on being a grad student

The impetus for this post was a question: my friend asked if i knew of any blog posts that dealt with the question of mental health issues and graduate school. After not really recalling anything, I thought I’d write some thoughts down. Clearly, my perspective is colored by the various social locations i inhabit, and, among other things, from my own educational experience having attended an “elite” private undergrad institution and a “not-nearly-as-elite” public graduate school. In the latter, “financial aid” means, for the most part, TAship. I have received a grand total of two quarters (six months) of fellowship support over almost six years. Every quarter other than that, i’ve spent TAing, which has been great for my facility with a lot of the material i want to be familiar with. It has not been terribly supportive in allowing me to do the research I’ve needed to do to complete a dissertation.

This is increasingly the story i hear from Ph.D. students I meet, including some attending ostensibly “elite” universities. More and more, I think that to describe the academy as an unqualified space of privilege is to miss the mark in some serious ways, even as we recognize the privilege it confers and that comes with being a student. [ETA: It is also hard for me to take that notion seriously when more than half of the people teaching classes in universities these days are being paid barely above minimum wage.] Anyway, here’s the response. Please feel free to chime in, especially if you have thoughts, or if you know of other blogs that have addressed this topic.

* * *

good question! you know, there really should be, and i hope there is, but i don’t know of anything in particular. i do think there need to be resources especially directed toward people who are making, have made, or are planning to make, the transition directly from undergrad to grad school.

what i do find is that a lot of the mental health problems that i see graduate students struggling with have as much to do with the forms of micro- and macro-hierarchy through which the academic profession is structured, as well as the attitudes toward graduate students through which it becomes naturalized. there is so much that graduate school leaves you completely alone to figure out, then punishes you for not having figured out already. you’re supposed to know how to negotiate a set of relations with professors who have considerably more institutional power and clout than you but who probably experience themselves as having very little institutional power and clout, and who are probably not as receptive as they might be to the impact that their actions have on your life, your material livelihood, and your sense of wellbeing.

there’s a constant expectation that you carry yourself as an adult and that you produce yourself for a profession, and at the same time. you’re constantly being infantilized and evaluated in formal and non-formal ways. ”graduate student” is rarely a well-defined institutional position with concrete expectations—more often, it’s the kind of neither nor space that becomes, under certain conditions, a kind of purgatory. even exempting teaching duties, you are not completely a student because you’re being asked in ways that undergraduate students are not to reproduce the life of the institution and, most likely, of a profession. structurally and institutionally, you’re not considered a full worker: not only are the chances that you’re being paid a living wage slim at best, but your labor, when you TA, is part of what makes you a student and not a professor. there’s an anticipatory quality to everything you do; everything is the road to something else. the idea that pursuing an academic career means the possibility of pursuing knowledge for its own sake completely ignores the material conditions in which academic labor actually takes place. you rarely know when you’re going to be done and, if you are choosing to go into academia, the conditions in which you will labor are so entirely subjected to the logic of the market that it becomes hard to discern what you are and are not doing correctly.

this is the kind of environment, i think, out of which mental health problems—from paralyzing depression, to overblown senses of competition, to various forms of paranoia, to issues that don’t really have names i can identify but are characterized by the normalized ways in which certain anti-social and oppressive behaviors go oftentimes without much remark—are really more norm than aberration. going through graduate school can be like going through your teenage years all over again in the sense that you become so much accumulated not yet. childhood without children. being not yet is not as straightforwardly a mental thing as it is a logical outcome of the way graduate students are institutionally positioned. it’s a result, i think, of doing this kind of work within the various kinds of hierarchies that are endemic to working in the neoliberal academy. what frightens me is seeing former grad student colleagues become faculty colleagues, seeing the ways in which they participate or are called to participate in the consolidation of this kind of stuff. seeing the ways in which institutional pressures lead to microhierarchical attitudes and such with people who, even a year ago, shared the same status with you. it’s scary. but the regularity with which i’ve seen it happen makes me sense that it’s not something that has to do with people being corrupted by the system or anything. rather, there’s something lawlike in the way it seems to have to happen in one form or another, even though people negotiate it in very different ways, i suppose.