Transcript
Speaker: As an academic, it's important to attend the annual conferences in your field.
Speaker: And as an ethnomusicologist, that annual conference is SEM, or the Society for Ethnomusicology.
Speaker: Now every couple of years, SCM would be held at the same time as the AMS conference, or the American Musicological Society conference, which focused more on Western musicological research, as well as the SMT conference, or the Society for Music Theory conference.
Speaker: And on those years, I got to go down to the annual conference with my pals in Western musicology at Cornell University.
Speaker: And we had a game that we would play.
Speaker: Guess who's AMS, SEM, or SMT?
Speaker: And it was really easy to spot the ethnomusicologists as our joke went because typically they were either wearing Birkenstocks, Tevas, Chacos, you know, some kind of footwear like that, and or ethnic garb from the cultures that they were studying.
Speaker: So needless to say, there was a lot of tribal print and...
Speaker: I bring this up because even though ethnomusicologists literally study music typically from around the world although you can do ethnomusicological or ethnographic anthropologically based research on Western music as well, ethnomusicologists tend to share some pretty core traits in common with one another.
Speaker: And I dare say this is evidenced in Episode 9 interview with Dr. Alan Roda, PhD in ethnomusicology.
Speaker: Dr. Roda earned his PhD from NYU, and his dissertation was titled Resounding Objects, Music Materialities in the Making of Banerasi Tabla.
Speaker: Among numerous prizes, Dr. Rhoda was awarded the Charles Seeger Prize for the Best Student Paper at the Society for Ethnomusicology Conference in 2013, and his work was also published in the Society for Ethnomusicology's annual journal.
Speaker: After finishing his doctorate, he went on to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Jane and Morgan Whitney Curatorial Fellowship before joining a then-small company called Dissertation Editor that he helped turn into America's premier dissertation and thesis editing surface.
Speaker: Along with co-authors Dr. Lauren Saunders and Kevin Anderson, Dr. Roda recently came out with a book, P.H.
Speaker: Dunn, a professional dissertation editor's guide to writing your doctoral thesis and earning your Ph.D. So without further ado, let's hear the story into and out of academia with Dr. Alan Roda, Ph.D. I'm currently in Punta Uva, Costa Rica.
Speaker: What brings you there?
Speaker: Well, we decided that, you know, we've been working from home for a long time and working from home actually just means working from the internet.
Speaker: So it kindly decided, why don't we take this show on the road and see what that's like?
Speaker: So we found a school for our children here on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica and we signed them up and we rented out our house back home and we moved here.
Speaker: And now we are spending the fall in Costa Rica.
Speaker: And yeah, it's been an adventure.
Speaker: Yeah, it certainly sounds like it.
Speaker: Would you identify with this label that's come about in the past couple of years of being a digital nomad?
Speaker: That's what we're trying out.
Speaker: We're trying out the digital nomad.
Speaker: And the other hip term is world schooling.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: which is like not homeschooling, but world schooling.
Speaker: Except we've been trying to find actual schools for our children to attend, hoping that they will learn some Spanish.
Speaker: It definitely sounds like it.
Speaker: You're, I think, living the dream for a lot of us here, you know, being able to hop around.
Speaker: You know, I, for one, also work mainly through the internet, despite being a Luddite.
Speaker: But I love the freedom of being able to just kind of
Speaker: pick up and go when I feel the urge to do so, which to kind of segue into academic talk here, that was one of the greatest things I felt about academia was having this kind of autonomous, once you're done your coursework, right.
Speaker: And as far as I understand, you and I have similar backgrounds with study that kind of enabled us to travel, but in academia, I thought that was one of the best parts.
Speaker: And I feel like I, for one have enjoyed
Speaker: trying to create that here out in my life outside of the ivory tower.
Speaker: I don't know if you can.
Speaker: Can you identify?
Speaker: Oh, no.
Speaker: That's one of the tips that we give PhD students in our book and when they come out, communicate to us for support is go somewhere.
Speaker: One of the joys of writing a dissertation, even if you're doing research that is fixated in a particular lab somewhere or has a very specific location, go to a new coffee shop to write in.
Speaker: Go to a new place that you haven't been before in whatever capacity.
Speaker: And that's one of the joys of the academic life is that you can kind of take that with you.
Speaker: And then, of course, you know, speaking of the ivory tower, it kind of all comes crashing down when you have to get a job in the ivory tower.
Speaker: And then you don't have any choice at all anymore.
Speaker: And suddenly you get to go wherever you get hired.
Speaker: I remember a colleague of mine said, you know, in academia, you don't get employed, you get deployed.
Speaker: I've never heard that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, you know, this was, you know, my colleague who was, you know, so excited to have gotten that tenure track gig.
Speaker: But moving from Manhattan to Beloit, Wisconsin was kind of a stretch.
Speaker: I'm sure it was lovely.
Speaker: And I think she ended up loving it there.
Speaker: But the point being that it was far away from family, far away from friends.
Speaker: And in academia, I know many stories of people who have moved, uprooted their whole family, moved for three to five years and then have to do it again to another place where they don't necessarily know anyone or have anything to connect them to.
Speaker: You're very right about that.
Speaker: And that definitely on the show, that's been one of the biggest themes of what people realize at one point or another when they were thinking, wait a minute, is this compatible with the life that I want to have for myself?
Speaker: Not being able to choose where I live and here you are.
Speaker: This is more like a sabbatical year.
Speaker: This isn't like a lifestyle, I don't think.
Speaker: I mean, the real truth was I chose to live across the street from my parents.
Speaker: Oh, that's wholesome.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: And my kids can just run across the road and go over to grandma and grandpa's house.
Speaker: And it is just delightful.
Speaker: But, you know, we also wanted to kind of shake things up and go on an adventure as a family.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And this type of work really lends itself to that in a way that being tied to an institution would not.
Speaker: So why don't you tell us a little bit more about this work that you do that enables you to have this lifestyle?
Speaker: You mentioned a book, you mentioned talking with PhD students.
Speaker: Yeah, so the company is called Dissertation Editor.
Speaker: And basically, it kind of was born out of the realization that there's a tremendous need.
Speaker: I mean, part of it was I wish I had known there was a dissertation editor I could have hired when I was writing my dissertation.
Speaker: I remember spending weeks of my life trying to get the page numbers to work properly.
