So what are you going to do with that?
I once thought about writing a guide for graduate-school attriters. How to know when you’re slipping, how to know when you should never have done this in the first place but still forgive yourself for doing it, and most importantly, how to get out and move on.
I never found a round tuit, as happens not infrequently. Fortunately, that last-named trick is covered with remarkable sanity and decency in this short, sensible book.
What I admire most about it is its gentle but unrelenting effort to disabuse its audience of the false and pernicious messages and mindsets they bring with them from academia. Me, I am not gentle about this, not in the least—but my approach doesn’t work; you can’t tell a fish “that’s water, all around you, water; c’mon up out of it and grow some legs and then we’ll sort you out.” The poor fish doesn’t know what water is, because it’s never tasted air.
The book’s approach is less confrontational but more straightforward: here are things you must not do, here are things you must not say, here are things you must rethink. No whys or wherefores other than the strictly pragmatic “this will block your being hired.” No Cude- or Lovitts-style debunking of myths. Sorting all that out to arrive at a new understanding of the world takes perspective, a commodity most recent ex-academics, still thoroughly enmeshed in academia’s account of itself, don’t have in abundance. Therefore the book mostly doesn’t bother. Smart.
What it does do is model the new modes of thought and action extensively by means of case studies. Where I would say something like “Academia has a vested interest in your belief that it contains the smartest of the smart,” or even “Get over your damn dissertation already; it doesn’t make you All That,” the book quotes people talking approvingly about their new coworkers’ intelligence, or shows them reworking their résumés. Show, don’t tell. Very smart.
I plucked the new edition off the new-books shelf at MPOW because my husband is struggling with mid-dissertation sturm und drang and I have completely run out of ways to help him; he’s got the good old deer-in-the-headlights learned helplessness that New Librarian (also an academia-baby) had before him, and unlike New Librarian, he’s too acclimated to my standard goosing tactics to respond to them any more.
Which leads me to the book’s one defect: no advice for family and significant others! Now there is a book that needs to be written…