If It Were Easy, Everyone Would Do It: The Definitive History of My PhD Journey

So, today marks the six-year anniversary of the successful defense of my dissertation.  But the journey to that point was not without its speed bumps, potholes, and curve balls (and those are the NICE things I can say about the process).  This blog post has been brewing for a while now, but I wanted to frame this story in a constructive way—one that doesn’t unnecessarily cast aspersions on the players involved, however much they might deserve it, but instead serves as a lesson to aspiring doctoral students so that they can learn from the infuriating, maddening, insanity-inducing experience.

Let’s start with comprehensive exams.  Ya’ll, I don’t have the personality for comprehensive exams, or at least, not the way they were administered to me.  That might explain why I failed them the first time.  We had three reading lists, 8 hours in a room with a computer and not much else per reading list, then an oral exam combined with a defense of our dissertation prospectus.  Can I just say that I can’t do 8 hours in a room doing something I actually enjoy, let alone having to create word vomit about a given subject?  That is a fate worse than death to me. 

I’m also a believer that brevity is the soul of wit, and it seems rather superfluous to spend 8 hours typing 20 pages using a gazillion sources when 4 hours and 12 pages will do just fine.  So, yeah.  I realized, after the first time, that one cannot simply BS your way through comps.  By the way, hear me when I say this, PhD students—if you have failed your comprehensive exams, you are not alone.  In fact, if your experience is anything like mine, you realize that a bunch of folks you know with PhDs also failed comps and all lived to tell the tale.  I did better, but not great, the second time and passed by the skin of my teeth.  Good thing, too.  If I had failed again, I doubt I would have kept going. 

I realize that this is how comps are done in many departments, but I have a humble suggestion, one that is being used by many other departments: E-mail the question or questions for each reading area to the student at 8:00 AM on the scheduled day.  Give the student 24 hours to complete the exam.  It MUST be e-mailed back by 8:00 AM the next day—no exceptions.  Yes, this would be an open book, open note exam, but to answer the questions completely and with a higher level of rigor would be impossible without advance preparation. 

That would allow students to pick their poison: if someone does better in a quiet room with no distractions, they can do that.  If it’s someone like me who does better with background noise (I made it through the PhD process by watching The West Wing multiple times on DVD), it’s a chance to listen to or watch whatever we want to, take breaks, go for a walk or a bike ride, etc.  The quality of the work would be higher and the sanity of the students would be more intact.

But in the midst of studying for comps the second time, more fun happened.  Three weeks before I took my comps for the second time, my dissertation committee called me in for a meeting.  They liked my dissertation topic (at the time, exploring the relationship between religious literacy and militancy among Islamists), but thought it might be biting off more than I could chew.  So they suggested another topic—whether Islamist groups would moderate if fully incorporated into the political process.  Three. Weeks. Before. Comps. 

So, I don’t have a problem with the new topic—in fact, the new topic became a boon for me (more later).  I have problems with two things here: first, they did this THREE. WEEKS. BEFORE. COMPS.  I had failed comps, had to wait six months to take them again and they waited until three weeks before I tried again?  Really?  The timing was terrible.  Which leads to the second problem: I got no guidance from my committee.  In fairness to them, I should have advocated for myself more strongly, another issue I’ll come back to soon.  However, I also don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect the grad school version of Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn Rule”: You break it, you own it; or in this case: you change the topic, you help start the new lit review.  That didn’t happen. 

So instead, three weeks later, I (barely) passed comps, but got blasted because my prospectus was not what they wanted on the new topic.  I was given an out: a Master’s degree instead of the PhD and we could call it all good.  I was livid—like, had to leave and walk around campus for about 10 minutes so I didn’t say unkind things livid.  It was a Wednesday, and that night, I went to church for dinner and choir practice.  I attended a church with a lot of professors and one of them asked me how things were going.  I asked him if it was weird that I was having recurring dreams about throwing members of my committee out of a plate glass window, the higher up the better.  He laughed and said, “Not at all!  Let me know if you need help hiding the bodies.”  It may have been the kindest thing anyone said to me during the process.  While we’re on the subject of church, let me add here that for about three weeks after this, “It Is Well (With My Soul)” was the song that sustained me, especially the second half of the first verse: “Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul.”

My favorite version of "It Is Well (With My Soul)" by Audio Adrenaline with Jennifer Knapp

After the disaster that was the oral defense of my prospectus, one of my professors finally decided that helping me with the lit review would be a good idea, and the finished product was actually pretty damn good.  So, after a couple of attempts at comps, a couple of prospectus drafts, and way more frustration than was strictly necessary, I was finally ABD.  Did I mention that my PhD program was on shaky ground?  Because while all of this was bad, things got worse—for everyone in my cohort.  My program was a political hot potato on campus on a good day.  By the time I got to the ABD portion of the process, there weren’t many good days.  It didn’t help that many on campus perceived our program director to be a raging narcissist, and his sins were often visited upon us.  There were endless personality conflicts between him and even our other major professors, which made putting committees together a fraught process. 

But the real chaos started with a meeting in which we were promised “Exciting news!” in January 2011.  The news was neither exciting to many of us, nor particularly good: the university was doing away with our degree programs.  An interdisciplinary program such as ours was believed to be surplus to requirements since all of the disciplines covered by our interdisciplinary program now had graduate programs of their own.  We were, however, promised that no services would be held back and we would have everything we needed to finish in a timely manner.  Heh.