Speaker: And I know I'm seeing the PTSD on your face.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I had to do my footnotes twice.
Speaker: And I'll just say, I had such a hard time with the document itself.
Speaker: My computer couldn't save it.
Speaker: And I ended up losing the Word doc.
Speaker: I lost my PDF.
Speaker: And I had to make a few changes after my defense.
Speaker: I talk about it in my episode.
Speaker: I straight up had a breakdown.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like the document itself was driving me crazy.
Speaker: It wasn't the content per se.
Speaker: It was like it was a Microsoft Word functionality.
Speaker: And oh, my gosh.
Speaker: So, you know, I realized we handle that for people like that is basically the premise is.
Speaker: There's a lot of pain points in the doctoral journey.
Speaker: And we have basically built a company around alleviating all of them.
Speaker: So depending on which one a student is facing, we're there to support.
Speaker: And it could be, I don't know what to do with the feedback I got from my advisor.
Speaker: Or it could just be, can you just make this table of contents work?
Speaker: You know, like it's and everything in between.
Speaker: And so the kind of natural offshoot of that is, you know, we've been working with thousands of students at this point.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Yeah, probably a little over 4000 students from 500 universities around the world.
Speaker: Amazing.
Speaker: And we kind of took all that experience and we've now just published a book.
Speaker: It came out in August.
Speaker: It's called PH Dunn, a professional dissertation editor's guide to writing your doctoral thesis and earning your PhD.
Speaker: And, you know, what sets that book apart, I think, is it's a mixture of how to balance your life and your work and your how to bring dissertation writing into your life.
Speaker: life as you exist in it, and also the nuts and bolts of what belongs in each chapter and what are some tips to write it.
Speaker: And it's all peppered with anecdotes from different people we've worked with who faced similar challenges at every step along the way.
Speaker: So there's something for everyone.
Speaker: If you're thinking about grad school or you're in grad school, there's something in there that I think would be valuable.
Speaker: And ultimately it's the book I wish someone had given me when I was starting my program.
Speaker: So I could have gone into it eyes wide open.
Speaker: I didn't know what the IRB was until I had to apply for it.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: And like,
Speaker: Why?
Speaker: Why?
Speaker: And that's so many people.
Speaker: I think I hear that story.
Speaker: And I was just in those exact same position.
Speaker: And it's kind of like, okay, no, no.
Speaker: Here's a roadmap.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Here's a roadmap.
Speaker: This is what you should expect.
Speaker: Also, this should help you decide if this is what you really want to do or not.
Speaker: Like if you're passionate and driven and just know what to expect.
Speaker: So you can be, you know, you can make an informed decision and be excited about what lays ahead of you.
Speaker: So, okay, I have two things.
Speaker: I love all of this.
Speaker: I also wish that I had gotten this book when I started grad school.
Speaker: Although first thing I wanted to kind of share here has to do with the IRB, Internal Review Board, if I recall my acronyms correctly here.
Speaker: I did a PhD in musicology with a focus on ethnomusicology, and we didn't have any ethnomusicological methods courses at Cornell when I was there, which I kind of was like, but wait, why did you accept me then?
Speaker: So I did all of my training in anthro.
Speaker: And they had like their core ethnographic methods course.
Speaker: And our professor was really, I think he was a postdoc.
Speaker: He was fresh out of his doctorate at Princeton and he was really practical.
Speaker: And we just spent, I remember we spent like two weeks talking about IRB and this is, this is the process.
Speaker: This is the kind of things that you should submit to the internal review board.
Speaker: And for listeners who don't do ethnographically informed work or don't have to deal with human subjects,
Speaker: IRB is essentially in Dr. Rhoda, you can fill in here if you'd like.
Speaker: Basically making sure that your work with human subjects, so interviews or any kind of surveys or ethnographic work, using relationships as a site for data, right?
Speaker: that you're doing so in an ethical way according to the ethics, and I have scare quotes here, of the university.
Speaker: So that you're not, you know, you have to have forms for some things, permission, disclosures, things like that.
Speaker: Of course, I learned in my IRB class, or it was, you know, ethnographic methods, but we talked about IRB.
Speaker: that a lot of times you don't necessarily need to, but for some sorts of research, you do have to.
Speaker: It's kind of like doing your taxes if you're anthropologically adjacent.
Speaker: And I remember, and this is the point that I kind of wanted to share that was sort of like this bitter irony.
Speaker: I loved this class.
Speaker: We also spent a lot of time on how to write a successful grant proposal, because you'll be doing a lot of that, especially if you're doing
Speaker: fieldwork.
Speaker: You need someone to fund it.
Speaker: Got to write a good grant proposal.
Speaker: Here's what it looks like.
Speaker: And I remember all of the other, the Anthro students, you know, we used to get together after and have like a drink or have coffee or whatever.
Speaker: And people would just complain about, oh my gosh, this class, we're not talking about any theory.
Speaker: And I remember feeling like,
Speaker: But we're talking about stuff that's really relevant.
Speaker: And this is great.
Speaker: And I actually, to this day, it was one of the best.
Speaker: I remember it as one of the best classes I took in grad school, because those are skills that navigating an institution, whether it's IRB or IRS, learning how to do that effectively and also learning how to write about your work succinctly.
Speaker: Those are things that whether or not you're an academic are actually really applicable.
Speaker: So I kind of thought that there was some bitter irony there that the students all were sad that they weren't getting my classmates that they weren't getting this like, you know, hardcore critical theoretical edge, but they were getting this practical stuff instead.
Speaker: But that actually I thought was the most useful.
Speaker: So that's point one.
Speaker: Point two.
Speaker: So you mentioned that you wish that you had this book when you were starting out your studies.
Speaker: I'm wondering when you got this idea to launch this company, which by the way, sounds really successful.
Speaker: And I'd love to hear more about how you grew that company too in a minute.
Speaker: But if you had any experiences as a grad student or any moments when you were a grad student that led you to do the kind of work that you're doing now.
Speaker: That's a great question.
Speaker: I mean, the truth is, in grad school, I was very committed to the tenure track dream.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: So when I graduated, I got a postdoc at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Speaker: That's incredible.
Speaker: It was really great.
Speaker: I walked through Central Park for my commute to the greatest art museum in the world to spend my day looking at really, really old musical instruments.
Speaker: And it was great.
Speaker: I got to wear gloves and be in a lab and run tests and stuff.
