A PhD Doesn’t Matter Anymore

Over the last thirty years, numerous friends and family members have told me about their decision to pursue a PhD. I admit, I have tended to be less than enthusiastic about it. I’ve tried mostly to keep my mouth shut. But I suppose if I had to ask questions I might start with—why? What is it you think that finishing a PhD will enable you to do that you couldn’t do without a PhD?

I got a PhD because I intended to teach college German classes. I was going to be a literature professor and I planned to write VERY IMPORTANT essays about other people’s published novels and poetry, while writing my own things on the side. I thought that this made a lot of sense. I had certainly seen it modeled by other professors who I had watched as an undergrad. What I didn’t know at the time was that universities were going to choose to screw over a whole generation of graduate students by not hiring them as full-time professors but instead using them as underpaid adjuncts who had almost no collective bargaining power and no tenure to protect their jobs. I worked for a couple of years as an adjunct and then began to see the writing on the wall, so I walked away from my dream of being a literature professor as I’d imagined being when I first read Little Women as a kid. That was my first life.

I’ve lived and died in another life since then (“clean” young adult fantasy writer) and am now on my third life—at the very least. One could argue this is actually my fourth life as a financial person (technically a securities trader), but I haven’t quite given up my third life as a writer of adult mysteries. When a friend recently asked me about getting a PhD in literature, I was pretty lukewarm about it. The friend insisted that this was a very important step in the process of feeling like they had authority in their own life and that they could write things that mattered.

And this is when I realized that I had forgotten all about that stage of my life when I was so uncertain about myself and my place in the literary cosmos. I remember spending the first years of my published author life waiting for some external thing to make me feel like I was a “real writer.” I remember a friend sending me a made-up “real writer” certificate that felt funny and comforting. And then . . . the sense of being not real just went away. As I spent more and more hours of my life dealing with deadlines and contracts and agents and foreign rights questions, I just stopped questioning if I deserved to be here. Because I was here.

Something similar happened with the PhD. For a lot of the years after I quit teaching at a university, I was embarrassed about my PhD because it felt like I had somehow not lived up to the expectations of the professors in my program. I also felt angry at what had happened to me and didn’t want to talk about it a lot, so I often left that out of any professional bios that I wrote. And then I stopped being ashamed or angry about what happened and decided that I was going to use it for my own purposes. It started going on bios when I published The Bishop’s Wife to give me more clout, that I was an educated woman writing about Mormonism and you should expect me to have THINGS TO SAY. Which I said. And got in trouble for saying, at least within Mormonism.

I don’t need to worry about my credentials anymore because I already have them. I went through all that. I have the luxury of knowing how unimportant that certificate is because I got to stick it in the back of my closet for a while. But yes, it mattered for a time. It made me who I was in a way that I struggled to articulate. It wasn’t Princeton that made me a better writer or a more interesting person. But the complicated experience I had with my PhD absolutely did. It is part of my history.