As an undergrad, I idolized my professors and believed they were some of the smartest people I would ever meet. They were experts; they had spent years gaining highly specialized knowledge in their fields and had eloquent, complicated answers to any question thrown at them. I was constantly in awe of the academics around me, measuring myself against them and questioning how easily they were able to engage with different concepts and ideas. Why didn’t I consider that implication? How did I miss that subtle point? When would I learn this complicated jargon? What did people mean by “discourse”? And many others. At the time, I hadn’t yet decided to continue in academia (I had no idea what I wanted to do, hence why I did honours in English and majored in Philosophy, two excellent disciplines for those who love to think and read and get lost in the abstract, but who have no idea what to do with their lives). But I was curious, and I enjoyed thinking my way through different questions. I wanted to understand how the world worked, first from a philosophical perspective, and now from a sociological one.
I’ve been a graduate student for a significant number of years now, doing work that I find both challenging and meaningful. It’s a period when I’m doing my best to enjoy the everyday moments. I don’t want to look back and wish that I’d done things differently (though I’m sure this will be inevitable); where I can say I did the best that I could given the time, energy and knowledge I possessed at the moment. I think most grad students question their ability to undertake the work and navigate the sometimes treacherous academic waters. We all suffer from some kind of imposter syndrome.
I’ve spent a lot of time in my Ph.D. over the past few years trying to figure out if I can make a career out of academia. I’ve hit the various milestones that one typically does: finished my coursework, passed my comps, taught my first course, published an article, and had my proposal approved….and with each one, there’s been an immense feeling of relief and accomplishment. It made everything seem all the more real, that I could do academic work, that I belonged here. I can say without a doubt that I do enjoy this work; puzzling through theoretical material is singularly rewarding, having discussions about various ideas and concepts is always a delight, and teaching undergrads has emerged as a consistent joy for me. And yet, I’ve questioned at various points if this is work I’m capable of doing. Or rather, if I can perform at the level needed to achieve success.
When I was an MA student, my supervisor at the time talked about how graduate students are seen more like colleagues among faculty, and that there’s less of the divide that exists with undergrads. I could somewhat appreciate this, but I was also fortunate to have a supervisor who treated me with respect – certainly, not all faculty members hold this collegial view towards grad students. But the point of that is to say that grad students are more immersed in the academic world. They undertake research, publish, teach classes, present at conferences, and are a convenient, cheaper, and malleable workforce when administrators come calling for help. So, in this way, grad students occupy this interesting liminal space between the roles of “student” and “academic.” At some point, there is a shift that occurs out of this liminality, most often, I think, when one has the Ph.D. in hand. But not always.
The shift, as I’ve been thinking about it, is that moment when one is still a grad student (or, perhaps in some instances, it continues into faculty life) and has the realization that they can do the work, that they do belong, that maybe the academic life isn’t so out of reach. Of course, I know that this will occur many, many times over the Ph.D., and I can only imagine post-Ph.D. But the first time one has that realization is significant because the experience now stands as something concrete, a reminder that even when you feel lost in the unknown, you might not be as lost as you think. For me, the shift came after I finished my comps and was given my first class to teach. Suddenly I was responsible for designing a syllabus, selecting articles, designing assignments, preparing lectures, and, most worryingly, being responsible for all of these students. I was nervous but threw myself into the preparation with all of the self-confidence of someone who has no idea what they’re doing. But then I experienced the shift: I realized that I did know what I was doing.
I made mistakes and had a lot to learn in terms of healthy boundaries (the world will not end if I don’t answer the 2 am email from students) and how to not overwhelm myself with putting too many assignments on my syllabi. But as I engaged in this pedagogical work, this was the thing that made me realize I could be an academic. I could speak to this material; I had spent years learning it over multiple degrees. I could lead a class and facilitate discussion; I could evaluate assignments and help students work through their conceptual issues. The experience of teaching classes helped me to realize that I had learned so much along the way that I could speak knowledgeably about various topics. I recently had a class where I discovered I had forgotten to prepare any lecture notes, but I knew the material, and I was able to deliver a lecture and then facilitate meaningful discussion. I had come a long way from exhaustively writing out my lecture script to now being able to speak about the material off the cuff. There’s something my first-year Intro to Western Lit prof used to say in our class that has stuck with me and that I’ve tried to bring into my pedagogy. He told us all that even though he was a professor, he didn’t have a monopoly on truth. He didn’t have all the answers, he wouldn’t be able to answer every question we might have. But that was okay because together, we would engage in the process of knowledge co-creation. It has taken some work to shift away from the mindset of “I must have an answer to everything.” I have gotten better at saying to my students, “I don’t know,” or that I realized I’d missed something when I was marking a final essay and had to change the grade I’d originally assigned. Part of the shift has been learning that there is nothing otherworldly about academics as I’d originally believed as an impressionable 18-year-old (though admittedly, a view that has been hard to shake into my 30s). While I maintain the utmost respect for those who can succeed in the grueling academic world and forge viable careers out of a line of work that grows more precarious in an increasingly neo-liberalized, bureaucratized institution, I can now appreciate them as people.