What Professor Bigshot said

I was feeling very nervous, sitting there in Professor Bigshot’s office. I had just been accepted into the PhD program, and was visiting the department to get to know everyone and see if it was the right fit. I hadn’t applied to any other PhD program. If I didn’t go here, I probably wouldn’t get a PhD.

You can figure out pretty easily who Professor Bigshot is, if you care. I guess you could say I’m giving her a pseudonym for SEO reasons.

The student who was showing me around the department had asked, “Oh, have you met Professor Bigshot yet?” I had not. I had heard of her, but I had absolutely no idea what her work was: what she studied, what she had written, what her theories were. I was nervous, sitting there in her office, because I was afraid she would find out that I hadn’t read anything she’d written. I was right to be nervous, but for a completely different reason.

“So Angus,” Professor Bigshot asked me, “You know that the job market in linguistics is very tight? You understand that we cannot guarantee you a job when you graduate?”

I relaxed a bit. I knew this one. I had thought long and hard about it. I said, brightly, “Oh yes. But that’s okay. I have computer skills, and I can always get another IT job if this doesn’t work out.”

“Well, at this university,” Professor Bigshot’s face abruptly twisted into a snarl. “We are not in the business of granting recreational PhDs.”

That was the last thing I was expecting to hear. I did the only thing I could think of: I thanked Professor Bigshot politely, got up and walked out of her office.

I still had a day and a half before I left town. I had planned to visit classes and see the rest of the university.

I didn’t quite know how to tell my student guide what Professor Bigshot had said, so in a few minutes I was sitting down in Professor Littleshot’s office. I didn’t know what he had done in linguistics either, but at this point it hardly seemed to matter.

“So Angus,” said Professor Littleshot. “Have you made up your mind whether you’re going to attend our program?”

I opened my mouth. “Well…”

“Is there anything I can say to convince you?”

I shut my mouth and thought for a minute. “Well, I guess you just did.”

That was slightly over nineteen years ago. Professor Littleshot retired before I could propose a dissertation topic. I wrote a dissertation in Professor Bigshot’s theoretical framework, received my PhD in 2009, taught linguistics as an adjunct for seven years, sent out applications for tenure-track jobs and was invited to exactly zero interviews. Last week I started working as a Python developer in the IT Department at Columbia University.

Recreational PhD? Well, there have been times that I’ve enjoyed quite a lot. And yes, I suppose you can get a back injury, chronic insomnia and thousands of dollars of debt from plenty of other recreational activities. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t tried so hard to prove Professor Bigshot wrong.

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