Grad School Memories

I’ve been reading as others discuss their grad school experiences, struggles as well as successes, and thought I’d write some about my own experience in higher ed. Although I’m no longer in the field or really in academia at all, I did enjoy my time there for the most part, although it was exhausting and draining and stressful. And it doesn’t have to be, in an ideal world. Anyone should be able to pursue a post-graduate degree if they desire, for whatever reason, and not have it adversely affect their life, finances, whatever. People should be allowed to pursue education for its own sake, disciplinae gratia disciplina (scientiae gratia scientia? whatever works).

In high school, I developed an interest in learning Latin. I don’t know exactly where it started, but I think reading Stephen King (particularly the short story “Jerusalem’s Lot,” itself an homage to Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls”) made me want to learn Latin. I thought of it as this cool secret code, gibberish to me at that point, but something I thought I could learn. Words like that had power, arcane knowledge, things others would just gloss over to be thrown out and disregarded. But it all meant something to me. I remember picking up a book in my high school library called Latina pro Populo / Latin for People, by Alexander and Nicholas Humez (1978). It was an interesting little book, a mini-Latin course with exercises and everything. They talked about something called “declensions,” which I thought were long-lost and needed to be reconstructed or guessed at, rather than grammatical categories for words used in other texts everywhere. It was all a mystery to me but I found it so cool. I remember having Barnes and Noble vel sim. order a copy for me, and I still have that on my bookshelf today. I never used it (I learned from Wheelock’s Latin myself), but it’s still a cool little book and I think people would find it interesting. The fact that they often used the word matella, -ae, “chamber pot,” in exercises was kinda hilarious; I don’t think I’ve really ever seen it “in the wild” in Latin, but maybe I’m reading the wrong stuff.

In any case, that was high school. I’ve always been into computers, so I thought hey, why not be a computer programmer for a career? That made sense to me. So I took a C programming course in summer 2000 (IIRC), about a year before I graduated high school, at our local university, and really enjoyed it. When I started college in earnest in 2001, I declared a computer science major. Started taking programming classes, &c., math classes, all that. But that quickly fizzled out as I realized I didn’t have the passion for it. I was getting C’s and D’s in math and A’s and B’s in Latin, which I was thrilled to be able to take as a freshman. So I changed my major in all but name to Classics, and made it official in junior year.

Again, this involves my memories from grad school; just a small sketch of undergrad for you. As I was finishing up and getting ready to graduate, I started applying to grad schools. I went for the big guns, so to speak: Stanford, USC, UCLA, things like that, since of course I’d heard they were “good schools.” No luck with any of them, since I was just coming out of undergrad and really had no credentials to speak of. My professors told me it’d be a lot of writing, research, and conferences, and I had to enjoy that if I wanted to succeed in grad school. I thought “fine, great, no problem.” I didn’t mind writing papers and I enjoyed studying the languages and working on translation; it just seemed like it’d get harder from there, and that was OK.

In the 11th hour I applied to a school I’d never heard of, that my parents suggested, which had a later application deadline. It was a terminal master’s degree program, so I’d have to do a PhD elsewhere (necessary to do much of anything with Classics, as far as I’d heard), but that was fine. It was a “foot in the door.” So I applied, and I was accepted. No funding, student loans it was. I’d already taken plenty out for undergrad, so that wasn’t surprising, and I thought “onward and upward,” all that, &c. I had a girlfriend at the time and we ended up breaking up not long after I moved away, since I was going to school in another state. That’s OK, that relationship was bad news anyway, and had run its course.

