Lives of the tenured: Graduating and beyond.

This past month, I recently reconnected with a (Caribbean) (social science) person who I know from my doctoral institution, who got a position and then tenured in the college town that I now live in.

We were catching up, and he told me that he was set to graduate where he was cleared to file and everything and did so, and then this one prof who had passed him along and everything was good was telling him to wait for his comments, and then they didn't come and people told him to file, and then like a day before the last day you could file, the guy got back to him, and is like, "Now we get to work," and he wanted all of these positions reversed and everything completely rewritten, on a twelve chapter dissertation where he'd been decently involved all the way through.

And, the (Caribbean) guy was like, "And I had plans to move and everything and a position set up and [his girlfriend of the time] was depending on me, and it's like, he could have told me earlier."

But, somehow it got resolved, and that guy's stance didn't matter.

He also said that when he first got there, there were profs who would read and comment on the first page of a thirty-page paper and then put nothing on the rest, and then when you went to talk to them about a project, they would berate you for not taking into account what they said, and no, they couldn't help you.

It was very reminiscent of one external perspective that I had on my own Ph.D. experience, that it was "a farce of intelligence."

Even though he's a very calm and methodical and laid-back guy, too, he told me that when he hadn't gotten tenure yet, at one point he had to go to the hospital a lot, because of stomach problems that he developed.

"The lucky ones," my one Ph.D. colleague who's now gone into social work commented to me, when I texted him about all that.

It's interesting, too, the (Caribbean) guy was saying that his program had such a reputation, but when you break it down, their placement was crap and they in no way deserved the reputation that they had. He told me that he knew an MA several years ago who was considering staying here or going there for her Ph.D., and he advised her to look beyond the first layer and just stay where she was, and she graduated quickly and is now tenure-track somewhere else, and that just never would have happened there.