This week we discussed all things school! We talked following your dreams, not liking your graduate program, feeling closeted at Catholic universities, what to do with your high school’s GSA, and so much more! We did not discuss whether or not I prefer pencils or pens, however I will let you know: PENCILS.
Stay tuned for the October GIBWK schedule, which will go up next week — I will be back on October 12!
Getting In Bed with Kristin: School Hard | September 28, 2017 from autostraddle on Vimeo.
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Kristin is the co-director of A-Camp, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Everyone Is Gay & My Kid Is Gay, author of This is a Book for Parents of Gay Kids, and co-host of Buffering the Vampire Slayer, a podcast about (you guessed it!) Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Kristin has written 60 articles for us.
For the person who is several years into a PhD program in a red state and not happy there, this is a vote in favor of not forcing yourself to stick it out from someone who went through something similar. I would recommend trying to talk to people at the counseling center on your campus and the career services people, too, about figuring out what you want to be doing and what you need to do to move in that direction. Also, have you done the coursework to get a masters from the program and does your program award a masters that’s coursework-only? I quit having gotten through the doctoral candidacy process in a program with no coursework masters, and I only regret not having a masters from it. (It never occurred to me I wouldn’t finish my degree.)
Hi this was me. Thanks for your advice! I passed doctoral candidacy about a year ago, and I would need more classes to get a coursework only Masters, but there is an option for a thesis Masters that would let me use some of the research credits I have gotten since then and graduate by the end of Spring 2018, assuming I can wrangle the lab work I’ve done into some sort of coherent story for a thesis. That’s the option I am looking at right now and then trying to figure out what it is I do want to do and how to do that in a way that lets me buy health insurance and pay rent and other important life things.
Any advice for life post grad-school and making the transition back to the “real world”?
If you can manage the thesis masters, I would go for it (I couldn’t handle it mental health-wise). Figuring out what to do next is how the counseling center people were helpful. I did all kinds of “what career would be good for you” kind of stuff. I don’t know whether you can say I’ve transitioned to the real world since I’m mostly have stayed in academia except for some months of temping. I’m a librarian at a research university now (the library is where I would hide from grad school). Some of what I read about career etc goals talked about a multi-step process. What can you take from what you’re doing now and move closer to what you want to be doing even if you don’t get there all at once? I started working in a library and then moved to get the degree I needed and then moved for the job I wanted in a city that I’ve now been in for 13 years.