And on the other hand
The other side of the conversation I had last night with my grandmother was about leaving grad school. How long would it take me to get a PhD now, my grandfather asked. Oh, 3 or 4 years (at least), but the problem is jobs; the problem is that I don’t want to move around from adjunct position to adjunct position; the problem is that I don’t want to live in lots of places, and that I am unwilling to make that sacrifice.
And then we got to how and why I disliked living in the US, and I suppose my regret about leaving was clear. It was the right choice, yes, but I still regret it: it was a hard choice, and it required me to give up on dreams (both reasonable and un).
“It’s just as well you left. You’ve only got one life, you shouldn’t waste it being unhappy.”
February 23rd, 2005 at 12:36 pm
Yes. You made the right decision. Can you imagine how annoying it would be to invest all that time and energy into a PhD and then find because of the job market, finances and personal life you can’t pursue it any further. Very annoying!
February 23rd, 2005 at 7:38 pm
Yeah. Well, for a while I was going to do it and then go into industry anyhow. But I gave up on that because I couldn’t stand the way my life was any longer.
February 23rd, 2005 at 8:41 pm
Yep, it’s a hard decision. I’ve actually made it twice. I gave up on an MFA, which was harder than giving up the Ph.D. I hadn’t been funded for my final year, but I could have scraped money together or something. And giving that up meant giving up part of how I identified myself–as a writer. I didn’t write for years after that. When I went back to school, I wrote a little, but then threw myself into writing academic papers instead of creative stuff. The second time around was hard too because I felt like I was establishing a pattern of quitting. I cried a lot. Then I picked myself up, decided what I really wanted to do and did it. There are still regrets sometimes, but I think it was the right thing to do–and now I’m writing again–because I have time!
February 24th, 2005 at 7:16 am
It would be interesting to identify what it is — just that missing tidbit or facet — that we miss most of academic life. “Us” being those who have chosen to leave even with a great temptation to stick it out, or who have been forced to leave against our wishes by the System or the uncompromising trials of normal human life.
If we could only identify the stuff that makes us miss it, and build it into our new lives somehow, or build a place where it can live apart from all the crap… that might be a good thing.
February 24th, 2005 at 8:18 am
Laura, I also feel the “I am such a quitter” issue. And — well — I have quit things, so it’s true. On the other hand, it’s also true that I’ve quit the big things for very good reasons, after a lot of soul-searching. Somehow being rational isn’t ever quite enough.
That would be a very good thing, figuring out what makes us miss it. The flexibility, of course. But it’s not just that; I’m sure I could find myself another job, more flexible than this one (which is pretty flexible itself, in a lot of ways). I don’t know what else it is. Something about the nature of the work, and about the freedom of the work. But that doesn’t help, really.