Speaker: And for an after musicologist like yourself, who had done pretty much all of my research in talking to people about what they do, for me to get into a lab and do x-rays of instruments to look at their insides and think about how that would affect their acoustics and basically...
Speaker: Spent a lot of time trying to imagine what 19th century music in India sounded like.
Speaker: So it was a really fun shift for what I'd been doing.
Speaker: So anyhow, that's where I was.
Speaker: And the truth is, I didn't start dissertation editor.
Speaker: I am the first employee.
Speaker: But Kevin Anderson was the founder of the company.
Speaker: And he started it because he was at Harvard and started editing papers for people and then started recruiting his friends to edit papers for people.
Speaker: And over time realized that there was no one more desperate than the doctoral students and realized that he needed somebody who had been through that process themselves, who really knew the dissertation journey,
Speaker: to kind of take over the doctoral wing.
Speaker: So he had another sort of larger editing company and then dissertation editor became its own entity.
Speaker: So I was the first employee of dissertation editor.
Speaker: And again, it was that service that I wished I'd had.
Speaker: And when he told me about it, I was like, wow, this is genius.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: And so it kind of was born out of that.
Speaker: It came to me at a time when I had just started adjuncting.
Speaker: My postdocs had run out and I was interviewing for some tenure track positions.
Speaker: And then I started doing this on the side.
Speaker: And I kind of have fond memories of
Speaker: It's like type two fun, I think.
Speaker: It's like, you know, it's more fun to talk about now than it was in the moment.
Speaker: But I remember I taught an 8 a.m.
Speaker: class at NYU and a 5 p.m.
Speaker: class at the new school.
Speaker: which meant I just had to like be in Washington square for the entire time in between.
Speaker: And I ran dissertation editor from the shared TA lounge at the new school for months.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: I taught my class in the morning.
Speaker: I ran a company all day.
Speaker: I taught another class in the evening and I rode my bike home.
Speaker: That was the hustle.
Speaker: Big time.
Speaker: Yeah, that was a New York City hustle.
Speaker: And at the end of that semester, I was done with adjuncting, done with New York.
Speaker: Dissertation editor kind of took off instantly.
Speaker: And I moved to North Carolina.
Speaker: Is that where you're from?
Speaker: That's where I'm from.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm from Asheville, North Carolina.
Speaker: And moved back to my hometown, be closer to family and work remotely.
Speaker: And this was, gosh, this was 2014.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So it's been a long time.
Speaker: We've just been kind of working with students ever since.
Speaker: And honestly, that's my favorite part of this, talking to students who are in distress and letting them know...
Speaker: You're not alone.
Speaker: This is going to be okay.
Speaker: You have support.
Speaker: We can help.
Speaker: And the relief that you kind of get to just hear in their voice sometimes, even from that very first conversation, is just so beautiful.
Speaker: You know, we work with...
Speaker: a lot of people who are up to big things in the world.
Speaker: They are educators, nurses who've been nursing for 20 years and now want to teach others to be nurses.
Speaker: And they're doing various types of doctoral degrees, not just PhDs.
Speaker: that enable them to take their career to another level to help more people do good things.
Speaker: And the fact that we have really good Microsoft Word skills makes us feel like we're doing some small part to help these people do some really amazing stuff.
Speaker: I imagine as an ethnographer, and we'll talk about your field of study and what you researched in a minute here because fellow ethnomusicologist, yay.
Speaker: But I imagine as an ethnographer, it's probably really interesting to work with these other kinds of doctors and not just PhDs.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: These like you're saying, like kind of getting this full scale of human intention and human ambition, but also learning about these different kinds of doctorates that are that are out there and these different kinds of terminal degrees has to be interesting.
Speaker: But you're an ethnographer because you're an ethnomusicologist.
Speaker: Where did you go to school?
Speaker: What was your field of study?
Speaker: What was your research?
Speaker: So I went to NYU, New York University, and my dissertation was on drum makers in northern India, tabla specifically.
Speaker: For your listeners, if you've ever heard Indian classical music, if you've ever heard anyone play a sitar, there was a pair of drums with them that someone was sitting on the floor playing.
Speaker: And I wrote about those drums, but I wrote about them, not how they were played, but how they were built because a lot of people had already written about playing them and no one had ever written about building them.
Speaker: So I did like a deep dive into who carves the wood, who melts the metal, who skins the goats, who puts it all together, where do the materials come from?
Speaker: And kind of just a network of artisanship that creates this bond.
Speaker: It was a really great time, actually.
Speaker: I spent two years in India.
Speaker: I spent the first year learning to speak Urdu and Hindi.
Speaker: And then I spent the second year learning.
Speaker: hanging out at the drum shop, watching the way the drum makers and the musicians who came to purchase or get repairs interacted.
Speaker: And one of my articles that came out of it talked about the performance of musical instrument construction.
Speaker: And it won an award, which was fun.
Speaker: So I won a prize, right?
Speaker: Yeah, I got a Seeger Prize and a Densmore Prize and a Klaus Wachsman Prize of various prizes for awards related to articles that came out of that dissertation.
Speaker: That's very impressive.
Speaker: And for listeners, the Seeger Prize is like the top prize for graduate student paper presented at the Society for Ethnomusicology Conference, SEM, which is the big kahuna of conferences in our field.
Speaker: It's a big deal.
Speaker: So in pursuing your tenure track dream, and by the way, your research sounds fascinating, also very on brand for Asheville.
Speaker: I'd like to kind of reverse engineer how you ended up as an ethnomusicologist in a minute here, because I think it attracts a very quixotic kind of soul.
Speaker: You know, it's interesting.
Speaker: For me, it came from a very clear vision.
Speaker: I was in undergraduate school and actually Gage Averill,
Speaker: who was then the chair of the department at NYU.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, wow.
Speaker: He came to Wake Forest University as a visiting scholar, and he did a series of presentations on the permutations of rhythm around the Caribbean.
Speaker: over time.
Speaker: And I was the guy at my undergraduate school who organized the drum circle.
Speaker: And then here was this guy who shows up who knows so much about drumming.
Speaker: And I was like, I want your job.
Speaker: I want to be you.
Speaker: And that was really clear to me.
Speaker: And then the next step beyond that was, okay, a little bit later, as I percolated more with that, I thought, okay, I want to teach world music classes at Warren Wilson College in Western North Carolina.