My master’s program was a lot different than undergrad. Pretty much all 3-hour seminars (or sometimes a 1hr class, 3x/week), and we were really able to dig into a text in a lot more detail. Lots of discussions, close readings, and reading secondary scholarship. Not just translation and recitation in class, and grammar was pretty much out the window, except for interesting points that came up in class. I began getting to know my fellow grad students (colleagues? I dunno), and that was nice. I started dating one of them; we bonded over a night of drinking, I walked her to the bus stop so she could go back home, and I remember we shared a kiss on the couch at my place before that. We ended up spending a lot more time together, getting to know each other, and of course also bonded over our mutual love of Classics. We moved in together about a year or two later, as her roommate was moving out, and that was cool. She and I ended up moving to another state together where I did my PhD, and is still there, even though we’ve long since broken up. We are still good friends, although not as close as we used to be; the distance is hard, y’know, to keep up a friendship sometimes, but we try. Anyways, not too much about her; we had a rocky relationship and the highs were really lovely but the lows were really low. We actually lived together for quite awhile even after breaking up; I think we lived together for about 3-4 years before she moved in with her partner and my spouse moved in with me.

But yeah, back to grad school. Lots of classes, tons of texts to read. I’d hang out at a coffee shop for hours studying for exams with my ex and other friends, reading Herodotus or Thucydides or whatever we were reading in class. Often were cramming the night before the test. I miss those days though. The coffee shop was really cool; they had good food and good drinks, and the owner was awesome; she was Ethiopian and very very kind, and it was cool talking with her here and there. I miss that place and wonder if they’re still open. We also spent a lot of time on campus, whether at the school library or in our Classics department library. The latter was very cool and had a great collection of books, generally donated by previous professors or students, and we could use anything while in there, but it was non-circulating. There was also an ancient computer in there we could use to access the TLG (Thesaurus Linguae Graecae), a comprehensive, searchable database of Greek texts that we used for lexical/frequency searches. We were really quite fortunate to have a subscription, as it’s really expensive per year. (Aside: The TLG released a CD-ROM version of the database in the early ’90s that was accessible offline via computer; I found a torrent of said CD late in my master’s program, and it really helped me through not only the master’s program but also my PhD in terms of accessing texts!)

Otherwise I spent a lot of time with my ex and exploring the city when I wasn’t studying Greek and Latin. Academia these days is all about “publish or perish,” and some suggest even publishing in grad school if you can, but it wasn’t something encouraged in my program, nor was it something really accessible to us students (as far as I knew). We did put on a lecture series with invited speakers throughout the year, and even a student symposium where you could present papers, and we also had a student-published journal that solicited papers. I presented at the symposium a couple of times, and also published a couple of papers in the journal, so that was good practice, but it wasn’t a peer-reviewed, “official” journal, just something our department published. I still have the volumes published while I was there, though, and even edited the journal the last year I was there, so that was really cool (more on that later most likely).

My master’s program, unfortunately, was characterized by procrastination and spinning my proverbial wheels. I’d always heard that most master’s programs take 2 years, but everyone in our department typically said our program took 3 years generally. I graduated in 4, which was a real source of disappointment and depression for me for a long time, since I felt like a failure for taking so long. I wasn’t working, just living off of loans and my parents’ help (which was sporadic and often had strings attached), so I really had no excuse not to get things done. But I think depression factored into the procrastination, and I also just didn’t take writing my thesis as seriously as I should have. I procrastinated on my research papers for classes, even needing take an incomplete in a class or two since I hadn’t finished the paper, and while I eventually got them done, it really sucked that I’d put myself in that situation. My relationship also wasn’t great (highs and lows as I mentioned before), which probably contributed to things, but I didn’t really know how to stick up for myself and allowed myself to be treated badly, which wasn’t healthy. So 2 (or 3 years) stretched out to 4, and my professors were running out of patience with me, and my family didn’t understand what was going on. They wanted to help, and had some “come to Jesus” talks with me (get it together, &c., or maybe just abandon grad school and move on?). Those talks, while hard and “tough love,” did ultimately help, and got me in gear to finish things up.

