From 2006 to 2013, I worked on a doctorate. In the end, things did not work out for reasons that are deeply painful to me. After many years, I have finally decided to directly discuss what happened. This will take multiple posts. Let me start by acknowledging that, at that point in time, I was not ready to work on a doctorate. Here is what I wish my younger self would have known. There may be a doctoral student out there who would benefit from my experience.
If I could go back in time to when I was about to start work on my Ph.D., I would give my younger self the following advice. In college, you got by simply by being smart. When you get to a doctoral program, everyone is smart. The question then becomes, what else do you bring to the table. Writing a dissertation is not simply a really long research paper that you spend several years on. You are not simply being asked to produce a coherent bit of writing but to make an original argument about a highly specific topic that will be presented to scholars who are experts in this field. With a term paper, you need to convince a professor that you are a decent student who paid attention to lectures and followed that up by reading some of the relevant literature. With a dissertation, you need to convince a committee of scholars that you are someone close to being their equal. With a research paper, your task is to follow the teacher’s instructions and as long as you have made a good-faith effort to do so, the worst they can do is give you a B. If they did a bad job explaining the assignment, that is on them. With a dissertation, no one owes you anything. If the committee does not want to accept what you have written, you are out of luck and all your work will have been for nothing.
Considering the fact that a dissertation requires a different mindset from a research paper, it is important to not jump straight from college to graduate school. Instead, you should take time off to do something else. Spend a few years teaching high school, get married, and start a family. Stay in the Washington Heights neighborhood near Yeshiva University where you have a solid group of friends and one of the few places on the planet where you do not need to justify being an observant Jew who likes secular studies.
One should not think of this as putting your academic career on hold. On the contrary, start developing contacts within academia so that there will be professors who think of you as an adult and a colleague instead of as an eager student. When you are thirty or so and find an attractive offer in a good program that has plenty of funding with an advisor who knows what they are doing and honestly wants to work with you, then you can start your doctorate. By then, you will understand what you need to do and have the personal maturity and support network to succeed.
The fact that I did not understand this, at the time, left me vulnerable to being given bad advice from none other than my advisor. He told me that I needed to write on a big topic and that I should only bother putting together a committee when I was nearly finished writing. I was not prepared to take what he said in the proper spirit of skepticism because I assumed that my job was simply to do what he told me. The possibility that I could be made to pay for his mistakes never occurred to me. That is not how school is supposed to work. School is supposed to be a safe place where the adults are in charge but also carry responsibility.
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