This is not a popular topic of conversation, especially at a university that just hit R1 status in no small part due to strong graduate student statistics. But after wrapping up a whole series on prioritizing mental health, establishing work/life boundaries, and listening to what your mind and your body are telling you throughout the graduate student experience, I felt it was important to talk about the elephant in the room: what if prioritizing mental health, establishing boundaries, and listening to your needs looks like walking away from graduate school altogether? To best talk about this in a way to reduce some of the stigma and shame, I wanted to have this conversation with one of the graduate school deans, Dr. Sara Dolan, who is also a specialist in psychotherapy. Getting people to address their core needs and care for themselves is what she does best! Whether you or someone you are close to in your program has considered leaving graduate school, we hope there’s a word of grace in the following interview for you.
BearTracks
So Dr. Dolan, what are some signs or reasons that a graduate student might want to consider walking away from graduate school?
Dr. Sara Dolan
First, let me normalize that having doubts about your abilities is completely normal, common, and to be expected. I also think those doubts can creep over into feelings that you should leave. That’s also normal. I can’t tell you how many times in my graduate education and in my career that I’ve had those doubts and thoughts that maybe something else would be a better fit. What you really want to think about is, are these thoughts normal ebbs and flows I’m experiencing, or is this something that I need to really take a serious look at and explore more deeply? I think having a really good support network around you, of people who are in your field, your department, your program, but also people who are outside of it all. Not just people who are in academia but outside your department, but people who are not at all connected academia; just people who know you well. Having discussions with those folks can be really, really helpful, because they’ll know whether this is just a normal dip in motivation or a normal feeling of anxiety or disquiet about your path, versus is this something that really just isn’t right for you anymore?
BT
I think that’s so good to have people outside of the community, because when you just get feedback from within your academic community, of course everyone within it selfishly is going to tell you, “Don’t leave! You’re my friend!” And that’s coming from a good place, but it might not actually be helpful or healthy advice. Having people with different triangulations of engagement with your sphere is really helpful.
So, let’s dig into this a little bit more. We all know that everyone has thoughts of quitting at times. Maybe you have a really awful paper or you get an email from a professor or a student that’s just the worst thing ever, and you’re thinking, why am I doing this to myself?? How do you start to differentiate from very normal and even healthy thoughts about “what else could my life look like?” versus the place where your mind has shifted into a different track, and where it might actually be beneficial to seriously consider and actually walk away from this path you’ve chosen?
DSD
I think when I have had these thoughts, it’s been important for me to think about, is this just a reaction to one single thing that’s happened, like a paper rejection or a grant that’s been massacred by reviewers, which is normal but painful. Or is there kind of a sustained pattern of a lack of fulfillment, a lack of sustained motivation for this path? I’ve certainly had lots of individual impulsive experiences of thinking, This is ridiculous. I could make a lot more money doing pretty much anything else! But those feelings go away pretty quickly. And that’s part of resilience. The more resilient you are, the quicker that stuff goes away. But if you’re having more of those feelings, or if that feeling is persisting even when things are going well, that’s probably a sign to start digging more deeply into it.
And I will say, on this end of things as a faculty member, I wish students would come to me earlier in that process of having doubts, maybe considering leaving, or even shifting gears within the program. I wish I could be a part of those discussions early, early on. Because when you are a student and you haven’t had experience with this, it’s really helpful to talk to somebody who has had experience with these feelings. In my area of clinical psychology, it’s really hard to see patients with mental health disorders who are struggling, while I’m also taking classes and also engaging in research – it’s very hard to juggle those things. Well, we’ve had successful graduates since the 70s. We can help – faculty can help students navigate some of those normal ups and downs and figure out is this the fit? It might not be the fit, and that’s really okay. But the earlier we can be a part of that decision making process or just be a part of discussion and exploration; if that’s really the right path to leave, the earlier we can figure out how to make this a successful transition, the better. Our goal as faculty is for students to be successful.
The student who doesn’t finish a graduate program is no reflection on me as the faculty member, but if a student doesn’t finish their graduate program and leaves with a bad taste in their mouth, that is a reflection on the faculty and the people who are supposed to be educating them. So what can we do to make it a successful transition? Sometimes, if you’re in a doctoral program, that means figuring out a way to get a Master’s degree, and get the student moving on to the next path. It might be connecting a student with Career Services, or with alumni in the field who have gone on to different paths. But the sooner we can be a part of that discussion, the more likely it is that a student can make a successful transition back into being motivated and satisfied and making good progress, or transitioning to something else.
