are nearly always interested in the success of their players as students first and as athletes second. Might this have something to do with the fact that Oregon Tech isn’t part of the NCAA? I don’t know, but my guess would be a big fat “yes.”

So, yes, while there’s a part of me (an old, entrenched, Canton, Ohio part of me) that’s excited to see WSU in the national rankings this week, every time I see another former student or former faculty member, or current faculty member give a shout out to the Cougs’ football team on social media, it’s hard not to wince. I was born five miles from the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Within a few minutes of being born, I had a blue plastic football placed in my hand and had my picture taken with it. I “get” football about as much as one can without ever having played it in an official capacity. But damn if college football isn’t messing up these kids’ lives, and by extension the workings of many otherwise great universities across the country that could be even greater if they could be bothered to value education over the supposed money-making machine that is college sports.

I’m sure I’ll watch a few games over this Christmas holiday, but it’s hard to be as excited about Bowl Week as I used to be when I was younger. I always feel a bit dirty watching a college football game now. And that’s how it should be. For all of us.

* I’m sorry to be so spectacularly vague in this paragraph, but 1) this was nearly four years ago at this point and 2) I’m hesitant to be too specific because…well, for obvious reasons.