It’s one of those truisms that you can learn a lot by failing. That’s certainly been my experience throughout my academic career — I’ve failed at almost everything at one time or another and it’s been a learning experience. I’ve made numerous bad decisions: worked with the wrong people, valued the wrong things, pursued frivolous ambitious, put my time into unfruitful projects. I’ve also failed in just about every arena of academic life: job interviews, job searches, fellowship/grant applications, article/book submissions, you name it. I’ve taught some terrible classes and dealt badly with students. I’ve made enemies of colleagues and neglected my professional reputation. It is safe to say that my career has been more defined by my failures than by my successes — and I have what many would consider a successful career.
I have previously blogged about a recent failure of mine — the kerfuffle surrounding my graduate student Esmerelda’s attempts to defend her thesis. There’s a lot of blame to be spread around but I do feel that the situation has a great deal to do with poor choices on my part. I could certainly have done things better.
Well, last night Esmerelda graduated, having defended her thesis for a second and final time. It took some herculean effort but she was able to pull the revisions together and get it past the other members of the committee. In the spirit of productive reflection upon what I learned through this stressful, distressing, and unnecessary situation …
What I learned is: IT IS ALWAYS BETTER TO INCONVENIENCE, ANNOY, AND CREATE STRESS FOR A GRADUATE STUDENT THAN TO INCONVENIENCE, ANNOY, AND CREATE STRESS FOR THE FACULTY MEMBERS ON HIS/HER COMMITTEE.
I’ve realized that I was so invested in Esmerelda, going out of my way to praise her, support her choices, and get her through the process as quickly as possible, that I neglected the other faculty involved … ultimately to Esmerelda’s detriment. It would have been far better for her if I had put my foot down, told her she couldn’t finish that semester, and she’d have to just accept that fact. She probably would have been angry with me but she would not have had to go through the trauma of not passing her defense.
In other words, I actually needed to DIRECT her thesis not merely serve as her cheerleader and therapist.
The good news — and I’ve gotten very good at focusing on the positives despite all my stumbles — is that now I know for the next time.
2 comments
Comments feed for this article
August 18, 2008 at 1:50 am
Notorious Ph.D.
I love the idea of learning from our failures. I remember my first meeting with my Ph.D. advisor (different from my M.A. advisor), where I told him that I felt that writing the M.A. thesis had taught me important lessons in how *not* to do a number of things: how not to choose a topic, develop a bibliography, take notes, etc. He chuckled, and said that now I was going to learn how *not* to do archival research.
Turns out he was right. ((chagrin))
August 19, 2008 at 7:29 am
profacero
I once voted with the majority to fail somebody I actually wanted to support. The committee was horrified at the director because the student (the dissertation) obviously wasn’t ready yet. Needed another semester. We said, director, why did you do this to us all? He said, because something needed to happen to get us all talking, so this student could move forward. He said he knew there would be heavy revisions but also felt strongly that some meeting needed to happen with everyone there, thinking seriously, to help get the project pulled together.
At the time I saw it as a failure of the major professor system. Where I went to school you had a director but they were not your only mentor or guide – the whole system was structured so as to avoid that.
More recently I dumped a thesis student – told her she was not ready and that there was work she had to do and I couldn’t do for her. This is under the same major professor system: there is a committee but the custom is not to have it meet together until there is a full dissertation draft. I had been encouraging the student to talk to all the committee members, work with everyone, as I had been trained to do in my time, because she really needed input and although I was the director for bureaucratic reasons, I wasn’t actually the most knowledgeable person here on her topic. This hadn’t worked because she told the different committee members different things about the direction of her project. It was a mess.
What a super-senior person finally revealed, after the fact: even though there isn’t an official moment to do this, I could have called a committee meeting and insisted we discuss the project all together (yes, there’d been a prospectus exam, but things had changed since). I then realized: that was what the long ago dissertation director, the one who had the student defend before he was ready, could have done, should have done, too. But we didn’t realize. Now I know.