When I decided to go back to school to finish my Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, I figured I would eventually work on political campaigns. I would have some super exciting, high-pressure position on the campaign trail for someone fantastic, like Hillary Clinton, where I would travel the country with her and her very important team of very important people like myself, whose sole responsibility was to do very important and exciting campaign stuff. Then I realized that campaigns are full of mostly crappy jobs with even crappier paychecks. I developed a new, better plan: become a college professor.
Becoming a college professor would let me do all the cool things I love: talking about stuff I'm interested in, reading and learning more about said stuff, having breaks so I could travel. I would get to be a lifelong learner and would get paid big bucks for it. I'd get to enjoy working on interesting research projects funded by grants, take sabbaticals, wear Toms to work, let people know how smart I am just by telling them what my job is. This plan was perfect. So I went to grad school.
I got a Master's of Liberal Arts (MLA) from the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, which is essentially training wheels for a PhD. I got to take classes I was interested in and write papers on topics I cared about. My focus quickly switched to International Relations since I had decided that American politics has become a giant cartoon full of assholes. Lucky for me, a PhD in Political Science focusing on International Relations was my next step, so I didn't feel that this MLA was a waste of time or money, and I thought that since I was in a program with PhD students, that this was a perfect way to prepare for the rigors of a PhD program. This plan was so good. I was a genius.
After being accepted into Arizona State University, Georgia State University, The University of Alabama, and The University of Mississippi, better known as Ole Miss, I left sunny St. Petersburg for the Deep South. I ended up in Oxford at Ole Miss with a group of ambitious, sharp, poli sci nerds just like me, all in pursuit of our Holy Grail: the Doctorate of Philosophy.
I soon decided that maybe this was a horrible life choice and that I may possibly be the worst decision-maker ever. My beautiful world of the Democratic Peace Theory, Marxist economic policy, and the political and economic stabilization of separatist conflicts in the Post-Soviet space was rapidly being destroyed by standard deviations, questions of causation or correlation, dependent and independent variables, units of analysis and other horrible things that appeared in the form of Greek letters and weird squiggly lines. I wanted to do Political Science. I never wanted to do math. I hate math! I hate quantitative research! I hate quantitative arguments! I hate the letter Q! What was happening!?!?
My reasonably fast progression from undergrad to PhD student saw me quickly go from being one of the sharpest kids in the class to feeling like the biggest idiot in the state of Mississippi, and, from what I have observed thus far, that's saying something! Plus, the entire time I'd been in college, the powers-that-be had been waging a war on higher education all over the country. Budgets were being cut, jobs were being eliminated or shifted to super underpaid adjuncts, and new PhD grads were finding themselves in the positions that new law school grads have long been finding themselves in: a very bad supply and demand equation where you are the overabundance of supply and there is rapidly decreasing demand. Oh, and we are all pretty much saddled with a loan debt that will financially ruin us for our next hundred lives. Perfect.
So this is my personal chronicle of the journey I embarked on with hopeful optimism and have found myself ambivalently stuck in because I have two useless degrees and can't even think about starting to pay my loans back. I also likely won't be able to get even a non-academic a job in this field without a PhD at this point. At least I can always break the emergency glass and fall back on my perpetually in-demand skill set as an awesome bartender, which will likely be the outcome anyway.