Speaker: Until I realized that wasn't a choice.
Speaker: Until many, many years and a deeper understanding of how academia actually works to realize that there will always be precisely one spot for an ethnic musicologist at Warren Wilson College.
Speaker: And that person will always be an expert in Appalachian folk music.
Speaker: But I didn't figure that out until I was already speaking Hindi and Urdu on the other side of the planet.
Speaker: So that's kind of how it all started for me.
Speaker: That's where it was born out of.
Speaker: And really for me, getting the PhD in ethnomusicology...
Speaker: There's another kind of fun moment.
Speaker: I was in New York.
Speaker: I had just finished my master's.
Speaker: I wasn't sure what I was going to do next, but I was tired of moving around.
Speaker: So I decided I was staying in New York no matter what.
Speaker: So I only applied to NYU, Columbia, and CUNY.
Speaker: And I also applied for the New York City Teaching Fellows.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I got into all of the things, but there was a minute there where I was in between PhD in ethnomusicology or Spanish-English third grade teacher in the Bronx.
Speaker: And both of those were viable career paths for me.
Speaker: And I kind of did a lot of soul searching, and I thought, if I want to teach third grade in the Bronx, I could do that after I finish my PhD.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: Let's go to school.
Speaker: But really, the idea of going to school was this sounded like the most fun thing I could possibly do right now was get paid to read books.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: I mean.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: I love your story.
Speaker: I think that so many of us that go into academia, especially in the humanities or social sciences, we have this, you described it so well, this like aha moment of like, you have the life I want.
Speaker: I want to do whatever you're doing.
Speaker: Like when Harry met Sally, I'll have what she's having.
Speaker: Like straight up.
Speaker: And I had a really similar moment too when I took my first ever musicology course at my undergrad.
Speaker: And I looked at this professor, well postdoc's life where he had this balance between learning and being a scholar
Speaker: And also musicianship.
Speaker: But it was I had a similar like aha moment of like, whoa, that's what I could do.
Speaker: Because again, intellectual capriciousness kind of led me to not like I knew I loved this idea, this romantic idea of what a professor was when I was an undergrad.
Speaker: And I never I knew I never wanted a nine to five.
Speaker: I knew that was like not going to be me.
Speaker: I didn't want anything that involved an alarm clock or a blazer.
Speaker: Let me just put it that way.
Speaker: But I think it's interesting, too, what you brought up here, this like dual choice.
Speaker: And again, not to draw like neat parallels here with the ethnomusicologists, but I think it is interesting.
Speaker: I've worked as a public school teacher on and off since 2008.
Speaker: When I was in college, I had an internship in college.
Speaker: a high school in the South side of Chicago.
Speaker: I actually did that twice.
Speaker: And here in New York, I actually worked as a kindergarten teacher during the pandemic.
Speaker: And that's always sort of like in my mind been like, okay, well, I can do this or I can do that.
Speaker: I also had that same kind of idea that public school teaching and no disrespect to public school teachers, because I think what they do is superhuman.
Speaker: And they're the salt of the earth.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And I couldn't, I'm too soft for it.
Speaker: Like I just, it was, it was a lot.
Speaker: There was a lot of almost like caregiver burnout.
Speaker: I mean, I was working at a public school in Coney Island and those kids were amazing, but sometimes we'd have to deal.
Speaker: For example, one kid, he got in trouble at the playground.
Speaker: He's such a sweet boy.
Speaker: And we're like, we have to call your parents.
Speaker: And he's like, well, I don't have parents.
Speaker: You can call my caseworker.
Speaker: And it was just heartbreaking.
Speaker: And that kind of thing, I don't know if I have the constitution for this.
Speaker: So like salt of the earth, like people who just are able to, and command, you know, a room of 25 rowdy children.
Speaker: on the spot.
Speaker: These are people who I just admire so much.
Speaker: But for me, like public school teaching, I always kind of thought I can always do that if I can always do that.
Speaker: And I don't mean that as like, oh, it's my fallback.
Speaker: Cause that's a, and I ended up realizing speaking of New York city teaching fellows, I had a moment last year in my freelance journey where I was like, maybe I should think about being a public school teacher.
Speaker: I actually applied for New York city teaching fellows.
Speaker: And I made it to like the final round interview.
Speaker: And then I just kind of was like, no, if, if I really wanted to do that, I would have done that by now.
Speaker: This isn't something that's just like, oh, a fallback.
Speaker: I think you really need to 100% want to do that, to thrive in that environment.
Speaker: And those kids are lucky to work with people who are able to give them that, if that makes sense.
Speaker: So I'm kind of going off on a little tangent here, but I think it's interesting that you brought up public school teaching too.
Speaker: Well,
Speaker: Well, long before grad school, I was actually a substitute teacher in the public schools for about a year.
Speaker: And I ended up in one classroom where someone left mid-year.
Speaker: So I ended up about half a year in a special ed classroom with, it was K through six grades.
Speaker: And so it was like, I was in, I think the upper half of that, the four fives and sixes.
Speaker: But yeah, it was a beautiful experience.
Speaker: And there was a time when I could have imagined myself really digging into that.
Speaker: But I chose other pathways at the time and thought that I could theoretically go back to that someday.
Speaker: But now that I'm a parent and I have children, I got to tell you, teachers are incredible.
Speaker: They really are.
Speaker: And I want nothing more than to support them in any way possible.
Speaker: And, you know, and we work with a lot of educators who are getting the EDDs, you know, and they're some of my favorite clients.
Speaker: They are so committed and driven.
Speaker: And it's it's a beautiful thing.
Speaker: you really said it.
Speaker: And I think it's really cool that you get to kind of, again, witness this broader spectrum of people in the work that you do now, which leads me to ponder a little bit more about this connection between how, how is it that the two ethnomusicologists here both have kind of thought at different times, academia, public schools.
Speaker: And I think it's this love of people.
Speaker: And I think it's this love of connection.
Speaker: And as musicians too, and I'd love to hear more about your own musical history, how you got into drums in a second here.
Speaker: But I think that one of the things about music and my dissertation research was about this, like understanding how music actually brings people together, like the act of music making as like community formation, which funny thing about academia is things that are super obvious out here are like interesting topics to dig into.
Speaker: Yeah, we say musical production as community formation as opposed to dance party, which is what everyone else calls it.
