PhD Blog

Thoughts on 7 years of writing something very long

I mostly talk about my freelance writing on this blog, but I am also pursuing a PhD in literature and will be defending my dissertation next month. So I figured now was as good a time as any to collect some thoughts about my experience doing a PhD over the past 7(!!) years. I get emails sometimes about how to balance freelance and the PhD or whether someone should go into one or the other, to which I say, lol. But really, I wanted to write down some of my thoughts about the past few years on the job market and transitioning into an alt-ac job while also building a freelance career. I hope someone finds this useful and this can answer some of the questions I am getting.

I decided I wanted to get a PhD when I was studying in London in 2017. I decided to get a PhD, rather than a Master’s degree, because I could graduate debt-free if I got into a program with a stipend. If you’re reading this and thinking of doing grad school, there are debates over time to degree vs. earning potential with PhDs vs MAs that I won’t go into, but my personal perspective is free is free and that I would never do a paid master’s unless I won the lottery. I also think earning potential in the years immediately after college for people graduating right now is greatly exaggerated— I wouldn’t have been maxing my retirement in any scenario— but I acknowledge that doing a PhD in your 30s is a different calculation and can’t give advice on that.

I applied that fall and got into my school, a public school in the Northeast that is one of the top-ranked schools for my degree. PhDs give 5 years of funding, but a 5-year completion timeline assumes you have an MA coming in or that you will work harder than the devil to finish in five years. I will have finished in 7 (fingers crossed), which is average.

PhDs are job training for professors and sometimes professional university staff. Since I was at public school, my aid package required me to be a research aid for one year, teach for 3 years, then I got an additional few years to work in a college writing center, and then I got a job which covered my last year’s tuition. Anecdotally, when I came in in 2018 I was told it was easy to get year 6 and 7 funding; I did get funding, but most people I know had to adjunct until they were done. It’s probably easy to understand how you can finish your degree faster if you don’t have teaching responsibilities, but I am of the opinion you should teach in grad school regardless because you should know if you like it or not.

There’s not a lot that makes my academia story unique, but there are a few things that stand out. First, I am the first person in my family to get a PhD (I do have an uncle who’s a medical doctor.) I didn’t know until I got to grad school how many PhDs have parents with PhDs (about 1/3 I would guess) and I instead got knowledge about the degree from my advisors and friends. I would say this was pretty equivalent to PhD parents a lot of the time but I knew a lot less about the job market reality (and had less networking built in) than some other people I know.

Second, I started freelancing halfway through my degree and relied on that for extra income/a sense of purpose outside my degree. I have a need for creative fulfillment and freelancing did that more than my dissertation. It was also nice to know I had a career offramp (I mean not really if you look at how journalism is doing, but I could at least make some extra money if I needed). I interned at Paste and wrote for a lot of publications and ultimately built up a portfolio that helped me get a job. I get questions about that sometimes so my answer to “how did you freelance and PhD at the same time?” is I would have been too bored only doing one or the other and it helped me have a life outside academia. Both freelance and academia made me a better writer as well.

I’m trained as a medievalist but went on the job market in 2023 in both medieval studies and writing and composition (first-year writing). Having worked in a writing center for several years, I thought I would be happy working at one. I also applied for several post-docs. I got very close in several searches (not the tenure-track ones) which I’m told means that you are likely to get it the next year, but that kind of felt like wishful thinking at the time. I also applied for some jobs in journalism, which I didn’t get emails back on, and eventually any job that I thought would be interesting and included writing. This is how I found my current job as a digital editor.

Before I went on the market, I knew teaching was a tough option for several reasons including covid safety (lack thereof), a voice problem I was dealing with that made lecturing hard, and the fact that I find teaching exhausting. My roommate in grad school used to say teaching energized them, and I would nod at them from the couch in teaching-induced slumber. “Good” classes were kind of energizing, but more in a “I will collapse on the couch in a positive mood rather than a neutral mood” way.

