Today Salon.com‘s advice section features a letter from "Panicked Prospective Ph.D. Candidate", who is applying to a raft of Ph.D. programs but has become paralyzed with anxiety. Writes PPPh.D.C: "I don’t know if I can handle being rejected by every single school I have chosen — not that I would go off the deep end or anything, but I honestly think I would be absolutely crushed, humiliated, etc., but worse, have no sense of what I will do next." Advice columnist Cary Tennis offers some sensible suggestions in reply; he recommends taking a rational approach to panic and questioning the "truth value" of all those paralysis-inducing inner voices that insist that the world will end. All good advice, and worth reading (you can access it without a subscription if you’re willing to click through Salon’s ads).
But there are a few additional things PPPh.D.C ought to know about what s/he is getting into. I doubt you’re reading this, PPPh.D.C, but just in case you are: First of all, if you have a hard time handling rejection — as lots of us do, if that makes you feel any better — then getting rejected by graduate programs is only the beginning. Rejection at the outset is less personal, and therefore less stinging, than rejection later on, when you’ve got more invested in the idea of being an academic. If you don’t get in, you can take consolation in the fact that you’ve applied to highly competitive programs, that there’s arbitrariness built into the process, and that you can always try again.
But if you do get into graduate school, you’ll have to deal with a lot of other kinds of rejection. You might have to compete for fellowships. You might encounter the kind of professor who doesn’t believe in giving positive feedback to graduate students, and who will comment on your seminar paper that your bibliography is thin and your research unoriginal, thus leading you to think seriously about dropping out after your first semester and going to work at Borders. And then there’s the rejection that you read into every negative student evaluation when you start teaching ("They thought I was boring? *sob* But I worked so hard to make it more interesting for them!"). And then, if you do decide that academia is the place for you — which is not by any means a given — you will have to confront the low likelihood of your getting a tenure-track job. Rejection by half a dozen Ph.D. programs pales in comparison to rejection by fifty job-search committees. During my abortive academic job search last year, I found it relatively easy to cope with the rejection letters from the departments I didn’t really think would hire me. But the department that interviewed me last year, thus giving me real grounds to think they might want me, and then never deigned to get back to me with a rejection letter? Well, I’m still smarting a bit from that one. (Though really, it’s less a "where did I go wrong?" kind of smarting and more "I wish I could give them a piece of my mind.") In general, the more total time you’ve sunk into preparing for an academic life, the harder it is to walk away and the worse the rejections will be.
I think I’ve grown a much thicker skin than I used to have when I first entered graduate school. I’ve learned not to take it personally. But still, a Ph.D. program isn’t exactly the kind of environment where it’s easy to maintain your self-esteem. You might want to consider this, PPPh.D.C, before you head off to pursue your degree. You might consider doing something else first, something that will remind you that you’re bright and competent and capable, because you’ll need to remember that in grad school, where it’s easy to suspect that all the other graduate students are more brilliant than you are.
My advice? If you don’t know what to do next, don’t expect graduate school to provide the answer. You might end up, like me, deciding that after spending your 20s going after a Ph.D., you still don’t know what to do next. Better to get a job and earn a bit of money, even if the job isn’t what you see yourself doing in five or ten years.
