If James Franco could handle grad school, why couldn’t I?
My first time quitting something academic was during my first year at Cornell. I was a textiles and apparel major, and I quit that after my first semester. It felt right. Fashion wasn’t for me, and the English major suited me much better. I loved fiction, I loved school and I was good at it.
In my senior year, I briefly toyed with the idea of going to law school … but I quit that, too. In fact, I walked right out of the L.S.A.T. after the first section of the test. As the other students continued taking the test for hours, I wandered around campus wondering how it was that I wasn’t in there with them. This felt so unlike me.
But it was the right decision. After, I excelled at my studies. I racked up all the honors and awards you could as an undergraduate English major and thought, “Well, maybe this is a career path.”
That’s how I landed at a graduate program at Yale. For the first two years, I loved it. I loved the people, who were inconceivably smart and cared about books in a way not many of my other friends did. I loved the students I taught. And best of all, I loved that I didn’t have to go into debt. My tuition was subsidized; I had a small stipend and didn’t need much. My parents, Russian immigrants who graciously embraced my career path, were able to help me financially in small ways — a car, my books.
And James Franco was in my program. He smelled nice and only attended every other class.
The academic profession is so closely tied in with your sense of your moral self. It’s not just a career, but a comment on who you are as a human being. Helping young people to think critically and love literature is noble; trading stocks is not. Everyone who studies humanities in graduate school is there because it feels like a calling. For me, this zeal made it hard to have the kind of healthy distance I think you need from your work.
Sometimes, when the thing you love becomes the thing you do as your job, it can become the thing you hate. My field was postwar American fiction, which meant it was my job to read novels. But then reading novels became so fraught and professionalized that I didn’t have that as an outlet anymore.
I took my oral exams after my first two years and did great, but as soon as I started working on my dissertation, I felt incredibly stuck in a way that I had never felt in my academic career.
It was a really strange feeling to not have a clear path forward. I kept thinking, if James Franco can do this, surely I can as well.
Before you write your dissertation, you write a prospectus, which is like a proposal for the dissertation. We were supposed to turn ours in during the first semester of our third year, and I just never got it together. At some point, my adviser said, “It’s unexpected that Anna can’t pull this together, and it’s not what I know of her.”
My adviser gave me an additional semester to work on it. I let it drag on and continued to work on it over the summer. At this point, my friends had already started on their first chapters of their dissertations and mine was just not going anywhere.
I spent that summer opening the Word document that held my prospectus, staring at it, and closing it again. I also used the summer to think about whether I wanted to continue on. I asked myself, is it worth finishing a program that I didn’t feel confident about, or should I cut my losses and try something different?
You’ve read the headline, so you know where this story is going. I should pause here to tell you that there’s no one reason I quit the program, but if I had to pinpoint one thing it would be the overwhelming suffocation of procrastination.
I kept delaying my decision because actually saying the words “I’m going to quit this program” was just too difficult. I was living in Brooklyn when I had a phone call with my adviser about leaving the program. She encouraged me to just do it, and I kept walking around a single block crying. You don’t know what to do with your body in moments like that, but I had to do something, so I was just pacing.
Yet I still couldn’t bring myself to fully quit. After my third year in the program, I took a leave of absence. I was even signed up to teach a course in the fall that I had written a syllabus for, but it was so obvious that I was never going back, even if I wasn’t ready to admit it. Every time I drove past New Haven, my heart would start racing. Just the thought of New Haven would give me severe anxiety, which is a shame because they have great pizza.
During that time, I was working a job copy editing romance novels for an e-book distributor. Then, a friend of mine started at Digg and needed help, so I started working there. Getting that job helped me fully quit. I could finally see how I could have a career that I loved but that didn’t define me. I could read novels again as an escape.
I had extended my leave of absence for an entire year, until I received an email from an administrator asking me to withdraw if I didn’t intend to return.
I started to think about what I wanted my life to look like. I was 22 when I started graduate school and had an idealized image of what being a professor would be like. A small college town, a life of the mind. Now that I was a little older, I realized that what I wanted was something completely different.
I wanted to live in New York. I wanted a job that I could detach from on the weekends. So much of academia is sitting in a room alone, writing and not collaborating, and it took me 25 years to realize that I don’t work well that way.
So, after two semesters and one summer spent on leave, I told my adviser I didn’t intend to return. I had quit the program, but I had also quit being indecisive.
It was an incredible relief. I threw out all the paper copies of my prospectus. I stopped carrying around a pen to annotate my books.
Quitting graduate school was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life — and I’ve given birth without an epidural.
I Quit!
Photo illustration by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
