This past week, I had my biannual existential crisis.
What am I doing with my life? Am I prepared to move away to pursue a doctorate? Is the student debt worth it? What about leaving my family and friends? Should I quit my job? What if I just got a job and bought a house? Should I move out of my current place? Why did I go on vacation one week before a huge presentation?
In my general state of anxiety and dread, I confided some of these things to a dear professor and colleague. We were meeting to discuss our plan to present our research in Toronto this week, and she innocently asked how I was doing.
What followed was a conversation that reframed everything I was thinking.
She said, “You know, you don’t have to stick with academia forever. My backup plan is to join the military.” I was surprised. But she explained that if she ever got laid off, there probably wouldn’t be any jobs in education available to her, so she’d learn survivalist skills for the apocalypse in the military. I have to admit, her logic is pretty sound. We plan to get an underground bunker together. With her skills from the military, she’ll do the hunting, and I’ll do the cooking.
Besides the doomsday prepping, what I took away from the conversation is that the skill that will serve us best as students in the 2020s is adaptability.
For almost all of my life, I have been hearing about “unprecedented times”. Personally, I yearn for a much more boring life, one where we do not experience the hottest summer on record every year, where epidemics and pandemics are not increasingly the norm, and where the average person can get a job and buy a house before the age of 36. But it is useless to pretend that we are not living through momentous social change. Wealth inequality, backsliding civil rights, and polarization compounded by targeted misinformation and disinformation are just some of the topics that keep me awake at night.
This tumult is also felt in our studies. Gender studies, my little niche, is being targeted as the site of “dangerous gender ideology” or a “useless degree” for women. Departments like mine around the world are being defunded or shut down. And these struggles are not unique to gender studies.
The landscape of academia is shifting, and we as students must be prepared to shift with it. The key to our success will likely not be blind determination toward one goal, but rather the adaptability to change course and create new paths to apply our expertise and training. Not all of us will become tenure-track professors, high-level executives, or ground-breaking researchers. But there are still ways to continue our lifelong learning and dedication to our respective fields. It may just look different than planned.
We cannot help that we find ourselves in university during this time and place. We may feel that we have been dealt a poor hand, and for many, that is true. However, despite the struggles, we can still take solace in knowing that we are developing the skills to navigate our uncertain future as best we can. Adaptability, resilience, and grit will define the students of our generation (regardless of chronological age). In my opinion, these are some of the most valuable traits we can possess, and we will continue to develop them as long as we rely on each other and forge a sense of community.
Surprisingly, the solution to my existential crisis was to remember that I have very little control over anything. It doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t try, but rather that reveling in the possibility of quickly changing paths creates more opportunities to learn and grow.