Permanent Head Damage
We're alive. And apparently, we are moving to Portland.
For those of you who may still check this blog every once in a while and have no idea why we are suddenly moving, perhaps I should fill you in.
It's over. I finished my Ph.D. and am free from the soul-crushing depths of grad school. After a frantic job search, I landed a job at an unspecified school that shall remain unspecified, and The Wife landed a really fantastic PT job. We're looking forward to getting the hell out of the valley. While our surroundings may be beautiful, the culture here is driving us absolutely nuts.
The Wife was joking that by moving from the valley to Portland, we would go from being considered some of the most liberal people in town to some of the most conservative in town without altering our political beliefs one bit. So, you know, that dynamic should be really fun to play with.
Life after grad school has been... kind of weird. I often compared grad school to living at the bottom of the ocean: Dark and isolated, with bizarre surroundings, unpredictable life events, and an overwhelming sensation that your entire body is being crushed from all sides. Now, life feels sort of... odd. When you remove a great pressure, the sensory system has a hard time adjusting to the absence of the constant input from the cells that detected that pressure. Or, when you get off a long train ride, your vestibular system may feel, at times, that you are still on the train and generate a ghost sensation of motion even when you're standing still. The emotional system, unsurprisingly, is very similar to this. For a while after defending my dissertation, I had moments where I would start to fret again about my experiments only to remember that I had defended and was done. I guess it's a little like PTSD, but instead of flashing back to a combat situation, I flash back to a draft edit or a statistical analysis. Or the defense itself. It took me a few weeks to wind down properly after that one. They don't let you walk out of there feeling very tall.
The last few months have been spent essentially recovering from grad school and preparing for my new job. Emphasis on the recovery part.
One of my advisors said something interesting the other day, about how a Ph.D defense is one of the hardest, most stressful events a human being can go through. It's apparently right up there with giving birth and a death in the family. I wonder how it stacks against being assaulted or getting shot?
The biggest lesson that I learned from the entire process is that I don't know anything. At all. You would think that having a Ph.D makes you feel smarter. It doesn't. More than anything, I feel dumber, unqualified, incapable, incapacitated, ineffective, impotent, perplexed, and overwhelmed. I eat and breathe and sweat and spit weakness. The entire process is designed to teach you how to really think, and it begins with crushing you until you realize that you don't know a damn thing. And the process does this very well. But what it does not do is put you back together. I suppose that part is up to me, but I'm so damn tired that I hardly feel up to it. Well, I suppose that I feel less tired and hopeless than I did right after I got my degree. I think that it will get better with time, but I hope that I don't lose my grip on the fact that I don't know anything. It seems odd to say, but really grasping that lesson and holding it close to your chest is worth all the anguish. I know that a lot of academics never really get a good grip on that lesson. Or if they did, they lose it.
Oh, God, I pray that I don't lose my grip on this. I worked so hard to learn that I'm an idiot. It's far too valuable to lose.
For those of you who may still check this blog every once in a while and have no idea why we are suddenly moving, perhaps I should fill you in.
It's over. I finished my Ph.D. and am free from the soul-crushing depths of grad school. After a frantic job search, I landed a job at an unspecified school that shall remain unspecified, and The Wife landed a really fantastic PT job. We're looking forward to getting the hell out of the valley. While our surroundings may be beautiful, the culture here is driving us absolutely nuts.
The Wife was joking that by moving from the valley to Portland, we would go from being considered some of the most liberal people in town to some of the most conservative in town without altering our political beliefs one bit. So, you know, that dynamic should be really fun to play with.
Life after grad school has been... kind of weird. I often compared grad school to living at the bottom of the ocean: Dark and isolated, with bizarre surroundings, unpredictable life events, and an overwhelming sensation that your entire body is being crushed from all sides. Now, life feels sort of... odd. When you remove a great pressure, the sensory system has a hard time adjusting to the absence of the constant input from the cells that detected that pressure. Or, when you get off a long train ride, your vestibular system may feel, at times, that you are still on the train and generate a ghost sensation of motion even when you're standing still. The emotional system, unsurprisingly, is very similar to this. For a while after defending my dissertation, I had moments where I would start to fret again about my experiments only to remember that I had defended and was done. I guess it's a little like PTSD, but instead of flashing back to a combat situation, I flash back to a draft edit or a statistical analysis. Or the defense itself. It took me a few weeks to wind down properly after that one. They don't let you walk out of there feeling very tall.
The last few months have been spent essentially recovering from grad school and preparing for my new job. Emphasis on the recovery part.
One of my advisors said something interesting the other day, about how a Ph.D defense is one of the hardest, most stressful events a human being can go through. It's apparently right up there with giving birth and a death in the family. I wonder how it stacks against being assaulted or getting shot?
The biggest lesson that I learned from the entire process is that I don't know anything. At all. You would think that having a Ph.D makes you feel smarter. It doesn't. More than anything, I feel dumber, unqualified, incapable, incapacitated, ineffective, impotent, perplexed, and overwhelmed. I eat and breathe and sweat and spit weakness. The entire process is designed to teach you how to really think, and it begins with crushing you until you realize that you don't know a damn thing. And the process does this very well. But what it does not do is put you back together. I suppose that part is up to me, but I'm so damn tired that I hardly feel up to it. Well, I suppose that I feel less tired and hopeless than I did right after I got my degree. I think that it will get better with time, but I hope that I don't lose my grip on the fact that I don't know anything. It seems odd to say, but really grasping that lesson and holding it close to your chest is worth all the anguish. I know that a lot of academics never really get a good grip on that lesson. Or if they did, they lose it.
Oh, God, I pray that I don't lose my grip on this. I worked so hard to learn that I'm an idiot. It's far too valuable to lose.
posted by Raoul The Destroyer at 5:31 PM
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