I very fondly remember taking a seminar on the Greek lyric poet Pindar, often thought to be one of the most difficult Greek authors out there, up there with Thucydides in terms of difficulty. I’m not sure if he’s not read that often due to that formidable reputation or what, but I remember getting Loebs of his works and really, really enjoying all of it. I’d read a lot of Homer, and Pindar engages with the epic tradition, but approaches it with lyric sensibilities, often touching upon stories in great detail that are only briefly covered in the Homeric epics. Another thing that began to emerge for me was Pindar’s engagement with the “Epic Cycle,” the whole catalogue of material surrounding the events before, during, and after the Trojan War. Keep in mind that Homer’s Iliad only covers about 40ish days in the 10th year of the Trojan War, and the Odyssey covers one hero’s often-disastrous return home from Troy. Anything covering the origins and early days of the war was nowhere, really, to be found in extant Greek literature, except very obliquely, or in prose paraphrases. Much of the “Epic Cycle” materal had sadly been lost, thought by many of the ancients to be not nearly as good as Homer’s epics, and thus largely discarded and lost to history.

I began researching about the bits and pieces we knew about the Epic Cycle and the panoply of epics comprising it: Stasinus’ (?) Cypria, Lesches of Mytilene’s Little Iliad, Arctinus of Miletus’ Aethiopis and Iliupersis (Ἰλίου πέρσις, “Sack of Ilion/Troy”), Agias of Troezen’s Nostoi (Νόστοι, “Returns”), and plenty of others (cf. M. L. West’s Loeb Greek Epic Fragments [2003] for more on the remnants of the Epic Cycle). So many tantalizing scraps of the story that we never got from Homer. Once I learned about these, I felt a little betrayed by what I’d previously read: you mean to tell me we’re just dropped in medias res into the story of Troy, throw continuity to the winds? I wanted the beginnings of the story, from the Greeks’ mouths themselves, not from later epitomes. I wanted authenticity (whatever that means); even the hints at the beginnings of the Trojan War in the Odyssey and even Roman authors felt like a cheat to me. So I remember writing my Pindar final paper on the figures of the Aiakidai (Peleus and Telamon, fathers of Achilles and [Greater] Ajax, respectively), the older generation of heroes and their adventures all before the Trojan War, and found it fascinating.

I eventually had to pick a thesis topic to finish out my degree. Part of the issue with writing my thesis was that I wanted more than anything to work on Homeric epic, which of course is a crowded field. I used to be all about Latin (Vergil, Lucretius, &c.), but in grad school I found myself becoming more of a Hellenist and found a real affinity for Greek literature. I really enjoyed epic poetry and wanted to pursue a career in studying it. None of my professors specialized in epic, though, which was one problem with that trajectory. I eventually needed to select a thesis committee, which was a difficult proposition. I eventually decided on my department chair (specializing in Greek philosophy and comedy), another professor (specializing in Greek archaeology and Greek lyric poetry), and my last committee member specialized in Latin literature. Initially I wanted to write a commentary on a book of Homer, but my committee members steered me away from that idea.

Largely from my forays into Pindar and his engagement with the Epic Cycle, I found myself wanting to study more of the Trojan story, to know what happened between the Iliad and the Odyssey. I’d seen it explored a bit in tragedy (Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Eumenides and such), but never in epic. I thought all of it had been lost. To this day I have no idea how I heard about it, but I learned of a 14-book Greek epic called Posthomerica (τὰ μεθ᾿ Ὅμηρον, ta meth’ Homeron, “The Things After Homer”) by a little-known, largely-reviled author named Quintus of Smyrna (Quintus Smyrnaeus; Κοΐντος ὁ Σμυρναῖος, Kointos ho Smyrnaios). Very little is known about Quintus himself; some called him Quintus Calaber (“Quintus of Calabria”), because one of the best manuscripts was found at Otranto in Calabria, but most called him Smyrnaean. Reconstructing ancient biographical traditions is murky at best, dangerous at worst, since everyone has a story, and poets often embellish or entirely invent biographical details. Everyone points to a “biographical” passage late in the Posthomerica where Quintus seems to speak to the reader directly, talking about how he was “pasturing noble sheep in the plains of Smyrna” (μοι … Σμύρνης ἐν δαπέδοισι περικλυτὰ μῆλα νέμοντι, moi … Smyrnes en dapedoisi perikluta mela nemonti, Posthomerica 12.309-10). It’s a fascinating passage, but many see in it a Hesiodic echo and tons of rhetoric, and don’t generally take it at face value (Evidently someone did, though, given his name).