Speaker: Do you remember that piece by Christopher Smalls, Musicking with a K?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's like, I mean, it's cool because I think in academia, it's like colonization of ideas.
Speaker: It's like, oh, I have this idea.
Speaker: I can trademark it.
Speaker: It's almost entrepreneurial in that sense where it's like, well, I have this idea.
Speaker: I'm going to patent this idea.
Speaker: And now you, every time you have this idea, even if it's obvious, have to go through me.
Speaker: I felt like the dream of the academic is for your last name to become an adjective.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But it's like, you know, it's very obvious kind of stuff, you know, and that's very much one of the things that I certainly like a dead end that I kind of reached in academia where I was like, I'm talking about this cool stuff.
Speaker: But through like obfuscating language that can't actually connect with people in my whole work is about connection in the first place.
Speaker: What what am I doing?
Speaker: doing.
Speaker: But you're the drum circle kid at Wake Forest.
Speaker: By the way, my mother has lived in North Carolina for 18 years and I know it pretty well.
Speaker: So I'm like, oh, wow.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm vibing you.
Speaker: That's cool.
Speaker: And I'm from Vermont and I feel like Burlington, Vermont and Asheville, North Carolina.
Speaker: I'm not from Burlington.
Speaker: My mother's from Vermont.
Speaker: Wait, where?
Speaker: She's from Windsor.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So like Southern Vermont.
Speaker: That's amazing.
Speaker: So you were the drum kid at Wake Forest University.
Speaker: And how did you get interested in drumming and music to begin with?
Speaker: When I was at Wake Forest, I was an anthropology major.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: That's how I started anthropology.
Speaker: And actually I started as theater.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: And I switched to anthropology when I realized I could study abroad a lot more.
Speaker: And so I studied abroad for three of my eight semesters as an undergrad.
Speaker: So I really took advantage of that opportunity.
Speaker: I would also usually take a semester off.
Speaker: from school and stay wherever it was I had been studying abroad just to hang out and then come back and continue.
Speaker: So I stretched out my undergraduate experience over the course of many years.
Speaker: And it was beautiful.
Speaker: It was really awesome.
Speaker: And everywhere I went, I...
Speaker: wanted to learn some music.
Speaker: That was the most fun thing.
Speaker: So I studied marimba in South Africa.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: And I was learning monastic dance in Tibet.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Oh my gosh.
Speaker: Then for my third study abroad, I went to the University of Costa Rica, just into their music department and studied music theory in Spanish so that I could really like dial in my Spanish.
Speaker: And by my third semester, I thought I want to be able to speak the language of the people I'm with really well.
Speaker: So that's how it started as an undergrad.
Speaker: And then when I was in Costa Rica, I actually was studying at the university and performing in a circus.
Speaker: It was really fun, Los Magos del Tiempo in San Jose.
Speaker: And that was my job.
Speaker: And I learned that I had been performing in the choir for the University of Costa Rica.
Speaker: And every student who sang in the choir gets free tuition.
Speaker: What?
Speaker: So I asked if that would apply to me.
Speaker: And they said, why not?
Speaker: So I stayed, even though I had already graduated from Wake Forest, I stayed in Costa Rica for another year and took two more semesters of music theory and sculpture and modern dance.
Speaker: And I worked in a circus.
Speaker: And that was what I did.
Speaker: At some point, well, it seems kind of silly, but I met a girl who said, I'm going to go to New York and get a master's degree.
Speaker: And I said, that seems like a good idea.
Speaker: So I applied to Columbia and got a master's in anthropology.
Speaker: And while I was there, that was when I had that soul-searching moment of, well, now what do I do, PhD or teach in the Bronx?
Speaker: What do I do next?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But that was what sort of took me from sort of nomadic undergrad life of lots of international travel to New York City.
Speaker: And I really liked New York City.
Speaker: It was a great place when I was in my 20s.
Speaker: And then as I got older, there came a moment when I just was...
Speaker: Ready to go.
Speaker: Was it on the subway?
Speaker: Only always.
Speaker: But yeah, so that's sort of how I got here.
Speaker: I think as ethnomusicologists in particular, first of all, that should be your second book.
Speaker: Adventures from a Nomadic Undergrad, like how to do it in an alternative way and get a lot out of it.
Speaker: You kind of played your cards really well in an unconventional way, but you created this tapestry of a life that in a way too, I'm interested to kind of observe this, that you're still kind of living, right?
Speaker: going back to this idea of being, um, what was it?
Speaker: Not a digital nomad.
Speaker: What was the word that you used?
Speaker: World schooling, world schooling my children.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Your world school, your children.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Well, it's always been just a really big part of who I am.
Speaker: And, you know, one of the jokes I have before my wife and I got together, someone asked me, you know, to make a list of qualities of my ideal partner.
Speaker: And, uh,
Speaker: Top of the list was well-worn passport.
Speaker: Because I just couldn't imagine a life that didn't involve a global experience.
Speaker: And I think that's part of what drew me to ethnomusicology.
Speaker: I mean, I was already in anthropology.
Speaker: And basically, I felt like ethnomusicology was a way to dive deeper into the artistic part.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But, you know, in hindsight, I probably could have just stayed in anthropology and I would have been fine.
Speaker: I didn't know then.
Speaker: But but yeah, that that desire and kind of hunger for culture shock.
Speaker: You know, I I used to joke that culture shock is my favorite drug.
Speaker: It's just it's very addictive and it's very exciting.
Speaker: But I found it hard to be a tourist.
Speaker: You know, we went on our honeymoon to Colombia and it was nice.
Speaker: We went on a beautiful hike to the Ciudad Perdida and it's an amazing country.
Speaker: But we kind of came home from it both thinking we don't want to do that.
Speaker: We want to go live somewhere.
Speaker: We want to make friends with people.
Speaker: We want our kids to be enrolled in a school and meet other parents and less interested in sightseeing and just infinitely more interested in the people who live in places, you know, getting to know them.
Speaker: And I guess that goes back to that ethnographic kind of drive.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like this wanderlust that I love.
Speaker: My favorite drug is culture shock.
Speaker: I love that so much.
Speaker: And I also totally understand too what you're saying about there's, there's like this challenge to getting in to a culture.
Speaker: And I also, I don't mean to say to, I don't mean to give myself any errors about like, oh yeah, I'm in whatever cultures that I've spent time in.
Speaker: I've spent a lot of time in Japan, obviously cumulatively over four years.