BT
Or even just connection with the Counseling Center. While you’re still here, let’s get you connected to some free services where you can begin this discernment process with someone objective and professional and caring –
DSD
– and who has experience with this kind of problem of life!
BT
Yeah, absolutely. So I’m glad you brought up the faculty and mentor aspect of this, because my next question is, what’s the biggest thing that keeps people from walking away from situations that are working? I do think some of it is not wanting to let down your mentor or your advisor. That’s obviously a natural inclination. What would you say to that? And then what are some other things that keep people peer pressuring themselves into staying in a situation that isn’t the right one for them?
DSD
Let me start with that second part. We know from psychology research that once people have made an investment in something, it is harder to walk away, and the longer the more resources you’ve invested in something, the harder and harder it gets to walk away.
BT
Especially something so high stakes like grad school, where it’s not a walk in the park to even be here in the first place! To walk away from something where you took the GRE three times and submitted all those application fees and wrote all those cover letter, that’s a huge investment even before you show up on day one.
DSD
That’s certainly a natural human part of not wanting to walk away, feeling like you need to finish what you started, that you invested resources and need to see it through. There’s also the fear of feeling like a failure if you don’t finish. And then the fear of letting down whomever – family, friends, your community, your faculty, your institution, yourself. And, you know, our job in this world, I think, is not to please other people, as much as it is to use the natural gifts and talents that God has given us to make the world a better place. And I think we’re in a unique place here at Baylor, because I think faculty recognize that maybe more here than at other places. It’s our job as faculty to help students find and use their gifts to make the world a better place – not to make my life a better place, not to make my lab a better place, but we want our students to be successful, no matter what paths they take.
So I think, for me, it feels more like someone’s letting me down if they’re suffering and not letting me help. That, to me, feels more like a disappointment. It’s sad when a student doesn’t finish, but it’s even more sad if they have been struggling and not letting people help them. The most important part of this when a student is thinking this is not for them, I would try to project into the future as much as possible and ask, “What do I want my life to look like in the future?” And then work backwards from that. In my program in clinical psychology, our students want to be psychotherapists. That is what they’re here to learn how to do. And we ask them to think about that periodically; do you still think in 5 years, in 10 years that this is what you want to be doing? If so, let’s see if we can get you through. It may not be a barrel of monkeys every day of the week for four years, but if that’s what you want to do, this is how to get there; we help you with that. But if you’re going through this program, and you’re realizing this is not what you want to do, let’s get you onto a path that fits better and is more consistent with the kind of life that you want live.
BT
Mental health is a big part of this conversation and is a very valid reason to leave something that maybe they wanted at one point but has become something else. But it’s not the only reason that that people leave. What are some of those scenarios? You might have applied to grad school with the best information you had at the time and with the best intentions, with the best goals. What are some situations where maybe that’s shifted, and it’s time to consider something else?
DSD
I’m gonna make a generalization here that I don’t have data to back up: my anecdotal experience has been that people who are younger when they start graduate school may be more likely to have some of those identity shifts. A lot of times people who come right from undergrad (and I came right from undergrad! I am a person who went through all of this.) have a hard time shifting from that undergraduate mindset. You go to classes at these days, at these times, and I do the homework I need to but that’s kind of it. Then you come to a graduate student mindset, where you’re working a lot on things that don’t have anything to do with classes. Classes are the least important thing that you’re doing in a doctoral program. And in undergraduate, your feedback is pretty close to the work that you’ve done; you write a paper, turn it in and you get a grade. In graduate school, your opportunity for reinforcement or feedback is often years down the road. It’s so hard to maintain motivation when you work on a paper for two years and then it’s going to take six or seven tries to get it published, and you’re dealing with it in peer review limbo for months if not years at a time. I think people who have gone and done other things might have a different sense of the timeline of reinforcement, which can be easier to make a transition into graduate school than folks who came right out of undergrad. So, I tend to pay more attention to this kind of stuff in students who are younger.
BT
Well not only that, but if you come straight from undergrad and you’re thinking about going to grad school because you’ve seen the life that your professors lead, it’s easy to forget that those people who you’ve looked to as your role models are anywhere from 20 to 40 years ahead in the career you’re thinking about. You haven’t witnessed all the steps that led up to that, and sometimes the steps that lead up to that are not actually steps you want to take to reach that end goal.
