Regrets I have and don't have about academics and grad school

By regrets, I don’t mean the things I wish I did differently, we all have an infinite number of those. Many of those are just things I messed up on due to ignorance or because I had no choice, and/or did simply being a different person I am today. So I cannot reasonably blame myself for those things and don’t find it meaningful to consider them regrets. The things discussed here are things I knowingly made the wrong choice in and know I could have done differently.

Regrets#🠑

• I wish I spent more time journaling? Writing for myself, articulating my thoughts and being okay with sounding clunky and incoherent. Like most people, I find writing difficult and sometimes painful, and cringe at what I write, even though I know all of that to be an essential part of the writing process. I wish I could have spent more time writing in a safe environment (journaling) so that I could feel comfortable being incorrect and formulating awful sentences. I valued journaling before I came to grad school, too, so I had the knowledge as I do now, and even the same journaling system as I do now, but think I didn’t spend time writing only because I couldn’t plan effectively and chose to do other, less meaningful but more urgent work instead
• I wish I had spent more time studying Marxism and critical theory in undergrad; I regret nearly all of the time I spent studying statistics (one of my two majors, the other being ethnic studies), something I was frustrated by throughout undergrad and mostly do not find useful today. I wish I studied what I actually valued and found interesting instead of maintaining the inertia from a choice I made in senior year of high school, so that I could have more tools to make sense of our current place in history
  • Maybe this one doesn’t count? Since it’s not about grad school?

Regrets I don’t have#🠑

• Going to grad school. I came to grad school partially because I found meaningful thinking slowly about the world and because I saw a strategic fit across my skillsets, interests, and what grad school valued, but the biggest reason I came was because I did not really have another opportunity present and I wasn’t really sure what I could do for the next five years except more school. People say that is a terrible reason for going to grad school, and I wonder if I should regret that choice because of that. My general conclusion: I don’t regret choosing grad school because among my options it is still the most reasonable choice I have and I think spending some time learning and figuring out what you want to do is fine, as long as the conditions within those five years are bearable.

• Having my research activities from the past year be driven mostly by activist interests and not scholarly ones. I am sure that I will receive fewer (perhaps no) job offers because I am not a very productive scholar in the academic sense. I mostly spent last year writing memos or reports that don’t really count as contributing to academic literature — I wrote this report with some other AEMP friends on property ownership in Concord, then I worked a lot on the UM endowment, on DoD funding of academic researchers, and so on. My research interests now are also mostly chosen by things I find fucked up in the world rather than by what I think an academic would actually study. But that is a tradeoff I have knowingly decided to make, which I made because nominal job security is lower on my list of priorities than supporting activist campaigns through knowledge work¹

  • A counterargument I’ve heard a lot: Biding time and waiting until you have tenure will let you do more of the kind of work you want to do in the long run . I’ll hold off on criticism of the false and sad sense of safety you gain through complicity, and just argue that if that were the case, then tenured professors would be among the boldest, the most outspoken, the most principled

• Having scattered interests. This is something I’m conflicted over, I’m trying to bring together my interests into a coherent trajectory, that would be a strong net plus. However, I can’t say I regret having scattered interests to date since I don’t know how I would have achieved a single trajectory I found meaningful if I had not first explored and messed around. This is a classic case of the cliche idea “it’s not a regret, it made you who you are today.” I mostly want to reject that since it’s very possible to make mistakes and we shouldn’t shy away from acknowledging that, but in this case it holds true.

Last thought#🠑

I feel a little silly writing this post. I’m 23 and in my second year of a PhD program. What real things can I regret? Why should I regret things if I have not even really lived life enough to regret them? Eh, who cares, it’s a blog post.

1. important: I have not succeeded in that, nor am I trying to imply I'm good at that in any way. I hate how this moralizing this sounds, it is simply how my interests and what I think to be important have turned out to be ↩