Speaker: in various capacities.
Speaker: And then I've spent, I've traveled all over.
Speaker: And then I've also, I studied abroad in China was also very eyeopening pre Olympic Beijing.
Speaker: It was, it was a vibe.
Speaker: It was an amazing vibe, but it was like, Whoa, I am definitely, you know, not in proverbial Kansas anymore, which was cool.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So I don't mean to say like, oh yeah, like I'm in, you know, especially Japan, like even after all these years, it's like the more that I spend time there, it's especially because Japan is such an insider outsider kind of society.
Speaker: I, you know, detect this little invisible wall, even though I just went to Japan this summer and I had a fabulous time traveling around the country, going and meeting all these people that are my friends after all these years.
Speaker: But I still am like acutely aware of, you know, making sure I don't think to myself like, oh yes, I am 100% integrated into this culture.
Speaker: Oh, no.
Speaker: And you can't be.
Speaker: But it's fun.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But there's still that challenge.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: It's fun.
Speaker: There's still that challenge of like, how can I connect beyond culture, over, through culture, just human to human?
Speaker: And that I totally feel you.
Speaker: Like, I get such a thrill from that.
Speaker: So just a couple weeks ago, I walked out on the beach.
Speaker: And there was a guy juggling.
Speaker: And so I walked up to him to see if he'd like to juggle with me.
Speaker: And he was making some jokes.
Speaker: He was like, I was like, can I juggle?
Speaker: And he was like, I don't know.
Speaker: Can you?
Speaker: And I was like, I think I probably can.
Speaker: He's like, oh, really?
Speaker: Like professionally?
Speaker: And I was like, well, it's been a while, but I was a professional about 20 years ago in a Costa Rican circus.
Speaker: And then all of a sudden, it turns out,
Speaker: he was in my circus.
Speaker: What?
Speaker: This was my old friend from 2002.
Speaker: And we did not recognize each other because we are old men now.
Speaker: And we just had this amazing reunion moment.
Speaker: That is so incredible.
Speaker: And what a funny little joke from the universe.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: We'll put these two guys together.
Speaker: We'll throw them, we'll reintroduce them.
Speaker: It was because when I left Costa Rica, it was just before
Speaker: the real boom of interconnectivity.
Speaker: You know, there was no Facebook, there was no Wikipedia, there was no YouTube.
Speaker: Most of my friends didn't have email addresses.
Speaker: Nobody had a cell phone.
Speaker: I don't remember how we communicated with each other, to be honest.
Speaker: So, you know, I left and I wasn't in touch with anyone.
Speaker: And so it was so crazy to come back and just stumble into an old friend from 22 years ago on the beach one day.
Speaker: What I'm loving too from your stories here is just this clear, just affection that you have for, again, for people, for connection and for adventure.
Speaker: And I think those qualities, it's like the common thread that I'm kind of sensing here from our conversation, from your days piecing together undergrad study abroad to study abroad, and then figuring out
Speaker: the next step of your life during your master's phase and then during the PhD phase and then post PhD too with the work that you're doing now.
Speaker: And to return to your time as an actual PhD student, what was that like for you?
Speaker: So the first few years were amazing.
Speaker: The first few years were like, I'm getting paid to read books.
Speaker: All my other friends from undergrad had like moved to New York city and they were like working corporate jobs and like doing all this stupid stuff that they had to do in their corporate jobs.
Speaker: And they were making lots of money, but I was lying around reading books, having a great time.
Speaker: I remember during my, um,
Speaker: This is one of the other funny stories.
Speaker: I lived in New York City with a budget of $7 a day.
Speaker: That's a lot of bacon, egg, and cheeses.
Speaker: That was one trip to the grocery store to spend about $30 and then save the other 12 for maybe a few beers on the weekend.
Speaker: I rode my bike everywhere.
Speaker: I ate nothing but rice and beans.
Speaker: I spent a year and a half before I went to a restaurant where someone brought food to my table.
Speaker: I only ate at places where you walked up to a window on the street.
Speaker: What?
Speaker: That was me in New York in my early grad student days.
Speaker: But it was really fun.
Speaker: And I read so many books.
Speaker: I learned how to read a lot faster.
Speaker: I was often intimidated by other members of my cohort during our seminars.
Speaker: But then I realized they were too, and we were all experiencing imposter syndrome.
Speaker: And really, it was great until there was this moment of
Speaker: So what are you going to do when this ends?
Speaker: How are you going to get a job?
Speaker: And then all of a sudden, that's when the insidious fear started to percolate.
Speaker: Were you aware at this time?
Speaker: I mean, I guess you were in graduate school before the big nosedive in the 2010s.
Speaker: It started 2008.
Speaker: I was in grad school before then, but 2008 was the big recession and everybody did a hiring freeze immediately thereafter.
Speaker: And I had a lot of friends who were just a couple of years ahead of me finishing.
Speaker: And then from 2008 to 2012, basically nobody hired anyone, which meant when they did start to hire people in 2013, which was when I graduated,
Speaker: there were now about five years worth of recent graduates all going after the same small handful of positions.
Speaker: Oh God.
Speaker: So, you know, I pride myself.
Speaker: I made it to the interview stage at MIT.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: And that was my dream job.
Speaker: And I was already doing dissertation editor.
Speaker: And I remember telling the founder of the company, I was like, look, if I get the MIT job, I'm going to quit this.
Speaker: And he was like, okay.
Speaker: And I thank God every day that I did not get that job at MIT.
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: And can I ask why?
Speaker: I love my life now so much.
Speaker: Had I had gotten the MIT job, they would have expected me to write two books before tenure.
Speaker: I would have spent seven years very, very stressed out about whether or not I was going to be able to keep my job.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: And I think it would have been a very anxiety filled time that, you know, might have culminated with tenure and it might have looked like a beautiful 30 years after that.
Speaker: But that seven years would have been up like two years ago.
Speaker: And I look at like what I've done over the last eight years on my own and my two beautiful children that I've actually had some time to spend with, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker: And I live across the street from my parents where my kids get to walk over to see them all the time.
Speaker: You know, all those things like MIT is a great place.
Speaker: And I definitely would have taken the job if they had given it to me.
Speaker: but I'm really glad they didn't.
Speaker: And this suits me.
Speaker: I love talking to grad students.
