one woman’s struggle with The Minotaur

A friend sends a link to HER RECENT POST on a Minotaur encounter in connection with her own Ph.D. work.

Just a few quick comments on this, in case they’re of use to others…

It’s difficult, but very important, not to let your advisor or committee members define your feelings about your own work. Some are sadists; some are clueless; more often, they simply disagree with you. This problem is not unique to doctoral committees. Try sending an article manuscript to certain journals, where one referee says it’s a brilliant article and should be published as is, while the other says it’s a piece of garbage. These things happen, and they can even happen in cases where both referees are perfectly sincere.

The problem is that graduate school tends to be a kind of psychological acting out of adolescence. Graduate students can often have a bit of a masochistic streak, and sometimes feel secretly more impressed by the advisor/committee members who show contempt rather than support for their work, just as some people are only attracted to members of the opposite sex who are vicious and demeaning toward them.

My general view of life is that the majority of our wounds are self-inflicted wounds. We stick with bad advisors. We stay in jobs we hate and gripe bitterly about them rather than looking for a new job. We wallow in hopelessly damaged relationships for years. We bizarrely gravitate toward those who insult us rather than those who support us, whether out of some decadent taste for punishment or some wish to reverse the past, or whatever is going on in these cases.

People tend to fear success more than they fear failure. If you simply make an effort to be conscious of this, it becomes a lot easier to escape it. One of the major American philosophers (I think it was Emerson, but it may have been James) says that we generally know which situations are good and harmful for us, but “an imprudent curiosity” makes us want to experiment with the bad situations. Simply don’t do it.. Think of yourself as a simple, healthy animal that wants to choose the clean food and avoid the dirty food.

As for advisors/committee members, either you can change them or you can’t. It’s a purely practical calculation that needs to be made according to factors on the ground that you can know better than others. But even if you can’t change them, the amount of direct pain they are capable of causing you is but a grain of sand in comparison with the time and emotional energy you will waste weaving a crisis story around your dealings with them. Remember, the Ph.D. is essentially a driver’s license; it’s not supposed to be psychoanalysis.

That said, I hate the Minotaur in this story.