I remember a few years ago, I was I was meeting with a student who was brand new in our department and had an idea of what she thought graduate school was going to be like. She wanted the end result but didn’t realize she didn’t want the bits and pieces that create that end result. Although, I don’t even know if that end result exists anymore, what with academia changing so much. The floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and the elbow patches are not really what academia is anymore. But she realized she did not enjoy a lot of what it means to be in this field. In English, a big thing is you kind of have to enjoy is literary criticism. She didn’t like that. And the research side of academia, she didn’t like it. But then she felt like a failure for not realizing that this isn’t what she thought it was. She went through all the work and effort of getting into grad school and, honestly, I think she felt a little embarrassed that the reality of it was not what she thought it was going to be.
I remember a professor breaking down the fact that a typical job in academia has three components: there’s a teaching component, there’s a research component, and there’s a service component. So what if you realize that one or possibly more of those is not something you enjoy? That it’s not life-giving? Does that mean that you don’t carry through with a graduate degree? What are the options there?
DSD
Well, certainly, not carrying through is always an option for any reason at any time. But something we as faculty need to do a better job of is sharing with students the variety of options they have once they get their degree. Not every academic position has a heavy research component, not every academic position has a heavy teaching component. And we can help guide students towards positions that are better fits for them. There are academic positions that don’t have a heavy service component. So don’t walk away because you don’t like one of those things. You may have to do it for four years or five years in order to complete your doctorate, but you don’t have to do it forever.
But if you really don’t like teaching or research, then I don’t know what a graduate degree is going to do for you. So that’s when we should have some discussions about what what are the options. Graduate school is very hard and not very rewarding. I don’t think anybody intends it to be that way, it’s just the nature of the beast. So if we can get students kind of beyond the fact that these are four or five years that are not going to be the most fun or richly rewarding, we can get you to a place where you have the options to have a life that that is. But if really you don’t want to be doing the job that is at the end of your degree, let’s find something that does make you happier.
BT
So especially at a place like Baylor where, generally speaking, we have very supportive graduate programs, what if you aren’t sure about sticking with grad school, but you’ve been here for a year or two, and you’ve built really beautiful friendships. You’ve got intellectual stimulation with like minded people, and you aren’t so sure about this whole graduate school thing, but you’ve got some great friends and colleagues. What now?
DSD
Wow. I’ll go back to what do you want to be doing in three, four, five, ten years? One of the fantastic things about where our culture and society is right now, especially since COVID, is that it’s easier to maintain networks and friendships and relationships, and maybe becoming less important to rely on your immediate physical, physically present circle than it was ten years ago. So it maybe easier for people to to leave and find something else while still maintaining those relationships.
Another way to think about this is that Waco is a thriving community where there are lots of options for employment. Baylor has jobs open all the time. I’m always surprised how many jobs there are available at Baylor that would be ideally filled by somebody who’s got experience with the culture already. There are ways to stay in the area and maintain those relationships without putting yourself through the discomfort of a graduate program, but also, there are ways to maintain those networks now that we didn’t have years ago.
BT
I keep hearing throughout our conversation is a willingness to take a step back and open your mind to other possibilities, which really comes down to imagination, which in theory, we’re cultivating all the time in graduate school, trying to generate new ideas and new research and new ways of looking at things. But that creativity and that imagination can get very tunneled. So with these sorts of conversations, this narrative we create for ourselves is that “If I leave, if I quit grad school, that will make me a failure.” How can we reframe that decision imaginatively to craft a new narrative that inspires hope and opportunity, rather than feelings of shame?
DSD
Yeah, great question. And I think it’s the word “reframe” that’s essential to that thought process. Who are you? Who do you want to be? I absolutely understand shame, humiliation, embarrassment, disappointments, frustration. All of those are valid emotions, that if you’re not experiencing them at some point, you will! Just wait! Those of us who choose to go to graduate school tend to be highly conscientious and highly neurotic – and I mean “neurotic” in the psychological sense of having high reactivity to emotional stimuli – so shame is triggered pretty easily in people like us. It’s normal. First of all, always keep in mind that those feelings are normal. But… so? Yeah, you’re probably going to feel a little bit that way. That’s okay. But if those feelings are in the service of not feeling that way further down the road and feeling fulfilled and satisfied and living a life that’s consistent with your values and needs and wants? This goes back to my remarks about resilience; the more we can build resilience in folks, especially during such a hard time, the more we can help students find that resilience and build it, the easier it is to withstand the bumps and bruises and rejections. And then the easier it is for people to think about what life is like outside of this.
BT
Yes! We want to broaden your scope and give you the ability to see beyond the momentary discomfort and disappointment to the longer term fulfillment.