Due to the market I found myself pushed toward composition and writing instruction jobs, which, while great, are not what I trained for. Getting a FT job teaching medieval lit seemed out of reach, unless I could get a postdoc (which seemed equally miraculous). (Postdocs also involve moving to wherever the postdoc is, for 1-2 years (and then you usually move again), and I like living in New York and moving’s expensive.) I was also beginning to be anxious about being a literature professor while AI was on the rise. The last time I taught, in 2022, Chat-GPT didn’t exist. I find it existentially depressing, as well as demeaning, to accept that I would have to grade essays written by a robot and not by real people (which I found the most rewarding part of my job). I liked working with students on their essays and talking with them about writing, but my impression is this opportunity is rarer and rarer. I’m sure there will always be people who are interested in writing and getting better at it, but I’m annoyed in my personal life how many people see it as a chore they can outsource to a computer. Trying to convince people to care about something when they have not just an incentive, but a very easy way, to cheat and not do it would make me feel like a truck stuck in mud.

The biggest pill to swallow after starting a non-professor job has been how some people in academia have responded to me. (This doesn’t include my advisors, professors, or friends, as they have all been supportive and I’ve gotten more than one “I understand exactly what you mean” from colleagues when I talk about the market.) But the occasional response that 1) I’ve settled or 2) implying that I didn’t have “the juice” to make my research into a real job (a made up idea, like have you seen some people who have tenure??) is a bummer. Some of this comes from inside. Being a graduate student is an esteem-booster. I’ve gotten past this and luckily have lots of people telling me I’m smart daily. I also feel I’m suited to editing more than I was to teaching. However, I look forward to putting “Dr.” on my paperwork and nametags for the foreseeable.

I do hope to do something with my research; I would love to turn my dissertation into a short book (and ideally one people would actually read). I also like reading medieval literature still. Not everyone who does a PhD can say they still like their subject at the end of it. As far as freelancing, I love it and still do it. It’s very hard to make a good amount of money from it, let alone a wage, if you don't have the network or name recognition of having been employed at a legacy institution (or from what I hear, even if you have.) After 5 years of freelancing, I make about enough to cover my utility bills and save up for a trip in a few years. If you’ve never freelanced before and you want to make it your whole career, please do not do that.

I don’t know if you should get a graduate degree and you should talk to your advisor about it if you have one. I can say it allowed me to have steady employment and eventually a job, though I needed outside experience (freelancing) to both distinguish myself and prove that I had non-academic experience (and pay bills.) It also gave me health insurance. A lot of people my same age are either in jobs they hate or struggling to find a job at all; I feel grateful my PhD helped me avoid that. It also made me much better and faster at reading; helped me understand academic theory and why people care about it; and taught me how much I love editing, talking about writing with others, and institutions that support learning for everybody like public universities and libraries.

However, I was told in 2018 that a PhD was a gamble professionally and I feel (in my field, English and specifically premodern) that’s only more true. At the time I was on the market I felt the pressure and struggle I’d have to go through to get a tenure-track job, if I could get one at all, wasn’t worth it for a job I wasn’t sure I would enjoy in the long term. Not to mention the assorted other reasons for my hesitation. If you’re doing a PhD because of perceived prestige or because you want to be seen in a particular way, I don’t think those are good reasons. Studyblr is all well and good but you can just watch The Chair on Netflix or read The Secret History. There are people who want to learn and work hard in PhD programs and there are people who get tenure-track jobs, and there’s no guarantee the first will make you the second, in my opinion. You really have to do it for the love of the game.

Then of course there’s all that’s happened to academic grants in the past year. This admission cycle was brutal for students, and next year will probably be worse. I don’t know what to say except “sorry” if you had a grant revoked, people work really hard to get external grants and I imagine that must be devastating.

I loved doing my PhD and don’t regret it at all. Many of my friends are from grad school and I love talking with them about books, academic drama, and life in general. I'm also proud of my research, which has become a 200-ish page document about medieval melancholy and disability in premodern England. Although academic writing doesn't come as easily to me as other kinds, I enjoyed the process of reading professionally for years and synthesizing that into the closest thing to a book I've ever written.

It’s pragmatic to see the PhD as job training but I approached it, and ultimately see it, as 1) writing practice and 2) an opportunity to expand your mind and get educated in the classic sense of being exposed to things that, years later, you realize are vital to a project or your life perspective. This might seem woo woo or impractical but to me it was the only way I could see it. It’s not that serious, basically.

If you made it to the end, thanks for reading. Please don't email me to ask if you should do a PhD/start freelancing/etc., with all the kindness in my heart, I will not respond. But I hope you found this advice helpful or at least cathartic.

Also, if you are an editor who is reading this, I will shortly have a lot more time to write for you and I would like to do that. Please get in touch!