Tom Pepinsky

Category: Teaching

  • The Loneliness of the Long Dissertation Writer

    At this time of year I find myself talking to students considering PhD programs who are interested in my own advice on whether or not pursuing a PhD is a good idea. One question that has come up repeatedly has to do with the psychological challenges of completing a PhD in the social sciences. Specifically, that it’s lonely. One very bright student asked me specifically about this issue last week; she had been told by another of my colleagues that writing a dissertation is a very lonely process. Coincidentally, that night I came across a post by Robert Kelly which makes an identical point in the context of 7 general gripes about being an academic.

    My response to that student was that I don’t think it’s right to say that completing a PhD is lonely. I think that it’s more accurate to describe completing a PhD as intensely personal. That may produce feelings of loneliness, but it need not.

    My own experience was that writing my dissertation (which, at one point, reached 550 manuscript pages…so it was long) was personally challenging because every morning (at 8:30 AM) and evening (at 9PM) I would open up my word processing program and stare at an empty screen with the understanding that after a couple of hours that document needed to have words on it. There was no one else who was going to write them but me.

    …And there was no one else who was going to bug me to write them every day but me.

    …And there was no one else to blame if they weren’t written but me.

    …And at every moment there were plenty of things that seemed more interesting than writing, and no one to tell myself to keep on task but me.

    This was an unpleasant feeling. I managed to get over it, but only after about 3 months of serious writer’s block in which developed an incredibly precise system for organizing notes and did a lot of unnecessary teaching preparation. (I remember this urge to convert my section syllabus from Word into LaTeX. Yes, that was a way to waste time.)

    But at least in my own case, it would be a mistake to call that feeling loneliness. I had plenty of professional interactions with faculty, worked at the Statlab, attended lots of talks, discussed dissertation issues with friends, taught, etc. In most graduate programs, there are plenty of things that you can do to keep yourself active and busy. The problem, in fact, is that there are too many seemingly useful and inherently social things to do that distract you from the task of writing.

    My sense is that in terms of the personal nature of the dissertation, political science tends to be more like the humanities than like economics and psychology, two social science discipline in which co-authoring throughout your graduate career is normal. This is different in some poli sci programs, but these are exceptional cases. My general point is that I wouldn’t worry about loneliness per se, I would worry a lot more about dealing with the more nagging issues of motivation, stamina, self-direction, etc. Conceivably, loneliness is cured by socialization; the others are conditions which have no easy solutions of which I am aware.

  • Three in One, Almost Done

    This is my job!

    It’s early May, and that means that this semester’s teaching is finally done. Phew. This has been the heaviest teaching semester that I’ve ever had: one 65+ person lecture plus two 15-person seminars (both of which are “new preps,” which means that I had never taught them before). I know that for most faculty, three courses in a semester is the norm: among the invisible professoriate three in one with two new preps is normal, even light. JMP once taught FIVE courses in one semester. But among regular faculty in research-oriented departments in research-intensive universities, it is not the norm.

    But I have a confession. Right now I may have the bleary-eyed look of Donald Sutherland in Animal House (and I actually do have that jacket) but unlike his Jennings, teaching isn’t “just a way to pay the bills until I finish my novel.” I like teaching, and I don’t care who knows it. Of course I don’t like everything about teaching, but I do like the basics: I like to talk about Southeast Asian politics to people who are eager to learn about it, and I like to debate basic questions about, say, why Asia’s material prosperity has grown over the past half century, or how we ought to go about learning how politics works around the world. On the whole, I’ve had a good time this semester. I’ll be glad to turn my attention to research again, but not because I haven’t enjoyed what I’ve been doing.

    The costs of teaching this much are that I have had scarcely any time to do any research or writing since January. I have, though, done a lot of productive thinking. I have a couple of ideas saved up on multimethod research, for example, that I’ll share here in coming weeks. Some of these ideas are going into a new paper on context and method in Southeast Asian politics, which I’ll be presenting in three short weeks at Uni Freiburg (this conference program can only be described as bad-ass…MacIntyre, Malesky, von Luebke, Shair-Rosenfield, Kuhonta, Tajima, and the great Emmerson too).

    However, before that happens, we have to have Slope Day here at Cornell. I have a couple of other Animal House images that I could post in honor of Slope Day, but I leave that to your imaginations.