Importance of Community and Perseverance While Riding on the PhD Boat

Published by The International Auto/Biography Association, January 15, 2018 SNS Network

 

Ozlem Ezer writes of her experiences of both the PhD process and the post-submission period in Canada, the US, Cyprus, and Sweden, stressing the usefulness of supportive communities in these two periods. Describing her journey through the PhD and “across the void,” she explains that it is okay to stop, to take breaks, to experiment, and to realize in the process what works best for you. 


Let me be clear: I have been skeptical about “support groups” since watching Fight Club (1999) and laughing out loud. I started my PhD at York University (Toronto) in Fall 2002 and became increasingly involved in North American society since then, only to find out that support groups were really part of this culture and their extent still surpassed my imagination. In 2004, my partner and I moved to Naperville, a suburb of Chicago, where he began his full-time academic post at a community college. We didn’t know anybody in the area. I lost my York-based feminist academic circle and felt like a fish out of water. In fact, I remember coming up with a penguin metaphor in my diary. York was the sea, where I could swim fast (I finished my course work and comprehensive exams all in one year), but I was wobbling like a penguin on land in Naperville. One day, I received an email about an ABD [all-but-dissertation] support group, whose members are writing their dissertations in gender and women’s studies programs. I remembered Fight Club. I can’t recall the reasons but the support group wasn’t formed or gathered regularly. However, Michelle Morkert, a young, bright feminist ABD reached out to me, and drove to Naperville to meet me in a coffee shop called Arbor Vitae (Tree of Life), where our friendship began. Her presence and our conversations meant a lot, and made me realize how crucial it was to have people who share the similar experiences with you. We built a strong bond despite the years and we both believe in the significance of women’s support of each other in academia as well as in other fields of life.



Every PhD student has a different story and I can’t tell how typical mine is. Losing my network as an ABD caused me frustration and anxiety. Had I stayed for one or two more years at York, I might not have experienced the alienation  I had toward the whole PhD process because I would be nourished by many academic events, hang out with like-minded people and learn more. Then again, I was never fully comfortable with the idea of becoming an academic in the first place. I love teaching, writing, and research. However, I didn’t enjoy teaching full-time because the workload (three or four courses per term) didn’t allow me to enjoy the privileges of research and writing.

In my third year, I made the difficult decision to write a letter to my committee at York, asking them to pardon me for my desire to quit the program. I had decided to move to Cyprus after securing a full-time English-Language Teaching position at a prestigious university.  My first year didn’t allow me to think of anything but work and to explore the island’s culture and natural beauties. However, my post was more demanding than the faculty’s in terms of teaching hours and it paid less. Along with  pressure by loved ones, my family in particular, this gap between the lives and the working conditions of language instructors and faculty affected my decision to return to my dissertation after a two-year break. In Cyprus, I had a supportive group of colleagues, who were language instructors themselves, and who kept me motivated during my writing process. I spent evenings and weekends working on my dissertation while teaching fulltime. Without the Internet/technology, this would have been impossible. My committee was very detail-oriented and demanded many revisions, more than I want to remember. During the last semester before the defense, I took a leave from teaching. This period was helpful for dealing with the stress and the logistics.

The keys to completing a dissertation are discipline, patience, and concentration. Having applied these three rules carried me to the happy ending. If you have faith and an ambitious plan of getting a tenure-track position in two years, that’s also great. However, I have an ongoing skepticism of people who attribute too much to the PhD process. There is no denying that it is a long and valuable learning experience, which includes coursework, proposal writing, and two rigorous exams, known as “comps,” before you are allowed to write a dissertation in the North American system.

Despite the above, not putting too much weight on it, perceiving it as just another step in the journey of life, was what allowed me to complete it. Ironically, before I defended my thesis, I was awarded a generous post-doctoral fellowship in Sweden. I remember accepting it very cautiously, keeping in mind that my committee members were very meticulous and the external examiner flying to Toronto for my defense might give me a difficult time. When I defended my thesis and flew directly to Stockholm in December 2010, I felt relief more than anything. My advisor was right: “The best dissertation is the completed one” (something which I kept quoting to many ABDs and also to MA students of the university where I taught). I still can’t believe that in Sweden, I immediately began transforming my dissertation into a book published in Turkey, which I finished in five months. I was very motivated by the fact that a Scandinavian university afforded me this opportunity to focus on writing. As I returned to Cyprus, I was re-appointed as faculty thanks to my new title (an absolute must in their system) so it was rewarding.

Currently, I am working efficiently on the topics I want to write about, which is about Syrian refugee women’s life stories and how stereotypes can be challenged through them. I need to repeat that everyone’s experience with and attitude toward a PhD completion is different. I don’t know where I will be located in the long run (I am currently a visiting scholar at Berkeley), but I have freedom of speech, time to think, to write, and to read, and these are the most precious fundamentals for an intellectual. In an ideal world, I would argue that the same essentials should be provided for graduate students as well. This might mean one or two terms that are still funded but without the tasks of teaching assistants.

