What we don't talk about when we talk about defending your thesis
Vaguely forboding empty lecture hall. Stock image via Unsplash.
Content note: this post is going to be really frank about depression, anxiety, and academic struggles, as well as briefly discussing an incident of violent queerphobia.
Editorial note: This post is not intended to be a call-out or criticism of specIfic people in any way, shape, or form. There’s a reason I don’t name any specific people in this post— my intention here is to analyze the institution-level issues and larger circumstances, and to offer analysis on a situation that there is very little guidance for students navigating it. But also I’m aware that it’s not hard to put names to specific people based on publicly available info, and so let me be be really fucking clear: do not harass or be shitty to anyone based on this post. You aren’t helping me or anyone else, and also you, random internet person, do not have all of the facts. If you do so anyways, be aware that I will throw you under the bus so fucking fast that there’ll be a doppler effect. Again, this is about the overall situation and porous nature of institutional supports for grad students.
“Don’t worry, they wouldn’t let you defend if you weren’t ready!”
I have seen and been told this oh-so-chipper advice more times than I can count. And I can’t express how deeply I hate it- because I know firsthand that it’s not always true.
I should state right up front who this post is for. This post is not for students on the eve of their defense, nervous and maybe catastrophizing like I find myself doing too often. This is not the post for you, to scare you about unlikely outcomes. Go do your thing, and then maybe come back and read this when it can’t worm its way into the depths of your mind to bleed poisonous mutterings into your internal narrative.
This post is for students who find themselves standing where I did in July 2021, who were reassured over and over by well-meaning confidants that their doubts we misplaced, that it’s exceedingly rare in most fields and universities to fail a defense, only to find their nightmare becoming true. There aren’t many resources out there to speak to that experience, and the shame surrounding it can choke you off into suffocating isolation as it seems all of your friends sail through their own defenses and off to greener pastures on a wave of celebratory champagne.
This post is also for faculty, friends, mentors, and everyone else- not to come in to dissect the corpse of my PhD, or to get some sort of macabre kick from it. This is for you to listen and learn from, and to perhaps sit uncomfortably as you stare directly in the eye of one of the things we try not to think about in academia, which you probably always have had dark assumptions about that you don’t want to admit you had.
So now to be blunt: I sort of failed my first defense.
Well, technically not a fail. There isn’t a word that sums it up neatly. Contested, perhaps? Or maybe a conditional pass? I still struggle with neatly pinning it down in a way that doesn’t lead to a long explanation that tears open old wounds. The facts are this: on Monday July 27, 2021, I defended my PhD dissertation at University of Oklahoma in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. My committee deliberated for hours, and ultimately kicked it up to the grad college. On Thursday, I was finally told that I had passed, but that I needed to add a massive amount of new analyses and revisions to my dissertation within 60 days— 60 days that would happen smack in the middle of me moving to UC Berkeley to begin my position as a postdoc. I tried to make the deadline.
It wasn’t enough.
By the rules of the OU grad college, this nullified the original defense, meaning I’d have to do it again. I didn’t even know that was a thing that could happen— surely you either pass or fail, right? How do you even talk about this painful middle ground? Over the next year and a half, I resubmitted my dissertation several times. Only recently did it result in approval to go ahead for a second defense, which finally occurred on Friday December 9, 2022. I am now officially finally a doctor. I cannot overstate the relief I feel at having this nightmare scenario wrapped up.
But that year and a half was one of the hardest things I’ve weathered. There were the practical parts— registering for four extra semesters while no longer being covered by the tuition waiver I’d had when I’d been based in Oklahoma cost an additional $10K, and at the same time my pay at UCB was cut due to not having the degree yet. All told, I’m somewhere north of $35K poorer because of this mess, a debt I’m not sure how to scrape away at. My parents ended up dipping into their retirement savings to cover some of it, I borrowed money from my brother, and more than anything the generosity of the online academic community came through to keep my lights on.
Even more than that, the deepest wound was mental and emotional. I started grant applications and then abandoned them, not believing that I’d actually be eligible by the time they were awarded. I found myself resenting other students who finished their degrees with a more standard bottle of champagne and applause, when I’d sobbed as I downed a pint of Cherry Garcia before falling asleep of a profound but troubled exhaustion on my friend’s couch (although the kindness of the two friends who were with me that night is one I will never forget). I’ve been angry and broken and tired and anxious for so long that I’m not sure now how to be anything else. It’s been a profoundly traumatic experience, and all the more so from the weight of stigma and isolation that comes with it.
So, the question is: what the actual fuck happened?