Speaker: I love being sort of a surrogate coach to people outside of my field and talking about the dissertation and the doctoral journey and broad brushstrokes.
Speaker: And I love the diversity of people I interact with.
Speaker: as opposed to all day, every day, a class full of really talented musicians who are going to become engineers.
Speaker: That's so true.
Speaker: You know, which is who I would be to, there's no grad program at MIT.
Speaker: There are very few music majors.
Speaker: They have a very large number of music minors.
Speaker: You know, again, it's a beautiful, it's a beautiful thing that I would have been doing, introducing this
Speaker: whole generation of engineers to, you know, the world of music and cultural empathy.
Speaker: And it's not worth the price of uplifting my life and the anxiety of competition that is happening.
Speaker: required of getting a tenure track job at a really prestigious institution like that.
Speaker: Totally.
Speaker: And you're kind of touching on something here too, which is not only the myth that like, oh, getting a PhD will get you a job, right?
Speaker: Which no one really talks about.
Speaker: A lot of us kind of in PhD programs came to that realization alone that
Speaker: at the end of our programs, right?
Speaker: Because certainly at Cornell, we had no professional development work.
Speaker: It was like getting a job equals becoming a tenure track professor, you know, maybe a postdoc or adjuncting, you know, but even that it was like getting a job equals staying in academia in this very particular context.
Speaker: But then the other myth is that getting tenure
Speaker: is going to make you happy.
Speaker: Once you're there, you'll be fine.
Speaker: And I had a realization that was similar to what you described at the end of my dissertation.
Speaker: That whole process was so stressful for me, writing the document.
Speaker: I realized I don't like academic writing.
Speaker: at all.
Speaker: I'm a writer now, but I don't like academic writing.
Speaker: I hate sources.
Speaker: I hate citing them.
Speaker: And you can't have an idea without double checking that eight different people didn't already come up with it.
Speaker: And then if they did, you have to find a way to make it your niche and all of that.
Speaker: I was like, this is driving me batty.
Speaker: And if I go up for tenure, I'm going to have to have, you know, my first book published, my second book in the works, you know, or already published as you were just describing.
Speaker: And I'm going to be going through this until I'm 40.
Speaker: And, you know,
Speaker: At least.
Speaker: At least.
Speaker: I was 30 when I finished my doctorate.
Speaker: Oh, good for you.
Speaker: You finished young.
Speaker: You know, it's an interesting time now in academia because I think people are really kind of waking up to the fact that, A, is it even, I mean, if you hear the call, you must heed, I think, when it comes to a PhD.
Speaker: But I think there needs to be more conversations within the academy about how can we use this
Speaker: to transition into a career that isn't a professor because as Christopher L. Catterin wrote in Leaving Academia, 93% of us do not go on to tenure track jobs.
Speaker: So most people are not going on to tenure track jobs.
Speaker: And that's after X number of years.
Speaker: I mean, I have several good friends who are just like postdoc hopping or adjuncting and they're miserable.
Speaker: It's like, you know, break free is what I wish I could tell them.
Speaker: And if you were to give advice, I mean, you do, you're in the business of giving advice.
Speaker: I'm in the business of giving advice.
Speaker: So there's two pieces of advice that I have here.
Speaker: One of them is that we talk about in the book, which is you can't postpone your life for your grad school or dissertation writing.
Speaker: It needs to be part of your life.
Speaker: And so there's a tendency people have to feel like, well, once I get X, then I'll be Y. Right.
Speaker: And so you got to be why now and then fit your X, you know, fit X into it, whether that's tenure or dissertation writing or grad school.
Speaker: You've got to make it part of your life and not postpone your life while you do it.
Speaker: That's so good.
Speaker: And then the other one that I really wish that my program had offered me, and I feel like this is something that, this is my advice for institutions, for all you grad schools listening to this podcast.
Speaker: There should be a mandatory statistics class for all researchers in all fields, even ethnographers, even literature students, because we learn such great research skills, and yet we don't have even basic knowledge of the largest body of research skills out there.
Speaker: which is various basic data analysis skills.
Speaker: And if you're gonna teach a research methods course, it should include all valid research methods.
Speaker: I feel like that's something that's really missing.
Speaker: Not everyone needs to get a PhD to become an expert in SPSS software.
Speaker: So much of the doctoral skill set is research oriented that I feel like it should be research in a much broader sense.
Speaker: And that would prepare PhDs to get other types of jobs more easily.
Speaker: That is pretty radical and also practical at the same time.
Speaker: And I love that because I see that you're kind of envisioning a new kind of training for PhDs.
Speaker: Because again, like this idea of expertise has, I think, expired maybe a little bit on both ends of the academy, right?
Speaker: Within the academy, training expertise without
Speaker: actually introducing other relevant fields that could... The expertise should be in research and critical thinking, not subject matter.
Speaker: Yes, exactly.
Speaker: In methodology as opposed to content.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And that you should be able to demonstrate at the end of your PhD that I am an expert researcher in so many ways.
Speaker: That is a really good solution for helping PhDs.
Speaker: I wish I had distributed a survey and tallied the results and run an ANOVA and put a table somewhere in my dissertation at some point that I don't know why, but no one asked me to do that.
Speaker: And now, here I am, I still don't know statistics.
Speaker: And so I have a statistics manager on my team who handles all of that.
Speaker: And over years of talking to students, I know enough of the lingo to know what kinds of statistics we can help with and what we can't.
Speaker: But I can't actually run them or speak eloquently about what they mean.
Speaker: And it feels like a major hole in my knowledge.
Speaker: If here I am, a PhD, someone who is an expert in doing research, I should be able to talk about
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I'm still kind of processing what you're saying here.
Speaker: Is this being one of the ways that we could help PhD students prepare them for what is very likely an inevitable transition into.
Speaker: There's a lot of literature that focuses on PhDs leaving academia, but it's mostly in STEM.
Speaker: It is mostly in STEM, not humanities.
Speaker: And it's not that the humanities need to engineer it up, but they need to be able to speak a little bit of that language.
Speaker: The humanities and social sciences aren't going to go into the lab, but they are going to do research.
Speaker: I hear that as humanities scholars too.
Speaker: One of the big projects that I feel very passionately about is recognizing also too, at the same time, the skills that we've already gained as researchers, we are master synthesizers and we are writers.
Speaker: We can synthesize material and represent it coherently.