This person whom I called an intellectual doesn’t have to be located in academia, but having a PhD definitely makes that person’s life easier when it comes to holding posts in, or receiving invitations from, academia. My advice, if I may give it, is to invest the time and discipline into your doctorate but not overstrain yourself because of it. Balance real life, nature, and academia.  Keep exercising and lead a healthy life even when you are going through the final stages of it. I hear too many excuses for skipping healthy meals or exercise because of the dissertation (sounds familiar?). I’d argue strongly that especially during those stressful times, pre- or post-defense, you need to take care of your body since it’s inseparable from your mental health.  Just remember the cliché metaphor of giving birth whenever one finishes a manuscript after working on it for months if not years. Hold on to this metaphor and now consider how careful pregnant women are from the very first day they learn they are going to have a baby. Contrarily, we (well, most of us) writers and researchers do the opposite during our intellectual pregnancy. We shouldn’t if we want the baby in full form and with the least trouble after it is born.

Discipline, patience, and having a supportive community and partner helped me throughout my PhD journey. Ups and downs were inevitable, but there is light and life at the end of the tunnel, and you will not regret crossing it.

An Open Letter to the PhD Candidates or Graduate Students across the U.S.

After a pleasant conversation with the author and philanthropist Sallie Bingham at Mable Dodge Luhan House in March, one particular topic stood out for me as a blog-entry or e-letter in order to inspire field studies in social sciences about the school shootings in the U.S., which seems quite a unique and unfortunate phenomenon in contrast to the rest of the world. The burning question which surprisingly remained unstudied as far as my online library research showed was: “Where are the fathers?” Ms Bingham wrote: 

“I wonder in the latest school shooting where that young man’s father is—or was. Only the mother is mentioned, implying that she alone was responsible for teaching this tormented soul how to be a man. And she died—mercifully for her—before he committed his crime. (…) In all the school shootings I remember, the murderer is being raised by a single mother. No uncles, no grandfather—and, most crucially, no father. These separations are often caused by spousal abuse, and so the disappearance of the fathers is another terrible consequence of this wildfire problem.”

https://salliebingham.com/guns/

Bingham argues that fathers are the only ones who can possibly transmit a radically new formula for manhood, not defined by violence or even success, and adds that they must assume the responsibility for revising the myth of masculinity.  I am all for collaboration though. Mothers can contribute by not admiring or complimenting the characters of the outlaw and the criminal in real life or in fiction/movies etc. as she also hints. Maybe they should shake the myth of unconditional maternal love and try keeping a distance from their sons when the sons display macho behavior.

For the record, dear researchers and graduate students, please consider a non-conservative perspective on the issue which won’t glorify the importance of the institution or sanctity of marriage or condemn same-sex marriages. I have found few articles on this specific issue but I will not post a Fox-news clip (“Missing fathers and America’s broken boys”) on my blog. Instead check out the following for sound approaches, impressions, and warnings on several major themes in life and in our society.

https://salliebingham.com

Farewell Athens: Keep the Struggle Going!

There are cities which have the power to awaken all your senses, emotions, and past times. In exceptional cases like this, referring to a Mediterranean city as ‘sensual’ becomes forgivable, especially if the author is not a white old man from Western Europe or North America. Plus, I have sensitive detectors against orientalism and sexism.

Athens was a very evocative and sensual city. I don’t necessarily mean sensual in the erotic denotation. The everyday life in the city, even a short walk around Syntagma, provokes five senses, no, indeed the walk tires my senses out on top of provocation: Athens is loud and unruly; it releases lots of pleasant or disagreeable smells and colors (orange and green pouring out of citrus trees as natural ones, innumerable tones of spray paint) and switches moods from one instant to another: Sad or grumpy faces of people on the streets were noticeable but if you walk by the taverns or cafes, you can hear boisterous laughers enjoying themselves. Feel free to sit and relax in cafes and restaurants if you can survive through heaps of cigarette smoke. The personal space becomes non-existent during rush hours at public transport. People seem okay with public display of affection.

Synesthesia, which is considered a brain disorder by medical doctors, happens naturally when I think of my neighborhood in Athens. It is the figure of speech where one sense is described by using words that would describe a different sense such as “I felt the clove-colored warmth on my skin caused by the varied scents coming from the patisserie.” Add the roasted sesame seeds and cinnamon to it! As a side note, I heard political graffities very informally talking to public trash containers whose mouths hardly shut up, frequently swearing too.

The day I arrived in the city marked some fatal floods. When I woke up, however, the sky was blue and people were ready for the farmers’ market. Fruits, cheap clothes, olives in 15 shades of gray, black, and green, vegetables… Vendors who would begin to barbecue at 10 am in the morning or to press fresh pomegranate juice on the spot. The interaction between the sellers and the customers, stallholders among each other, and the neighbors who would run into each other was lively, their words and gestures are dramatically expressed, and thus reminding me of Turkey. Like all foreign women, I was exposed to the limited and heavily accented words of so called ‘compliments’ in English by the vendors, and all I could do is to smile and pass the money.

