Regrets?

Of course, shortly after boldly announcing that I was going to post every week, my laptop power supply died. It’s now somewhat precariously held together with electrical tape until there’s time for a more permanent solution. In the meantime, like any good academic I added a subtitle to my blog. Because of course.

I’ve only been graduated and job-free for about a month and a half now, so it’s way too early to give up hope of—well, hope of anything. But between the job market and my own location-bound position, it’s pretty clear that whatever happens to my career isn’t going to be what I envisioned six years ago when I was looking towards the start of my PhD. As it turns out, there are lots of people in similar positions trying to find their way after completing a PhD but not finding the type of employment they were expecting. And a common thread running through their stories is regret. Regret at having given up 5-8 years and gone tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt to get this degree that has actually made them less employable. So I’ve been pondering what happens if I end up taking a path that doesn’t depend on me having finished this degree that I worked so long and hard to get. And I realized—

I have no regrets. For many reasons. First, I didn’t go into debt for this (thanks to five years of funding and to my wonderful committee members who helped me scrape together that extra semester). Also, I made lots of brilliant, interesting, wonderful friends who I treasure and would have never met otherwise, and I developed a lot of those PhD skills that all the alt-ac people point out, like self-motivation, multi-tasking, research stuff, teaching stuff, blah blah blah.

Furthermore, I never put my life on hold for this one thing. For the most part I did what I wanted—I got married, I bought a house, I got a dog, I HAD A BABY?! In fact, I had two babies. Who has babies in grad school?? That would be me :-) This is not to say, of course, that everyone in grad school should do the things that I did in order to be happy. But I had a life in grad school—I never “gave up” those years for my degree. The degree had to take its place alongside all the other things I care about, instead of taking over. And yeah, I could have been more productive without babies. I would have probably gotten another article out. But for me, article < babies. The *way* that I parent, relate to my husband, and take care of my dog is definitely affected by me having spent years in grad school, though.

Finally, from studying literature, I learned there are many ways to read a text. I don’t think I can overstate how big an impact that realization has had on how I related to the world, to other people (for the most notable examples, see above: husband, babies, dog) and to God. There’s a lot of say about that, actually, and I want to write about it more later.

To make a long story short, I am the person I am because I went to grad school. And for the most part, I really like myself, and I like the ways I have changed since I started grad school.   I don’t regret becoming this person—I’m sure non-grad-school-Erin would also be a wonderful person, but she’s not me.