Tag: graduate school

Courage is better than confidence

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I’m currently teaching an in-person class. I’m new to teaching, and I’m doing the best that I can, but sometimes I don’t have a lot of confidence in myself. And that’s okay.

Because confidence isn’t particularly motivating. I can be very confident that I can do something, but still not want to do it at all. I can feel capable and skilled, but that doesn’t meant I get up and do it.

Courage can be what motivates me to actually do the thing.

Getting a PhD has taken a lot of courage. I had to apply, and I had to get letters of recommendation, and pick out a writing sample that I thought would be good enough. And now I submit to conferences and teach classes. I reach out to committee members, and I meet with my advisor regularly. I get harsh feedback sometimes, and I keep going.

But I don’t feel particularly good at any of this. I know I’m good enough to be here and do this thing, but I still have a lot to learn. I keep on growing.

Courage helps me in those days when I know I’m struggling, but that I go out and I try anyway. I have courage when I raise my hand to ask a question sometimes. When I meet a new person and have to engage in small talk. When I want to go home and crawl in bed and not face the things in front of me, but I instead get up and do my best.

If we wait until we are confident, then we don’t give ourselves the time and the space to learn. My best research is not when I figure it out on my own, but when I bring the beginning of an idea and share it with others. When I’m not confident, and I’m ready to learn and change, and I learn so much in that space.

So don’t seek out confidence. It will come when it’s ready, and it doesn’t ever need to be there at all. Instead, seek courage, to get up and try even when you don’t feel like it.

Start of summer and reflections on graduate school

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I love summer. I’m back to being a full-time parent right now. We are busy as a family: birthdays, rodeos, going to state and national parks, swim lessons, rock climbing lessons, piano lessons, family reunions, camping trips, building a deck, etc.

I’m not required to work on any schoolwork this summer. But I find myself feeling like I should be writing papers and doing research.

I heard something recently from a podcast talking about what grad students wish they’d known about doing their PhD. When you’re a PhD student, you are working on your PhD. You get to decide what that looks like. But it’s really easy to do the research and the work that you think you are supposed to do, instead of the research and work that you really want to do.

Right now, my plan is not to continue working in academic research beyond my PhD program. I’m not looking for a tenure-track research job. I want teaching and educating to be a bigger focus, and when I do research and write things on my own time, I would prefer to write to a different audience than one that is purely academic.

I could worry about getting lots of publications. I could worry about going to lots of conferences. I could worry about building a longer and longer C.V. But that only enables me to get jobs that I’m not necessarily interested in.

People ask me what I want to do with my PhD. I usually say I want to teach college classes, which is accurate, but more importantly, I am getting a PhD because I want to get a PhD for its own sake. I want to complete a dissertation. I want to be a teaching assistant and teach my own classes. I want to write academic papers while in graduate school. But then I’ll graduate (hopefully) and do something different.

When you’re in the academic world, it is so incredibly competitive. Publishing is very competitive. Jobs are very competitive. But it’s okay if I’m not at the top of my program. I don’t necessarily need to enter myself into the competition. Other people can win awards and publish papers–and I can figure out what I want my PhD to look like. I can focus more on what I want to do and what would be the most meaningful work–within the constraints and requirements of getting a PhD.

That’s not to say that I can do whatever I want. I do have requirements I need to complete. I do want to do work that is helpful to other people. And if a graduate student does want a tenure-track job in philosophy, they probably do need to do a lot of research and get published and win awards. But I don’t need to impose restraints and requirements on myself that don’t exist and won’t actually help me with my long-term goals.

So here are some questions I can ask myself when determining what to do with my time:

  • Is this required?
  • Do I really want to do it? Why?
  • Is this meaningful or helpful to others? How?
  • Will this help me with my long-term goals or values?

If the answer is no to all of those questions, I should focus on something else.

Graduate School

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I have started graduate school. As I walk around campus, I look for people who are my age, and I don’t see many of them. Most people there are younger than me, and many are older than me as well. Sometimes I do feel a bit out of place–I know that there are graduate students my age, but I am settled in my life in a way that feels very unique: happily married, owning my own house, raising four kids.

Sometimes I feel a bit strange going to school. Unattached to my children, I somehow have transported myself to where I was 13 or 14 years ago, and yet I am not the same person. I think about them often, and I feel more alive and more of myself when I look to them.

But now I exist where people don’t know me as a mom of four children. By way of introduction, they want me to state my area of research, something that I am still figuring out. I’m not really figuring out what I want to study–I’m just figuring out the terms of how to categorize it. “Practical reason,” I finally decide to say, and then I add, “And economics,” just because it’s interesting. And I still very much like economics, and find myself slipping an economic term into a philosophy paper because different fields of study aren’t really that different after all.

There is always too much to learn, but I try to be a bit mindful of my time and my resources: I can’t go after every interesting idea and topic, but yet there are so many interesting ideas and topics.

It is a strange thing to tell people that you are getting a Ph.D., but in philosophy. As if the two things cancel each other out somehow. Smart, but completely unpractical. I get to spend years of my life writing things that no one will read, learning things that not many people care about.

But it fits me right now. And every time I learn, I want to maintain in the back of my head: how is this practical? Why would I care about it? Why would other people care about it? And hopefully, find some element of something useful and true in the sea of everything.