This is the article I needed to read eleven years ago. I graduated as the valedictorian from a good liberal arts college and ended up in a top-ten PhD program i

This is the article I needed to read eleven years ago. I graduated as the valedictorian from a good liberal arts college and ended up in a top-ten PhD program in English lit. My undergrad dept. was very much an old-school one at the time: most of my work was producing careful close readings of texts with only minimal engagement with new research. This made me a great reader but a poor scholar. My best professors had gone to grad school decades earlier when the pressures were very different. I was a naive 21 y/o who just assumed that “being good at school” was a sufficient condition to succeed in grad school. And most of my undergrad mentors assumed the same thing, at least implicitly. Consequently, I was thoroughly unequipped for the realities of grad school and the shape of the contemporary discipline. It was a miserable experience. I realized almost from the outset that I didn’t really belong there: I lacked the absolute commitment to the discipline to be willing to make the necessary sacrifices for it. (And, once I started working with the contemporary scholarship, that commitment flagged even more.) I bumbled my way through to ABD status before leaving without ever having written a word of my dissertation. There were also personal factors working against me. I didn’t know it at the time, but I also have ADHD. I was also a tremendously emotionally immature twenty-something who mostly just wanted to feel like an intellectual without having to do the work to be one! (I’m sure I was completely insufferable—more so than I even am now…) All of that virtually ensured that I probably couldn’t have executed the project even if I’d had the drive to do so. I came out with no debt and an MA after five years, which was good. I also realized what I did not want to do with my life, which was even better. But I also came out with a fairly unhealthy relationship with alcohol and some anxiety issues. Would I still have done it if someone had had a frank conversation with me on the level that Devereaux offers in this article? I’m not sure. I was stubborn. But it certainly would have helped me to be more realistic about my odds of success. Of my starting cohort of ten, three of us ended up finishing. I’ve gotten past the shame and regret that I felt for the first few years after leaving. I finally gave up on the idea that I am going to finish it someday. I ended up in a field that I actually love (but one in which I won’t be pursuing a PhD!). I have nothing but respect for those who make it through, but damn if it isn’t a brutal, strange, and at times humiliating system. (And one that only gets worse once you start applying for jobs.) In some respects, it obviously should be very difficult; after all, there are not nearly enough academic postings for the humanities PhDs we produce, so attrition at some stage is desirable. But I would like to imagine there is a way to create a system that can do that without the human costs.