Ms. Mentor suggests that you think about which authors, genres, readings, have kept running around in your mind long after the courses and teachers were forgotten. Which ones did you talk about incessantly with your friends? Which ones are you still quoting? These are the ones you'll enjoy rereading and rereading. What do you not know about these authors and texts? What would you like to know?
Further, are there writers whose papers are in your university library, barely touched by human hands? Does your local historical society have materials you could work on? Is there something genuinely original (and therefore more exciting) that you could do?
You should continue your search until you find something that tickles your fancy, for you will be working with it a long time. This will be your only chance to write a book on a subject dear to your heart and have it critiqued by experts.
Ms. Mentor also recommends that you read some completed dissertations in your field (the university library will have those written locally). Besides seeing how a dissertation is shaped by a thesis (point of view), you will be pleasantly surprised by how awful some of them are. “I can easily write something that mediocre,” many a grad student has told herself, chuckling with pleasure. This is extremely gratifying.
Finally, you should think of choosing to do your dissertation as a gift to yourself and the world, not as a punishment meted out by some horrific schoolteacher martinet in your head. And if the obvious person to direct your dissertation is horrific, you should not work with that person. Life is short. Choose a director who's congenial and helpful, and who's well published in your field: your director's connections may help you get a job.
Ms. Mentor believes that her wise readers should choose pleasure over pain. If living an interesting life inspires them more than the prospect of committing literary criticism, then they should choose life.
Early Publishing = Premature Perishing?
Q: Do I need to publish to get a first job? Should I be sending my seminar papers to academic journals for feedback, or will their manuscript readers get annoyed with me?
A: Ms. Mentor already knows what numerous learned worthies are thinking: there's too much bad stuff published already. You may be right in thinking you're not ready, and that you shouldn't clutter the mails, the Net, the journals with your naive maunderings. You should give your ideas, and your prose style, time to mellow and grow. What you send out should be substantial, long-mulled-over, and gravely wise. That is the only way to make an important mark, rather than selling out to the trendy, or prostituting yourself to the marketplace.
Ms. Mentor characterizes the above sentiments as Senior Scholar Claptrap and Entrenched Pseudo-Wisdom. For you it's also unrealistic, suicidal advice.
Yes, indeed, in an ideal world one would not publish a semicolon before it was ripe. But in the real world, a half-baked, or even raw, book is not uncommon. And a publish-no-thought-before-its-time academic, is an unemployed academic.
You cannot wait to be brilliant. You need to make yourself known as soon as possible.
Luckily for you, the human memory often blurs distinctions: people will remember your name, but not whether your work was splendid or shameful. You should be delivering conference papers, and writing book reviews; you should be volunteering to edit manuscripts, judge contests, arrange conferences, chauffeur visiting scholars and writers. You should be sending stuff around, whether it's published or not; you should list on your vita all the pieces that are “in circulation.” When an article is turned down, you should study the readers' reports, revise, and send it out again within a week.
You must be ambitious; you must aim to publish early and often. That is the only way you'll distinguish yourself from the hordes of people who apply for every tenure-track job—sometimes as many as two thousand for every one job in the humanities.
Without publication, Ms. Mentor guarantees that your career will truly perish.
The Professor Passes the Last Course
Q: My dissertation director dropped dead in the back seat of a taxi, and I have two chapters still to go. Now what?
A: Ms. Mentor, who reads Miss Manners faithfully about proper behavior, sends condolences on your loss. The passing of a professor is always tragic.
Ms. Mentor recalls the terrible case of a young man named Cameron, who was actually present, hailing the Number Ten bus, when his dissertation director—as Cameron put it—“started spitting out black stuff and then croaked.” Cameron persisted in telling this crudely entertaining tale for weeks afterward, until he became known (behind his back, of course) as “the Asshole with the Albatross.” He took a leave of absence to collect his thoughts, and Ms. Mentor does not know what became of him.
You, though, presumably do not want to quit. You want to salvage your dissertation and your academic prospects. And so Ms. Mentor suggests that you meet as soon as possible with your department's chair of graduate studies for advice about possible other directors. You may already have someone in mind, someone else on your committee, but the graduate chair can give you practical advice—what forms will you have to file?—and other information about professors' interests.
Further, if your original director left a lukewarm reference in your file (that sometimes happens), the graduate chair can have it removed, lest it taint your future possibilities.
(Do not make the mistake made by “Jim,” a highly promising graduate student in New York, who had almost completed his dissertation when his director died suddenly, leaving behind a tepid reference letter for Jim. Out of sentiment—or perhaps a strangely rigid loyalty—Jim did not attempt to have the letter removed. As a result, he was never able to get an academic job. Later Jim married a troubled young woman who was receiving interplanetary radio bulletins through the fillings in her teeth—and when last heard from, Jim was supporting them both by selling mortuary slabs in Ohio.)
Ms. Mentor wants you to be wiser, about past and future. For your new director, you will be tempted to seek out someone you like. You've sustained a loss; you'd like comfort. But you most need someone who'll give your career the biggest boosts.
Avoid your original director's enemies (you may not know who they are, but the graduate chair will). Avoid those who've opposed your original director's methodology: if you're a socialist feminist, you don't want someone who scoffs at “that pseudo-Commie crap.” Avoid outright sexists and the very territorial: they may want you to rewrite your entire dissertation so it's theirs, with no trace of your original director's hand.
Meanwhile, Ms. Mentor urges you to continue writing. Keeping busy will be consoling and also reassuring to whoever steps in as your next director. You'll be able to show that you're not someone who needs hand-holding but someone who's a colleague in training. You need a mentor, not a master or a mother.
It is perfectly all right, however, to continue to need Ms. Mentor's impeccable advice.
Every wise academic does.
The Job Hunt
It used to be that, ’round about the time he was finishing his course work and starting on his dissertation, a young man's fancy would turn to his future employment.
And so, he would talk to his major professor, who would call his friends at a select number of schools and find out who needed, for instance, “a man in American literature” or “a new fellow in economics.” The major professor would recommend “my brightest student, a fine young man.” By the following fall, the young man would be teaching, possibly at an Ivy League university or a fine Seven Sisters college. Most likely he would remain there, easily tenured along the way, for his entire career. Now and then he might publish an article or a review or a poem, but he would not be pushed to do so. Nor could anyone in a small college be expected to do publishable scientific research.
Rather, he would always spend some of his leisure time sipping sherry with students (some of whom might also be his bedmates). He would also pride himself on