So, Quintus Smyrnaeus. Who the hell was he, and what did he write about? Well, the first question I can’t really answer very well (although my thesis attempts to), and the second? Easy. His Posthomerica covers the period from the end of the Iliad to part of the Returns of the heroes from Troy. Basically, the latter part of the epic covers the same ground as Vergil’s Aeneid book 2 on the fall of Troy. Many people place Quintus somewhere in the 3rd or 4th century CE (some in the 2nd), and certainly think he used Vergil as a model, inter alios. But Quintus’ epic also, wonderfully, covers the events of the Aethiopis, including the coming and death of the Aethiopian hero Memnon, the death of Achilles, and even the exploits of Achilles’ son Neoptolemus (yikes!). All of this stuff I’d only read about very obliquely, so this was an absolute treasure-trove of myth for me, just wondrous. Not only do we see the traditional Homeric heroes shine, but the later generations as even their children come to fight at and around Troy (again, it’s a long war!).

Once I’d heard about Quintus, I had to procure a copy of his text and read through it, and decide what I wanted to write about for my thesis. I decided to investigate Quintus’ engagement with Homer and his other sources, and where his epic falls in the tradition. I also wondered why no one seemed to appreciate what a service he’d provided in preserving, however imperfectly (according to some), the events of the Epic Cycle, which I had thought were irretrievably lost. Many seemed to think his meter and diction artificial, no match for the lofty heights of Homer, and ultimately not worth reading. I thought that was nonsense and I didn’t know why people didn’t enjoy having this marvelous repository of myth at hand, Homer redivivus, restoring the grand tradition of Homeric epic almost a millennium after the Homeric epics were sung throughout Greece.

At the time, I didn’t entirely know it, since I wasn’t very familiar with scholarship on Quintus, but his image was slowly being rehabilitated, and people were beginning to reassess Quintus’ value and worth and to appreciate him more. I was writing my thesis in 2009, and I think these days he is a lot more well-regarded than he used to be. People in the 19th and early 20th centuries especially seemed to hate his work, unfortunately, but that’s thankfully since changed. It really is a fascinating epic and well worth reading. Alan James’ translation Posthomerica: The Trojan Epic (2007) is wonderful and a very accessible translation, including wonderful notes and commentary. Highly recommend checking it out if you get a chance. Francis Vian’s 3-volume Greek text, French translation, and commentary of it is also wonderful (La suite d’Homère, 1963-69), but may have been superseded by other texts. I still have Vian’s texts and they’re great (he also did a really nice 3-volume set of Apollonios of Rhodes’ Argonautika). I think Quintus’ rehabilitation over the years has also extended to the massive 48-book Dionysiaka by Nonnos of Panopolis, a 5th-century CE Greek epic all about Dionysus’ birth and life, and plenty of other stuff (great Loeb set of those as well exists!).

As I mentioned, anyway, after 4 years I finished the master’s degree and wrote what I still think is a great thesis. My writing has come a long way since then, which is good, but I am still proud of it and enjoyed working on the epic. After I finished that degree, I applied elsewhere for PhD programs and got accepted in another state, so I needed to move again. That was a very tumultuous time, personally, and I unfortunately allowed my relationship with my family to suffer throughout that; there was a lot of stress. Once I started at the new school, though, things got better. My ex and I broke up about a year after that; it had run its course, but we stayed good friends, and as I mentioned above, we lived together for a couple of years after that, mostly since neither of us wanted to move. It was weird but became less weird over time.

