Something Shiny!

I think the hardest thing about writing a dissertation is that it takes so damn long. I know, right? After six and a half years of graduate school, that’s my great revelation: writing a dissertation takes a long time. I’ll be accepting my Nobel Prize any minute now for this great contribution to knowledge. But yeah, it takes an awful long time, it’s hard work, and it’s so personal– I don’t think people on the outside, as it were, can quite fathom the process. From the outside, I’d guess, all that’s obvious is the sheer amount of time the whole thing is taking. From the inside, of course, there’s never enough time. There’s not enough time to conquer all the edits and all the tweaks and all the, well, writing. And on top of that, there are other things: applying for grants, applying for jobs, teaching, writing articles and presenting papers (so that you can get a job), oh and: eating, sleeping, living. For a number of reasons, none of which is that I haven’t been working “hard enough,” I’ve had to push my graduation date from May to August this year. Three months. Not a big deal, in the broad scheme of things. It’ll mean seven full years of graduate school, start to finish, which includes my MA. Which isn’t exactly a record, you know. The average PhD in history, including an MA, takes a full decade. And it’s not as if I’ve got a job waiting for me after August. (Heck, I’ll still be living in Gainesville for another year after graduation.) In fact, the job market is so bad that most professors here are advising PhD candidates to just postpone graduation indefinitely, until there’s a job offer. Because once you graduate, you’re stamped with an expiration date, as it were. You start to go stale unless you’re one of the lucky few who can land a job. And I know all of that. The logical part of my brain gets that. But even though I know that, part of me– the part with senioritis– wonders what’s taking so damn long.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 9:22 am and is filed under MeMeMeMeMe, Research, School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.