Of course it’s hard to say- I’m not on the committee, after all, and so wasn’t privy to what happened once I left the room. But a few problems in particular seem to have played a role:
Poor advisor fit- Sometimes, you just aren’t a good match for your advisor’s style, through no fault of either of you. This can be workable sometimes, but in my case it was compounded by additional hurdles, namely the departure of my first advisor from academia and then the huge disruption of quarantine as COVID-19 hit. I think this second one in retrospect is particularly important, even though it didn’t seem like it at the time- with limited contact with my new advisor, we had little chance to work with each other and figure out some of these rough areas for the better part of the year. By the time my defense rolled around, I’d grown accustomed to working independently, but in a different direction than expected- and this meant I didn’t meet certain expectations that would have been clearer if we had gotten more time to work directly with each other prior. Distance did not improve the working relationship in the slightest. I don’t think my second advisor was a bad advisor— they just weren’t the advisor I needed in a difficult situation that only became more complicated as 2020 unfolded. The absolute breakdown of that relationship is one of the biggest regrets of my PhD, and all the more so for my not completely understanding why it happened.
Unclear expectations- Many programs struggle with this issue, for an understandable reason. Grad programs need to be flexible enough to work for a wide range of students and subfields, even just within a single department. But this all too often leads to erring too far in the other direction, resulting in little accountability in how faculty treat students and wildly differing expectations of what a “complete” dissertation looks like from committee to committee.
This is a particular issue when a student has to switch labs, because expectations may change very suddenly. When a student initiates that change to find an advisor who better meets their needs as a mentor, that can be a good thing. But when it’s due to an advisor departing, this can be a difficult dance— and it’s one I fully tripped on while attempting.
What happens when your stress escapes become a source of trauma themselves? Via Unsplash.
Needing to relocate- I’d dealt with occasional background queerphobia throughout my time in Oklahoma. It sucked, but it was the sort of thing I could just put to the back of my head and try not to dwell on. That all changed in fall 2020.
I had been a devoted gym-goer throughout my PhD, but COVID forced me to look for alternatives that didn’t involve being in a room full of other people’s aerosols and sweat. I’d taken up running a bit reluctantly, and was starting to do it more frequently. Usually I’d do a route of a couple of miles, through my neighborhood to campus and back. My neighborhood wasn’t the greatest, but I had never really given safety much thought in daylight hours.
August in central Oklahoma is a study in different flavors of heat, from the hair-dryer winds from the baking southern Plains to the smothering humidity that rolls of the forests to the west. I dressed for comfort, as usual, in men’s basketball shorts and a loosely-cut tank. That day it was a grey one, with a velociraptor from Jurassic Park on it. So dressed in my comfortable androgynous clothes, I set out with my headphones on.
Only a few blocks from home, I passed a man on the sidewalk. I gave him a friendly nod, and maybe even said good morning. As soon as I passed him, he stopped and turned, glaring at me. A moment later he started screaming at me. I couldn’t make out all of it, but as I lifted my headphones slightly, I heard “you fucking dyke”. I started sprinting. When I glanced back, he had done the same, shouting “f****t” repeatedly as he ran after me. I ran in front of a car to cut him off and made it around the corner, but kept running, faster than I had before, until I was across the nearby busy street and in a different neighborhood. After I had lost him, I collapsed on the ground and sobbed.
This is admittedly mild compared to the violence many queer people face. But in the weeks that followed, it was enough that I finally decided I was done with Oklahoma. I needed to finish as early as possible and leave for one of the few states on my list that had legal protections for LGBTQ+ folks. I’d been playing around with the idea of trying to finish in four years since my advisor left— I had all my data in hand, so it was a matter of finishing analyses and writing it up— but in the aftermath, it switched from one of several possibilities to the obvious course of action.
I still can’t go running, by the way.
I was discouraged from trying to finish early, told I wouldn’t be competitive for postdocs, especially the limited pool that was left after I ruled out most of the US as unsafe. But then I got interviews again and again, each time I sent in an application. The interviews went well. I got the offer to come the Berkeley that spring. Finally I had a way out, and obviously the concerns my committee had raised hadn’t come to anything.
In retrospect, it seems clear that what to me was a logical decision based on concerns for my safety as each news cycle brought word of another state targeting queer and especially TGNC people, compounded by my difficult situation at OU, didn’t appear that way to others. It looked like disregard and arrogance— and maybe there was a touch of that, my careful attempts to hide my nearly overwhelming anxiety and depression with a facade of confidence crossing a line into an overinflated ego— and naturally that was not received well. My dissertation wasn’t going to be fabulous, not with this timeline, and I had made peace with that. All I cared about was doing enough to pass and then getting as far as I could from a state that was trying to legislate people like me out of existence. For those outside that experience, though, focusing on survival looks like laziness.
I don’t regret the choice I made. Berkeley has been good for me, even as the surrounding circumstances of my PhD made it seemingly impossible to manage. But it wasn’t an easy choice, and all the more so for the people I was looking to for advice not fully understanding why I made it.
Lack of institutional support- I’ve discussed on this blog before how most universities have no idea how to help students when their advisors leave. That lack of support— the expectation that nothing would change for me, and if it did it was due to me raising too much of a fuss— was then hugely compounded by the pandemic. Like many grad students, I found myself suddenly cut-off from my department and program, and unlike many students, I didn’t really have a lab either to fall back on. I wasn’t going to Zoom lab meetings where we all showed off our pets— I was alone, with just phone calls or video chats with my former or then-current advisor to periodically check in.