The PhD was a different beast. I also, after the first semester, was given funding, so my tuition and some living expenses were covered (I still unfortunately took out loans, which was a mistake), provided I taught a class and assisted as a TA for another class each semester. I taught briefly (for one semester) while in my master’s program, but it was a glorified assistantship, since I didn’t really do grading and didn’t have a lot of instruction time, and was mostly assisting a lecturer. This time I got my own classes to teach (introductory Latin classes, and eventually Greek), and that was really pretty fun. It was hard even to get college students motivated about learning Latin, and many of them didn’t like it, which was discouraging. But when it worked, it really worked. TAing classes was pretty easy overall and mostly just involved grading and proctoring exams, so that was chill. Amid all of that I had my own coursework, which consisted entirely of 3hr seminars where we did very deep dives into texts; I also had a couple of seminars on Latin and Greek literature in general. All of it was leading up to, and informing, what I would eventually write my dissertation on. My professors in my PhD progream were really very intentional about the course of study, and worked hard at keeping us on track so we would graduate on time, and get everything done that needed to be done (exams, &c.). In my master’s program, I think we had to take a Greek, Latin, and modern language exam, but in my PhD, we had to take six exams: Greek and Latin translation exams, a modern language translation exam, exams on the history of Greek and Latin literature, and the prospectus.

What’s the prospectus, you ask? Well, it was kind of like a pre-dissertation. And even before that, we had to do a “Special Topic,” which sort of fed into the prospectus. I wrote my “Special Topic” on Apollonios of Rhodes’ Argonautika, which I’d found very interesting, and focused on how Apollonios engages with the Odyssey. Apollonios was a librarian at the Library of Alexandria, so he was not only a poet but also a scholar, and knew his Homer extremely, extremely well, which helped when writing his own epic. And what an epic it is! If you haven’t read it, Peter Green’s translation is really, really good.

I’ll get to the prospectus in a bit. I want to talk a bit about my experience in the PhD. We had a lot more freedom and leeway than in the master’s program, and somewhat less stress. Things were easier at the beginning, since I was used to how a graduate program worked, and the typical trajectory and timeframe was 5 years from start to finish, even with a master’s. So I was slated to finish in 2014, which I ended up hitting just fine, as I had a wonderful advisor helping me through, thank the gods above and below. I made friends, got to know my colleagues, and really enjoyed the department in general. It was fun. We worked hard but also played hard, going out drinking, getting food, doing pub quizzes, and just enjoying town in general. It was a weird time in life, but also quite wonderful a lot of the time. I got to know my students, enjoyed teaching them, and began feeling like I was turning into a proper scholar. I presented papers at conferences (I started going to the annual conference of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South [CAMWS], and also the American Philological Association [APA, now Society for Classical Studies or SCS] conferences), and tried to do more professional development sort of stuff. We even held a graduate student conference which I helped organize and run, and that was really cool; I met a few very cool people as a result of that! I presented at a graduate student conference at a nearby university as well. So I was doing what was expected of me, doing my best, but also having a lot of fun in the process.

I made and lost plenty of friends, got to know my professors better, and generally enjoyed getting paid to spend time studying what I loved. It was a cozy nest, insulated from a lot of the stark realities of the outside world and careers beyond. In some ways it was too cozy, but in others, I am glad I had that time where my professors were cheerleading and encouraging all of us, telling us we could do it and making us feel we could succeed beyond the boundaries of the school. Some of them played favorites, often blatantly, which sucked, and I’m sure I was on the receiving end of that since I got things done and was generally well-liked; it was certainly unfair to others and I wish it hadn’t been that way. But most people were great and I learned which professors I enjoyed working with, and that largely informed my choice of committee later, as it should. I took lots of seminars with different professors; we had a small department so I got to know them all quite well, which was fun.