Speaker: That is a major skill that I think a lot of humanities people, we come out on the other, if we do, you know, rip off the bandaid, um,
Speaker: and say, okay, look, I can't do academia anymore, and I don't want to do academia anymore, what next?
Speaker: I do think it's a mix of that and also, like you're saying, having a hard skill.
Speaker: And I think as ethnomusicologists, so one of the ways that I make money is I teach Chinese and Japanese.
Speaker: Those are hard, quantitative skills
Speaker: that it's like either you know it or you don't.
Speaker: And that's been one of the big money makers for me.
Speaker: And now that my writing is going places, that's nice too.
Speaker: But in the intermediate, the teaching of languages, again, this hard skill has been what has the most valuable experience
Speaker: asset that I've taken out.
Speaker: And then learning also at the same time, again, kind of recreating my sense of worth, because I think one of the unfortunate souvenirs that I got in academia was this imposter syndrome that I kind of carried with me out into the real world of like,
Speaker: I'm inadequate out here.
Speaker: All I have is this degree that sounds made up, you know, and I was out of the workforce for seven years while these poor, you know, I had the same thought of like, oh yeah, my friends are like climbing the corporate ladder.
Speaker: Here I am.
Speaker: I'm the one that did it right.
Speaker: There's a bit of hubris in that.
Speaker: Like I'm traveling the world, getting paid to read, going on these cool trips all the time to do music stuff.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then it's like, I graduated at 30, about to turn 31.
Speaker: And everyone else is like stable.
Speaker: Not that that was something I ever necessarily crave for myself, but stability, financial stability, career stability, a sense of like, who am I?
Speaker: That was compromised.
Speaker: And a lot of my post PhD project has been owning this experience as something that was worthwhile in its own way, which leads me to ask you.
Speaker: Perhaps as a closing remark, although as fellow ethnomusicologists here, I feel like we could just talk endlessly.
Speaker: What do you think is the value of doing a PhD today?
Speaker: You know, that is a personal question.
Speaker: There's no one answer.
Speaker: There's going to be as many answers to that as there are PhD students out there.
Speaker: I don't remember exactly who it was, but I know one person joked, the only thing worse than starting a PhD is not finishing it.
Speaker: So what is the value?
Speaker: I mean, the value of that degree, it's got to be inherently driven.
Speaker: And so, again, I think it goes back to, woohoo, I get to read these books.
Speaker: And if that spark and that passion for your topic or for learning is not there, then
Speaker: You might really think twice about whether or not this PhD is the right path for you.
Speaker: Now, what is the value of it?
Speaker: I mean, I wouldn't do it differently.
Speaker: I absolutely loved it.
Speaker: I love the facility of language that I acquired.
Speaker: My children use words.
Speaker: four and five syllable words in kindergarten.
Speaker: I think it's fun.
Speaker: My wife says it's pretentious.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: But, you know, there's things that you learn in grad school that have an intrinsic value that enriches life in a way that is not quantifiable in career or financial success.
Speaker: And so,
Speaker: Asking what is the value of the PhD is like asking what's the value of a liberal arts education.
Speaker: There's no job waiting for you at the end of your liberal arts degree or at the end of your humanities PhD.
Speaker: But there can also be deep satisfaction and fulfillment from the process of learning.
Speaker: So, and it's interesting too, the graduate students we work with the most at Dissertation Editor are doing this later in life.
Speaker: They're in their 50s.
Speaker: And a lot of the conversations we're having kind of tend to focus on this demographic of straight, relatively straight out of undergraduate school into PhD and like, now what am I going to do with myself?
Speaker: Whereas there's actually a huge population of people who already have careers, already have families, already have that stability, and then decide, now I'm going to get a PhD.
Speaker: And there's like a worthiness conversation that comes out of that space that is really awe inspiring.
Speaker: And there's a drive and a commitment because I can't imagine writing a dissertation while holding down a full time job and raising children.
Speaker: And yet there are people who do it because they're that driven and that passionate about it.
Speaker: So what is the value of a PhD?
Speaker: Gosh, who knows?
Speaker: But it's really valuable to lots of people in lots of different ways.
Speaker: In some ways, it's almost becoming the new master's degree.
Speaker: I feel like 20 years ago, it was like, well, if you went to college, then you can go get a good job.
Speaker: And then it was like, well, undergrad's kind of not enough unless you're a graduate.
Speaker: have other software engineering skills or certain fields or it certainly is, but increasingly people feel like they need at least a master's degree.
Speaker: And I think the PhD is now becoming what a master's degree was 20, 30 years ago.
Speaker: It's a demonstration of a certain mental acuity and research prowess.
Speaker: A demonstration of commitment too.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Drive, commitment, perseverance, grit, like all of those things.
Speaker: And like I said, there's nothing worse than not finishing it.
Speaker: You know, I had a boss who was retiring after 42 years of a very successful career and still would say, yeah, I really wish I'd finished my dissertation.
Speaker: He was ABD.
Speaker: Oh.
Speaker: But 35 years later...
Speaker: He's had a great career and a great life.
Speaker: And the only reason it matters is because it still weighs on him.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So there is something to be said about finishing.
Speaker: And two, I guess also that was maybe the other reason we wrote P.H.
Speaker: Dunn was to help people know like, or the other quip, you know, there's only two types of dissertations, the ones that are finished and the ones that aren't.
Speaker: I hadn't heard that one.
Speaker: I thought you were going to say two kinds of dissertations, perfect and done.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: That's another way.
Speaker: Perfect and done.
Speaker: And the perfects don't exist.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: So it's either done or it's not.
Speaker: So get it done.
Speaker: There's a value for doing it for its own sake.
Speaker: Yeah, 100%.
Speaker: And I feel like that is the value.
Speaker: The value is intrinsic to the process itself.
Speaker: It is not the accolades that come with some letters at the end of your name.
Speaker: You know, depending on what you want to do, a lot of people are able to leverage those in various ways.
Speaker: It certainly does help authors with credibility, you know, to have that, to have some letters at the end of your name, you know.
Speaker: But yeah, it's intrinsic to itself.
Speaker: That's the value, the real value.
Speaker: And with that, Dr. Rhoda is certainly correct.
Speaker: With a PhD, the journey is the destination.
Speaker: So thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Academic Defectors.
Speaker: I am your host, Dr. Jillian Marshall.
Speaker: See you next time.
