Truly Getting what I came for: A mid-quarter review of my first in-person year of grad school
In my very first week of the Ph.D. program last year, I was assigned a book titled Getting What You Came For. While the book was fairly informative about the graduate school experiences and its various moving parts, its title bothered me. As I sat in my shoebox studio that even the little sunshine Seattle gets did not touch, I found myself often wondering, “when will I get what I came for?”
From third-party accounts and my own observations of graduate students, my basic idea of graduate school was that it was a place where, if nothing else, I’d be taken seriously at all times. Among my several reasons for pursuing a Ph.D., this was always and continues to remain near the top of the list. Don’t get me wrong, I was taken plenty seriously by several people during my high-school and undergraduate days. But even then, there were large patches where people would talk down to me, use jargon they knew I did not yet know, and generally dismiss me from what were treated as closed, “higher” conversations. I believe this to be a generally identifiable phenomenon for the average undergraduate student: they are taken seriously some times, but there is a line beyond which they are not.
What else did I come for? Conversations. As anyone who knows me will confirm, I love to talk and listen to others talk. Several visions and depictions of graduate school show groups of excited researchers, bouncing ideas off each other as either uncover a new direction in their work or find an idea vindicated. The energy in the room, the sparkle in the researchers’ eyes, the rising action, all culminating in a Eureka moment — that dramatized depiction of being a researcher is one of the first things that drew me towards grad school while I was still a teenager. I imagined having those generative, excited conversations with professors and other students, researcher to researcher, as I looked forward to being a graduate student.
It’s been a year since I sat wondering when I would get what I came for, and things have certainly been on the up and up. Although there is a new cohort of Ph.D. students in our department, I still find myself feeling like a first year student. I have been assigned a desk in a lab in my department, and I’ve been living it up every week with 12-hour workdays. In lab, there are 2–3 others at all times, having generative, collaborative conversations, exactly as I’d dreamed of. For the first 16 weekdays of the quarter, I have, without any planning or scheduling, met and spoke with at least one new person within my departments. As I run into these people, the conversations have been intellectual and engrossing, either about my research, theirs or cross-cutting themes between the two. I’m doing work that I enjoy and feel passionate about, as people around me are doing work that they enjoy and feel passionate about. Sure, things are not obviously ideal with masks and the hybrid model and the uncertainty of ever-changing instructions with health and safety in mind, but its being made to work.
Perhaps at the end of the quarter, I will reflect on the entire experience of my first semi-on-campus quarter of graduate school. But for now, I can say that I have started truly getting what I came for.
