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August 5, 2006

Advice I Once Gave

From a conversation with an old friend and Ph.D. student visiting from out of town:

Friend: You certainly gave me good advice that got me through the first two years of graduate school.

Me: Really? What did I say?

Friend: That I should give up trying to maintain any sense of dignity.

Looking up some old e-mails, it turns out that this is what I wrote a few years ago:

> ... do I really want to stay here that long? Or should I try to retain some shred of dignity?

once your desire to hold on to some dignity gets the better of you, grad school becomes that much more difficult to finish. The focus needs to be on "getting out", not finishing in a way you're proud of. The instant you accept that you can be satisfied with turning in a 3rd-rate thesis is the instant you can set your sight on graduation.

In the interests of full disclosure, I wrote that in December of 2002. It would be more than 3 years before I finished my Ph.D. That said, I did follow my own advice-- I didn't finish (or walk away) with my dignity intact, but I did finish, and I'll be starting a great job in the fall.

On the other hand, here's an alternate view: "Failure" is an option--

“Do something else with your life” is a hard choice for a phd student to make because they are immersed in and adopt a value system that does not value that choice. Remember here that the academic value system is not a universal value system. ... The world is big enough and diverse enough to support multiple value systems. Realizing this may be the key to making very good decisions in your life.

Truthfully, that latter piece of advice was pretty comforting to me towards the end of graduate school, when I had put so many years into it and was wondering how things were going to end.

Posted by Dean at August 5, 2006 8:32 PM

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