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PEREAD ABOUT MY PHD JOURNEY ⬇️
I’d always been a big reader and writer, and since about the age of 4 I had my eyes set on being a writer. But when reality dawned on me that being a writer might not be the most stable career, I began to brainstorm career alternatives and envisioned myself as a professor, lecturing on Jane Austen’s free indirect discourse and Vonnegut’s stunning political acuity.
By college, I’d set my sights on becoming an English professor. Yet something was wrong. I knew that so much of being a professor was fostering connections, yet I found myself unable to mesh personality-wise with my department, gravitating instead to folks in the economics and hard sciences, who seemed more pragmatic than their literary counterparts.
I had always been told that I was idealistic, but was I not idealistic enough to thrive in academia?
In grad school, I felt this same premonition—I did not fit in. My brain was too practical to thrive on an interplay of ideas wholly disconnected from reality. Coming from an immigrant background, I was substantially to the right of my graduate cohort, all of whom equated literature with socialism, though I’d always considered myself liberal. I realized that I was a lot more extroverted than the average bookworm and needed people around me to thrive. After finishing up my MA thesis, I walked away from my graduate study with no set course of action after setting myself up to be an English professor for the past ten years of my life.
So where am I now? I started a company where I get to teach high school students how to write, and I make literature videos every day for you guys.
Do I regret leaving my PhD? Nah. Would I ever go back? Absolutely not. Getting a PhD is an amazing accomplishment, and I admire everyone who’s done it, but it’s definitely not for everyone. I’ve been so much more fulfilled since—and, frankly, relieved.
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