We now interrupt our regularly scheduled tale of the people in the process to insert this bit of unexpected drama: I accidentally wrote a dissertation about the Arab Spring.  As I mentioned earlier, when my dissertation committee changed my topic…Three. Weeks. Before. Comps. (I’m done, I swear), they actually did me a favor.  The topic they suggested, the applicability of moderation theory to Islamist movements, became unexpectedly timely when one of my three case studies, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, suddenly became front page news.  Moderation theory asserts that when extremist parties (defined a number of ways) become fully incorporated into the political process and thus, responsible to the entire electorate, they will lose the more extreme parts of their platforms and moderate.  Very few folks had written about moderation and Islamism for a whole host of reasons, but suddenly it was a little bit important to start thinking about. 

I finished my chapter on the Brotherhood in the fall of 2010.  I started revising in early January 2011; then I had to stop.  It’s hard to revise something when you don’t quite know what the ending is going to be, and once the protests began in Cairo on Jan. 25, 2011, I no longer knew what the ending was.  So I spent the next five months waking up every morning and asking myself, “Oh, God….What do I have to re-write today?”  This part of the craziness was nobody’s fault.  It was an issue that others have had to go through before, though not to this degree since, probably, the fall of the Soviet Union.

Okay, now back to the personal drama.  By January 2011, I had replaced our program director as my dissertation committee chair, in part because he was impossible to get ahold of and in part because I, like many on campus, found him difficult to deal with and had grown tired of the whole mess.  We no longer had new members of the tribe coming in.  I was accidentally writing a dissertation about current events.  It was a fun time, really.  Then, the program director, the one no one could get along with, just disappeared off the face of the earth.  He was never in the office, never responded to e-mails.  And while no longer my chair, he was still on my committee.  In April, we found out that he had left the university under a cloud of personal drama.  He posted about his departure on his university-sponsored blog, which was updated so infrequently that none of us ever checked it.  Luckily, one of my favorite professors was able to jump in to his place, but that wasn’t the end of the committee make-up drama.

A couple of weeks before my dissertation defense, I got a call from our office manager.  It seems what had been conveyed to us regarding how many people were supposed to be on our committees and from where was not in accordance with Graduate School policy.  As the grad student responsible for keeping the website, I knew what we were told, because I was the one who typed it all out.  Turns out, it was one more thing the program director thought he knew better how to do than the administration.  So, while I had five people on my committee, one was an outside reader, and I needed five FROM the university, then an outside reader if I wanted to add to that.  Thankfully, because our office manager was a rock star, she had already reached out to the interim program director who volunteered to be the fifth person from the university and essentially go along with whatever the other five decided. 

There was one part of this whole process that was drama-free, and that was the defense itself.  This is as it ought to be.  Any dissertation committee chair won’t let a student defend an unpassable dissertation.  I figured out about 20 minutes into the process that I was going to pass, and it became a much less stressful situation.  Of course, the fact that I brought homemade snickerdoodles may have helped.  It’s not always this way.  One of my colleagues had a terrible experience with his dissertation defense.  I’ve heard story after story about two professors getting into screaming matches during a defense or one member of a committee hating another so much, they failed the student out of spite.  Please, fellow professors, don’t be THAT guy (or girl, though I’ve never heard of a female professor being so petty).  So after praying the prayer of all PhD students, I was finally Dr. Wheatley. 

Things got worse from there for the rest of my cohort.  Resources were taken away, defenses became mine fields, and people left bitter and hurt.  Furthermore, none of us got any real help in terms of job searches.  Because we were an interdisciplinary program, all of our major classes were cross-listed with other departments, but no one told any of us that to teach in higher ed, for accreditation purposes, you have to have 18 hours in the subject you want to teach.  The only reason I knew is that I got to see what a job search was like when the school I got my M.A. from was looking for a new professor.  We got very little about job talks and how to write an application letter.  Nor did we get any help with non-academic job searches.  While I haven’t asked around much, my guess is that this is not uncommon.

So what lessons are there to be learned here?  First, grad students: your cohort is your tribe.  No one understands your experience like your tribe does.  Nurture your tribe, lift up the members of your tribe.  Do it because one day, your tribe will be the ones lifting you up and helping you through the bad times.  My cohort was awesome and multiple members of it saved my sanity on more than one occasion.  Second, and this one cannot be stressed enough: ALWAYS be nice to the ladies in the office.  They are the ones with the real power—not your graduate program director, not your department head.  They know everyone and everything.  If they don’t like you, they’ll eventually get your request handled.  But they’ll accommodate everyone who treats them better than you do before they get there.

The biggest takeaway as a graduate student was this: YOU have to be your best advocate.  Don’t ever be afraid to ask for help or demand assistance, especially if your committee does something crazy, like change your dissertation topic Three. Weeks. Before. Comps. (Okay, so I wasn’t done.  I’m sorry.)  It’s not that your committee doesn’t care—most of them do.  It’s just that they have a lot of other things to care about, too.  You only have you.  So ask for help and expect it.  Seek guidance on that which you don’t quite understand.  If you don’t advocate for you, why should anyone else?  I learned this lesson the hard way.  But I did learn.

Faculty, you aren’t exempted from some guidance too.  I can sum it up in two words: Be. Better.  That’s it.  Just be better.  Be better than your experience.  Be better than the torture you endured.  Be better with students even if you hate their professors.  A PhD is hard.  And it should be hard.  But rigor and psychological warfare are not the same thing.  One of my colleagues today, who was also one of my professors as an undergrad, has said many times that the most powerless person in academia is a doctoral student on the eve of their dissertation defense.  He’s not wrong.  So be better at guidance, at mentoring, at compassion. 

If getting a PhD were easy, everyone would have one.  There are a million reasons why it shouldn’t be easy.  The proudest moment of my life to this point was the moment my chair came out of the conference room in our offices and extended his hand and said, “Congratulations, Dr. Wheatley.”  That should never be cheapened by making the process less rigorous.  But it shouldn’t be unnecessarily difficult just because that’s how it’s always been.  While my experience was stressful, sadly, I don’t think it was atypical.  We need to work to change that.