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alleygaiter

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Everything posted by alleygaiter

  1. If you approach your life with a checklist in hand, it's not going to be very satisfying. So, I offer you a list of useful things I have learned from my own experiences dating a successful academic, seeking my own success, and abandoning my former inclinations to accomplish everything according to an arbitrary idea of a schedule. 1. You seem to be overly caught up in the details of right now. He's not an academic superstar pre-grad program, so he'll never be an academic superstar. You're hot shit in your program right now, so you'll always be hot shit. No one's fate is sealed until that dissertation boldly declares the truth to the world: either you're capable of brilliance, originality, creativity, insight, and clear thinking, in whatever combination, or you're not. 2. Your world will not fall apart if you miss the deadline for a few stops on your itinerary. It will never fit together. It will never be perfect. You have no idea what sorts of things may happen a few years down the road. You plan the best you can, and you try to make decisions that will make you happy. 3. When you were accepted a few years ago, the job market in academia was flush with opportunities for grad school applicants. That feast has withered into famine. Programs across the board are having problems supporting their current faculty, let alone taking on new grad students. So, your acceptance to more programs doesn't necessarily make you that much more of a superstar, it just makes you luckier to have applied for PhD programs at a time when the market was more promising. 4. I dated someone who went to schools recognized as the best in the country for high school, college, and his doctorate, which he completed straight through. He immediately became a tenure-track professor at a university with a fantastic reputation in an awesome city, working under a pioneer in his field. I'm sure he's brilliant in his field (it's a little esoteric), but he was not someone who most people would assume was brilliant upon meeting him. They only learned about it when he mentioned his background. He grasped things quickly and thoroughly, but he approached those things as if he were studying them - he was obviously a great student. But he had a difficult time making innovative leaps and intuitive connections. He wasn't interested in literature, he couldn't hold a conversation about music, and if he saw a great movie, you generally had to explain why it moved you and why it's considered so incredible. There wasn't a ton of passion in his pursuits. He couldn't translate the ideas of his field very well into language that wasn't within its jargon. His research, in his own words even, was solid, but it wasn't groundbreaking. After the breakup, friends shared what I had suspected: they found him dull. In short, being talented academically does not necessarily make you smart. (Now, no one twist that into a reverse syllogism - that doesn't mean that not being talented academically means you are smart. There are smart people in academia, there are morons in academia, there are smart people in the working world, there are morons in the working world.) He's incredibly successful in academia, which I have a huge amount of respect for. We both got our dream jobs early on, and we both do them very well. We both achieved big titles at young ages. His is in the ivory tower; mine isn't. Neither is better or worse. So, basically, what I'm saying is, outside academia, no one cares about the minute nuances of your status as a scholar. It's who you are, how global your intelligence is, whether you have a work ethic, whether you can hold your own in a provocative conversation - not how many papers you publish a year. It makes about as much sense as saying, "I qualified for the Boston Marathon, but my boyfriend only runs a 10-minute mile. How will he cope?" Just cheer each other on and enjoy the fact that you both like to run. (With me and my ex, it was more like, proverbially, he liked to swim and I liked to garden. Neither is better, they're just too different to compare.) 5. If you're worried that he's going to go to a program that isn't his first choice and that you'll feel guilty for any potential fallout (especially if you suspect you may want to break up with him), then make sure he's making his choices for himself, not because it's what he thinks you'll want. That way, clear conscience no matter what he does. 6. Don't be caught up in the rankings. I went to a large public research university, and I was always a little insecure about it. But my ex-bf who went to these fancy schools is the one who taught me that the people in his department, the best in the field, had equal respect for colleagues in the ivy league as professors at more ordinary schools. The reputation wasn't staked on a name, it was staked on the level of the work people there were doing. 7. The problem doesn't seem to be his; it seems to be yours. View it through the filter of your own feelings, not your conjectures about what he feels. It sounds like a cover. 8. The title of this post is telling. "Finding and keeping a male partner?" It sounds like you're still keeping an eye out for something better. If you are, break it off, because the longer you prolong it, the more painful it's going to be. 9. If it's a chore to see him, then you shouldn't be with him. It's not love if you have to convince yourself that it is. It should not feel like a burden to see someone you love. If it is, you're probably making excuses. 10. You have a whole life ahead of you. Don't feel stuck at this age. If you feel constricted, figure out a way to break out of it. You're not trapped. Opportunity doesn't have an expiration date, but rushing could lead to serious mistakes. 11. If the worst problem in your life right now is that people will resent you for how awesome you are, that's pretty badass.
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