How unfair yet inevitable are the comparisons. Considering I flew to Athens from the cool “Pacific Northwest” made the contrast even starker. My host in Seattle was an Athenian with adjustment issues to the ‘hipster’ culture and the gray sky. I was in Athens temporarily and for work so instead of getting frustrated by certain things, especially regarding appointments, I treated it like an exciting affair with a new city. For long term and career plans I don’t mind the cooler direction, such as the Pacific Northwest or the hipster Bay Area. However, building strong friendships, spontaneous socializing, and experiencing generosity of the locals can indeed be a different story, considering the extent of individualism in North America. I couldn’t decide whether my affinity to the people and surroundings in Athens because of my background was an advantage. Clearly, what made my Californian friend excited was not exciting for me but simply nostalgic. Not so different than my U.S.-based Greek landlady who told me to enjoy the real yogurt and dried figs while in Greece. In Athens, I surprised myself by feeling and acting more Californian than I have ever imagined, but it was easy to camouflage.

Memorable Personalities and Life Stories over Coffee and Meals

I had the great fortune of meeting people from very different backgrounds: a Syrian-Greek anarchist activist who is adored by many and disliked by others, an Australian-British journalist-academic who just purchased her first home and is learning Greek while volunteering among refugees, a Canadian-Afghan academic from Oregon who sat in my class and wrote a beautiful follow-up e-mail, a 16 year-old Turkish-speaking girl from Baku who told me how homesick she was, a kick-ass Syrian bisexual woman who was homeless for six months in Athens, a Greek architect-photographer who is in love with ghosts of olives groves and is surely a soul-sister from another life, a Greek feminist activist who loved provoking waiters for years by ordering “Turkish” coffee, a devout Muslim lawyer from Aleppo who was laughing hard while telling me about her Portuguese girlfriends’ disclosing their sexual orientation to her, a Turkoman family from Iraq whose illiterate mother disclosed several paranormal activities in an Islamic context, a quiet British yoga instructor in a sad-looking building where the Palestinian flag was hung and all women covered their hair, a Syrian engineer whose surgeon mother taught him how to take care of the wounded when the war began, a cynical young Albanian who arrived 20 years ago and still waiting for his Greek passport, a Greek hyper-energetic supreme court lawyer who dedicated herself to peace among the youth and flamenco, a spiritual Turkish artist whose love for a Greek academic brought her to the city some 30 years ago, a recent self-exile academic from Turkey with an impressive career who is busy with decorating his new home on a Greek island, a Greek photographer [once-engineer] who went ahead to document arresting scenes of Kobani in Syria, an 8-year-old skinny boy who cried each time he said goodbye to me, a Turkish PhD student [married to a Greek] who brought my lost voice back during a workshop with honey and warm water, a big black African woman [a former soldier] with soulful eyes who offers knitting and sewing courses to refugee women, an old Iranian man who volunteers in City Plaza [a squat], who apologized for “torturing me” with strict entry rules, an 80-year-old retired Greek lawyer whose parents were from a town in the Black Sea (Turkey), an Iranian-born Baha’i woman artist-peacemaker with a British accent and an Armenian last name whose adopted Afghan daughter looks just like me, a Greek geological engineer with a gourmet’s skills of cooking and love of hiking, a British doctor who spends her annual leave by volunteering in the squats while her husband is preparing for their Christmas reunion at home, a polyglot Greek Freudian therapist who insisted on speaking Turkish with me and shared her impressions of the latest Orhan Pamuk novel…. And of her frequent visits to Istanbul despite her friends’ objections.  

And many more…

Where to begin next?

Musings on the places (Cafes, restaurants, private homes, office/NGO spaces, squats, and the Royal or National Garden/ Εθνικός Κήπος)

To be continued…

My favorite sections from "Identity, Authority, and Freedom: The Potentate and the Traveler"

[For those academics whose right to travel has been suspended temporarily by the authorities. You know that you are far more worthy of respect than the ones with self-adulation and uncritical self-appreciation. o.e.]

(…)

It comes to two images for inhabiting the academic and cultural space provided by school and university. On the one hand, we can be there in order to reign and hold sway. (…) your legitimacy is that this is your domain, which you can describe with authority as principally Western, or African or Islamic, or American, or on and on.  The other model is more mobile, more playful, although no less serious.  The image of traveler depends not on power but on motion,  on a willingness to go into different worlds, use different idioms, and understand a variety of disguises, masks, and rhetorics. Travelers must suspend the claim of customary routine in order to live in new rhythms and rituals. Most of all (…) the traveler crosses over, traverses territory, and abandons fixed positions, all the time. To do this with dedication and love as well as a realistic sense of the terrain is, I believe, a kind of academic freedom at its highest, since one of its main features is that you can leave authority and dogma to the potentate. You will have other things to think about and enjoy than yourself and your domain, and those other things are far more impressive, far more worthy of study and respect than self-adulation and uncritical self-appreciation. To join the academic world is therefore to enter a ceaseless quest for knowledge and freedom.  (404)

Edward Said's "Identity, Authority, and Freedom: The Potentate and the Traveler." in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Edward W. Said, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2000. ISBN: 0-674-00302-0 at p. 372-404.