Welcome back to my series on what the heck happened in graduate school. My last post in this series focused on what I've decided to call the "assumption of external motivation." I really believe that that was at the core of a lot of what went wrong in graduate school but that wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for the content of this post. Not only was there a toxic culture brewing in my graduate program but there was very little that I felt like I could do to escape or change it. I felt very trapped and this created a lot of learned helplessness. Here's why I felt trapped:
There was no one person to blame
I mentioned in my last post that there were things that various individuals did to make graduate school a bad experience. We would have these gosh-awful 'town hall' meetings where the students would try to explain to the faculty what the problems were with our program and what could be done to help. These were tense and unproductive. The problem is that there was no one individual who was to blame for the toxicity of our environment. Everyone had things they were doing well and a lot of ways that they were contributing the problems.
The little ways everyone contributed to the problem came together to make a big problem. When we tried to point out what individual faculty could do to address the issues in our program we inevitably felt like we couldn't perceive reality because they'd point out all the ways they were trying, and helping. I don't know about others but I'd find myself questioning if I was just overreacting and if maybe the ways this person was contributing to our issues weren't so bad. Honestly, it was like spending four years looking at this illusion:
I KNEW there were gray dots, but whenever I tried to focus on one to address it, it would somehow disappear.
I ended up writing this poem about it as I was preparing to leave to go on internship:
So much of my life was dependent on graduate school
This is a HUGE problem in academia, but there's this often unaddressed assumption that PhD students have some kind of family money they can draw on. This will surely be the topic of other posts because its an insidious and extremely important issue in terms of who can get a PhD and consequently, what psychologists look like.
In fully funded PhD programs (like mine was) your tuition is fully covered by a waiver (so no tuition, which is good!) Additionally, you are also given a VERY small stipend to live on and your health insurance is through the student health insurance provided by the university. Even as I write this I'm already feeling ungrateful again and hearing that internalized voice in my head saying "you're so lucky to have been a part of a fully funded PhD program! And to have had a stipend too! It sounds so privileged to complain about that." And, honestly, maybe it is. I'm not saying I'm not privileged because I certainly am in so many ways. But with my stipend being as small as it was, I had no savings, and I was totally dependent on my graduate program for my health insurance. My family is strictly middle-middle class, so my parents weren't struggling but I have 4 siblings who are all younger than me, and still depended on my parents for financial support. My parents didn't have a ton of extra money to financially support me.
In the background of my unhappiness and mental illness in graduate school was always the unspoken threat- what if you make too many waves? Will you be kicked out? Will you have more trouble meeting your milestones? Even though I'd been very averse to 'failure' since high school, graduate school made the possibility of failure so much more high stakes because if I failed there was the looming possibility that I would find myself with no degree, no savings, and no healthcare.
If anyone is wondering- 'well Ash, you have GAD. Were you just catastrophizing? Surely being kicked out wasn't a real possibility?'
I would like to believe that, but I think the final post in this series will be why over time in graduate school I learned it was unwise to trust my mentors. I've hesitated to write it because my intention with this blog really isn't to drag anyone through the mud. But the more I untangle the knot of why my graduate program hurt as badly as it did, the more I know that is the final piece of the puzzle. Stay tuned for What Happened in Grad School? Post #3.
Until next time,
Ashley
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