Eventually the prospectus rolled around. This was, as I mentioned, after the “Special Topic,” and, quite literally, the proposal for my dissertation. I really was interested in intersections between Aeschylus’ Oresteia (comprising the Agamemnon, Choephoroi, and Eumenides tragedies) and Homeric epic, specifically focusing on nostos (νόστος, “homecoming”) in the Oresteia and comparing it to the idea found in Homeric epic (the Odyssey is all about homecoming, of course). “Home” is such a polyvalent, loaded idea for everyone, especially the ancients, and it’s always fascinated me. I’m looking back in my files and I honestly can’t remember what the original idea for my dissertation was; the prospectus, if I remember correctly, focused more heavily on epic in its first draft. We had a lecturer at my school who was well-respected among Homerists, but I was nudged not to focus on Homer directly, as our school was not super known for epic poetry. So I pivoted and focused on intersections of tragedy and epic, and wrote the prospectus, my paper exploring the figure of Orestes and homecoming in tragedy as well as epic.

I selected for my committee chair a professor whom I’d come to know quite well by that time, and I really enjoyed working with her, so it made complete sense to have her as my director/chair. She specializes in Greek tragedy, and is one of the best scholars I’ve ever known. Looking back, I’m really fortunate to have been able to work with her, and we had a great working relationship. I built out the rest of my committee with a couple of other professors from my department (one who focused on Greek archaeology and lyric poetry, the other on comedy, Athenian law, and gender and sexuality in antiquity), and I also had to have an outside member. The outside member I eventually selected was in the Religion department and was a great addition to my committee and I appreciated his input on my work as well.

In any case, my dissertation focused on the idea of homecoming in Greek tragedy, and how it manifests differently in tragedy than in epic, where it is far more common. But given all the literature I’d read, I really felt that homecoming is an important theme in tragedy, and argued for not only thematic, but linguistic links between tragedy and epic’s handling of homecoming. I posited the idea of a parallel lexicon/register of homecoming-language found in tragedy, and explored the different treatments of the topic between genres. I still find it all fascinating, but I feel very rusty on it now. While working on the dissertation, I presented one-off chapters or reworkings of my dissertation work at conferences (and was even invited to present parts of my dissertation at my undergrad institution, something I still consider a great honor), and it was a great experience. I started dating my spouse right around the time of my prospectus, so they were around through most of my dissertation, and I’m extremely grateful to them for their support through all of the ups and downs of writing such a momentous work. It was exhausting and I’m sure I could often be a pain throughout all of it, but they were always supportive and cheering me on, which was wonderful.

My dissertation chair was incredibly supportive and always gave me copious notes on my drafts as I worked through the dissertation chapter by chapter. She was always very chill about deadlines, meeting with me fairly infrequently, and just letting me do the work and do my thing. But I eventually told her I needed firm deadlines to hold myself accountable (the spectre of procrastination rears its ugly head!), so she would set meetings every couple of weeks or once a month to check in on my progress. That helped me keep on track and actually get things done. Even though I’d often write the bulk (or whole) of the chapter the night or so before I met with my advisor, I’d be thinking about the ideas and what I was writing and researching for a long time before that, and it was percolating and bouncing around in my head. Basically, I’d just dump the contents of my head into a draft, give it to my advisor, make lots of edits, and turn slag into gold, a sort of alchemy, if you will. And it went on and on like that until the thing was mercifully done. Even though I had a lot of fun with it, it was still a hell of a lot of work.

