Meet the PhDiva, @Dissertating
I often receive direct messages asking if I am a bot. I am indeed a real person, and this is my story.
From my earliest days, I found the printed word fascinating and chose it over toys. My grandmother provided junk mail, which I promptly edited. I read early, choosing To Kill a Mockingbird off Grandma’s bookshelves when I was only 7 or 8. Obviously, school would provide me the penultimate stimulation and satisfaction, so it makes perfect sense that I would still find myself there (as a student) at age 48… and through age 55, as it turned out.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I completed a Bachelor’s in English at age 22 and took a job teaching HS English in a small town in Ohio. Little did I know that I would remain in that position for over 20 years, having married, had two sons, earned a master’s degree, divorced. When my younger son was a senior in HS, I worked on a project at the state department of education, which led to my seeking full-time employment there. It was time. I had taught nearly everyone in that small town and I was eager for a new challenge.
I moved to the state capital, Columbus, and began work as an English Language Arts consultant. Before long I was promoted and became an official bureaucrat—a title I detested. Somehow, I had gotten myself the education job that took me as far as possible from students, and I was disheartened. A much younger colleague at the department felt similarly, and she suggested that we go back to school for our PhDs. “We have to battle the brain drain,” she insisted. So, we both enrolled part-time in Ohio State University’s PhD program in Educational Policy and Leadership.
What a challenge. In addition to my 40 hours per week with the department, I taught one night class each term in college writing. I couldn’t give that up because it helped fund my PhD classes, so I found myself taking one or two classes each term, teaching another, in addition to the full-time job commitment. Thus began my bag lady period. I organized my life into three bags: student, teacher, and bureaucrat… and each bag matched its role—a backpack, an oversized tote, and a briefcase all lived in my car’s trunk, along with a file box and other assorted office supplies. Keeping my bags separate helped me focus on the task at hand. While at work, my teaching and grad school work sat in my car. While teaching, I couldn’t be distracted by work commitments; while in grad classes, I had to be fully present.
Ohio State required its doctoral students to have one term of residency—meaning I had to be enrolled full-time, taking 10 credit hours. At the time, the university was still on the quarter system, so it meant only 10 weeks of a schedule cram packed from early morning to late night. I spoke with my supervisors at the department– we chose a summer term, as our workload there is lighter– and they allowed me to use personal time and vacation days to attend classes. I enrolled in one weeklong class that met from 8 am til 5 pm each day and showed up on day one in a bright floral blouse, wearing sunglasses. I welcomed the other class members to my vacation! It was a rough slog, no doubt, but I had the time and my brain yearned to learn.
This continued for four years, until I realized that I was nearing 30-years’ service and could consider retiring. A professor had already offered me a graduate assistantship, if and when I could go full-time, so I met with the appropriate parties, and set my retirement for June 30, 2011. The department honored me with a lovely breakfast party—but I never looked back. I had worked there 8 years.
Finding and Losing Academic Footing
With a monthly pension check plus the small graduate research associate stipend, I continued my PhD studies, and picked up a graduate interdisciplinary specialization. I felt in my element and fully enjoyed my full-time academic life. I earned high marks, received high praise for my writing, and confidently entered the “dissertating phase.” If you’ve read my blog, or my posts to Researcher Chronicles—you know that did not end well. While I was well-matched with an advisor whose interests aligned with mine (state education policy and its implementation), we had a tense relationship. He left me to my own devices, which I took at the time as an indication of his respect for me and my years of practical work in my area of study. Ultimately it led to my appearing in my dissertation defense like a deer in the headlights, an expression we use here in America to describe a deer caught crossing a highway as it meets up with oncoming traffic and certain doom. As the debacle drew to a close and the committee filed out, I sat across from my advisor whose first words were “This was as much my fault as it was yours.” We didn’t speak long; I refused to cry in front of him. I would revise and redefend. I had a year.
Pushing Forward to Success
I was totally unprepared for how this failure would affect me. I had failed big before (divorce)… but somehow this cut me to my heart. I do not fail academically. But I did. Adjusting to that reality took a while. I had a newborn granddaughter, though, and I offered myself as her Friday caretaker. She didn’t care if Nana had her PhD! Eventually, I looked into her eyes and realized that I should be an example to her. I had to try again. Though my dissertation had sat untouched for three months, I opened it up, and began anew.
I remember clearly reading through it one day and having a visceral reaction—my body tensed, I blushed deeply, and I realized that this was not at all defensible. Advisor misconduct aside, I took responsibility for the failure and plodded on. Having conducted a qualitative study, I dug back into the data and chose grounded theory as my methodology. It was my only way forward, as it allowed for hindsight driving one back into the data looking for new insights. I submitted a total of three revisions to my advisor, who in this iteration provided detailed feedback each time. (By that I mean 11 pages single-spaced in response to the first revision.) It was a brutal process, but I persisted. My second revision only merited 8 pages of feedback, so we were getting somewhere! The third… well, the substance of his email appears as one of the slides here. A few sentences assured me it was go time. The second defense: a success!
I received my degree at 55. I deliberately chose not to apply for tenure-track jobs because I did not need to. I could choose to do what I loved and I did. I teach both face-to-face and online (education and English classes), and I serve as developmental editor for Ohio State’s education journal, Theory into Practice. My littlest inspiration, granddaughter Eila, has been joined by baby Bea, just this year. My life is full.
So that is my story… what’s yours?
Since April 2015, I have maintained a Twitter feed to support graduate students and "dissertaters" on the road to PhD. @dissertating now has over 9,000 followers. Join us!
These paragraphs served as the core of a live motivational talk I gave 29 Nov 2018, hosted by @Editage.
