"Aren't You Done Yet?"

I seem to not be having a very good month in between all the questions about marriage (which, call me crazy, but I think is really inappropriate to bring up at any point during a funeral) and finishing my Ph.D. I've already ranted in the past about the marriage question...so today it's the turn of the PhD rant.

The underlying theme of all these questions is that if I get a total of 4 months off during the year - or so it seems from the outside - and if I only teach 2 classes a semester then why the hell can't I just sit down to write and finish. How do you explain to an outsider that the "real world" gives you time off to take time off but the academic world is better at giving that illusion than actually giving time off? Yes you can take your own little vacation but at the cost of immense guilt and overwhelming stress that 3 days off is likely going to translate into weeks of catching up. There is something exponential about the work you do if you're academicking - by which I mean either working on a PhD while holding down teaching duties or adjuncting in 5 places as a newly minted PhD or in a tenure-track/tenured professorial position.

When school is in session, I think those of us who try to do this decently well, end up spending about 6-7 hours of prep for teaching a single class. That doesn't include grading, office hours, student meetings, e-mail questions, etc. Then there's the in-class performance - you have to go do it even if you're feeling particularly blah - and you have to do it enthusiastically. If you teach 2-3 courses a semester chances are that about 4 days of the week you barely have time to breathe. That leaves 3 days. You catch up on grading and reading and answering student e-mails. You plan ahead for research projects. You get yourselves organized. One day of the week you slow it down or else you'll be too bitchy and burnt out to pick yourself up and get through the next week. There are always disgruntled students to manage who don't do the work, feel like they deserve nothing less than an A+, and are convinced that their poor grades have nothing to do with their performance but your whims and fancies. [I hear women in academia struggle more with this than men and I think that's purely *&^#@( unfair!) Then that summer arrives. O blessed summer! To the world it looks like you aren't going to work. Except - well you're catching up on the last 9 months when you never got enough time to write and writing what you would have written in these 3 months irrespective.

Of course it isn't all dreary. Some of the students are wonderful, sometimes you reach out to particularly difficult students and it pays off after a few times, and the days you have a writing epiphany can be orgasmic in their own way.

The 5/22 issue of The Chronicle has what I think is a great article titled "Did You Publish Today" that explains the rhythms of an academic life for those on the outside. An excerpt from this piece pasted below really capture the essence of what I'm trying to say:

"When I first started running competitively, each time I told my brother that I had run a race, he would ask me the same question, "Did you win?" It diminished any achievement I may have felt -- a personal best, feeling good the whole time, having a great day. Perhaps the fact that he thought I was fast enough to win the Boston Marathon meant that he really loves and believes in me. But it also meant that the months of hard work I did training for the race were made invisible by the way he had framed the question. This column, I'm sure you realize, dear fellow academics, is not for you. You don't need me to tell you that when you're working it can sometimes look to the rest of the world like you're curled up in front of the fire petting the cat. This column is ....for the people who believe that academics have the summers off, for those who argue that we have cushy jobs because we have to teach only a few classes a week for a couple of hours at a time, and for those who think that reading books isn't work. This column is for those who think that getting published is as easy as winning the Boston Marathon."

So for all those people who have asked me why I'm still not done here are some responses based on the year of the PhD I was in then:

Years 1,2,&3: Oh come on! Even an undergraduate degree takes 4 years.
Years 4,5, &6: Contrary to popular belief I can't really whip this out of my posterior.
Summer of year 6: I see the finish line...but not I'm not done "yet"!