I defended my dissertation in December 2013 and spent the next few months polishing, revising, and completing the work. As many of you know, I’m a Linux fan and have been using it since about 2007 exclusively (so I wrote my whole master’s thesis using it as well), so that made writing the dissertation interesting. Our editorial office offered two forms of dissertation template: Word and LaTeX. I should’ve known that LaTeX template was likely for STEM majors, who were likely very familiar with it, but the problem was that, as I ran Linux, I didn’t have an official way to access MS Word. I assumed the template would have a lot of funky Word macros and nonsense in it that would only function correctly in actual Word, rather than Libre- or OpenOffice, the former of which I used, so that was a no-go for me. As a result, I thought hey, why the hell not, I’ll just teach myself LaTeX. It’s not as if I’m trying to finish a dissertation or something, right? In retrospect I wonder if it was a way for me to procrastinate further, since I spent a lot of time tweaking the template and making sure everything looked right. I spent a ton of time on StackExchange troubleshooting the template, since some things just didn’t work correctly or didn’t do what I needed them to do. I remember having people online help me with making the template do what I needed it to do, since no one in the editorial office knew what the hell to do with the template. I have no idea who created the template, but the editorial office basically just provided it as-is and said “figure it out,” since no one in the office could help me with it. I figured it out, though, after a lot of time and effort. It probably would have taken less time to spin up a VirtualBox Windows installation and pirate Word and just write it that way, but oh well. I liked a challenge.

Just before the dissertation defense, my mom visited me and my spouse. She was going to a conference that was held near Disney World, so we (being not too far away) decided to stay with her for a couple of days while she was there, and get a Disney trip out of it. That was a really nice way to relax and chill a bit before my dissertation defense, which I was worried about, and my mom stayed for a couple of days with us after the conference was done. It was a nice way to reset and clear my mind before I had to do the defense. Eventually when the defense came around, and my committee gathered to hear my thoughts on my work, and ask questions that I needed to be able to answer, it actually went really well. I was extremely stressed that morning, and my spouse attended with me, along with a bunch of my friends, but when it came down to it, everything was fine. My committee asked me difficult questions, but since I’d spent about a year working on this text and knew it inside and out, I was able to answer the questions handily. I was the expert on my own work, of course. They had lots of helpful things to say and good suggestions, which I appreciated, and I of course added those into my work wherever I could, but ultimately I got through it just fine.

After the dissertation was done and I graduated, I began to look for tenure-track jobs, working on starting my career proper. If you don’t know, the tenure-track field in Classics is an absolute disaster for the most part. There are not many positions open, and those who have a position hold onto it until they retire, or sometimes just never retire. So the spots that are open have tons of competition and go quickly. And even if you’re selected for a tenure-track job, there’s no real guarantee you’ll make it to tenure (often a 5-6 year process, involving that “publish or perish” mentality). I took a year off to focus on my job search; my spouse made enough that I could not work and just focus on finding jobs. I am very grateful (and of course very privileged) to have had that opportunity, and I tried to make the most of it, researching and trying to publish, and of course looking all the time for jobs. Ultimately the tenure-track job market didn’t pan out, and I shifted my focus to finding high school teaching jobs, which brought me out to Colorado. That job didn’t pan out either, and I’m, as I mentioned before, not in academia at all any more, but that’s OK. I am actually much happier now and don’t regret it at all.

I’m very happy I pursued my Classics degree and went to grad school, even though it was a large chunk of my life. It was worth it, even though I don’t use it in my career now, and I enjoyed learning about the ancient world and all it has to offer even to us today. I really did want to be a professor, but ultimately it was not worth it, given the paucity of available jobs, so it’s OK and I am very happy with my life now. Classics will always hold a special place in my heart, though, and I think I’m better for having been immersed in all of that tradition for so long. It opened up a lot of doors for me, despite closing some, and was all worthwhile.

“So what?” you may ask. Well, I wanted to write about my grad school experience in detail, in case you may be thinking of pursuing a graduate degree – whether for a career or just for fun, whatever the case may be. Other fields aren’t quite as saturated as Classics, so it may be easier to find jobs there. All I can speak to is Classics, of course. I was just thinking about my time in graduate school and wanted to share my experience, and I hope you find it interesting, helpful, or whatever else. I’d love to hear your thoughts if you want to share. Thanks so much for reading, friends.