I instead turned my attention to the support network that were growing up in their place— ones of researchers from all over, or community groups not part of academia at all. These were vital to me making it through that time (especially as the irrepressible extrovert I am), but when things started finally resuming at OU, I was one of the many students who were disconnected from that and fell through the cracks.
This seems like a fire hazard? Via Unsplash.
What happened after:
So those are, at least from where I stand, the factors that contributed to my not passing on my first try. As difficult as all of them were, the hardest part ended up being after I moved out to California.
I can only describe the feeling when my dissertation was eventually rejected as a type of grief. I had made mistakes in dealing with edits— mainly missing a batch of comments, which would have been caught if any of my committee members had touched base with me during the revision period but as it happened weren’t— but instead of being treated as a sincere error, I felt like I was being accused of being purposefully negligent. I considered giving up multiple times, even floating an offer to leave my postdoc so my supervisor could hire someone without all the baggage I seemed helpless to manage (he made it very clear he thought he hadn’t made any mistakes in hiring me, and would I please stop offering to leave). I’d call it imposter syndrome, but is that even the right name for it when people are telling you directly that you only got your position from luck or by being good at talking your way through an interview or because so many grad students were bailing from academia that people with your lackluster CV actually stood a chance? How are you supposed to just focus on what you do well when your confidence, your well-practiced ability to not show it when a round of feedback felt utterly devastating, are reinterpreted as a sort of Dunning-Kruger-esque inability to understand how badly you’ve failed, with a side of entitled arrogance?
When I tried to raise the issue of how my experiences with queerphobia in Oklahoma contributed to my decision and the outcomes of that decision, it came across as accusatory in my constant anger. I didn’t handle many of those conversations well. I was trying to explain how pervasive and systemic the issues were, but while I was spiraling, the words came out with an edge that cut the wrong way, that it was specific people’s fault and not the result of the overall environment.
I wish I could end this with “luckily I figured out how to stop the spiral and that’s when I defended and passed!”, but I can’t really. I just stubbornly kept pushing forward, doing revisions and jumping through bureaucratic hoops that felt increasingly meaningless until finally in early December I was told to be ready to defend that Friday. That’s probably why I still can’t really believe it, and have to keep reminding myself that it’s over, that I can breather. It felt like I had been randomly trying combinations on a lock and just finally hit the right one. Maybe at some point later I’ll be able to look back and say “oh, okay, here’s the thing I did that finally changed the outcome”, but at this moment, I can’t see it yet.
Throughout this whole sorry saga, I’ve been very vocal about what was happening (if not always very graceful in how I did so). I know it’s not the smartest thing to do, since now literally everyone can read about how I didn’t initially pass when if I’d been quiet about it, I could just pretend it never happened. That’s probably the rational thing to do. But when I turned to look for advice after that first terrible Monday, there were few stories to be found. It was clear that the fact that sometimes the worst does happen was a dirty little secret in academia, and the stories I did find were mainly Reddit or Quora threads where people talked about how alone and helpless they felt, and people told them there was nothing they could do.
And, like, excuse me but fuck that?? How are you going to joke about how only really bad students fail a defense one day, that it never really happens, and then either ignore that sometimes it does happen or, even worse, that oh well you probably deserved it by doing something wrong? I’ve actually come out of this experience very suspicious of whether we even need the defense in its current format, since right now it’s either a pointless formality or a trauma so shameful that to mention it is unspeakable. If it’s actually something that everyone passes, just call it an exit seminar, like some schools already do, and make it a celebratory occasion. If it’s actually a test of anything, treat it as the serious endeavor it is then, and offer more than platitudes for students in the way of support.
But one of my overriding principles is that while we actively work towards those long-term fixes, we also need to help those hurting in the here and now. So if you’re a student reading this wondering how they can recover from this thing that’s never supposed to happen, here’s what I can offer: you didn’t fail, you were failed. And while you’re surely cataloging all the mistakes you made and beating yourself up about them, be gentle to yourself in this moment. Everyone makes mistakes, but it’s those evaluating you that are choosing how much grace to have about them. Odds are, you are where you are not because you’re some sort of exceptional failure, but because the mechanisms that were supposed to catch you in the exceptionally ordinary failures you share with so many others, for whatever reason, didn’t. Academia has so many sharp edges and broken parts and things tied together with string, and it’s not your fault if you are hurt by them.
The thing that gave me the energy and motivation to go on was community— and largely community in places outside my program. You’re hurt right now, and so let others help hold you up while you heal. Find others who are willing to give you feedback, especially if you feel that some of what you’re being asked to do is unfair. Make space for yourself, and remember you’re allowed to feel what you’re feeling. And above all, if someone tells you not to discuss it, know that usually that comes from them being uncomfortable about what you’re saying, since your experience chips away at the comforting lies of academic meritocracy, of faith in the system. For every one of those people, there will be many others who can actually offer the support you need right now. It may take some work to find them, but I promise you, we’re out there. You can get through this, even if you can’t believe it right now.
As always, if you’re a student going through this sort of mess and need someone to talk to, please feel free to get in touch via my Contact page.