The Uncertainty of Being a Graduate Student

Anyone entering graduate school knows that there are various points in the process where you can fail. Oxford was no different. When I entered graduate school, I did not have a clear idea what the process of getting a degree would require. I wanted to be well educated, and the title of “Dr.” would signify that I had achieved that goal. But we find ourselves situated in a world that is not of our making.¹

The Examination (aka Prelims)

I kept my mother appraised of my progress. “My examinations were last Thursday [March 5, 1987]. I think they went all right. They were not like any other exams that I had attended. We had to wear ‘subfusc’ with caps and gowns to a special building called the Examination School (whose sole purpose is for examinations). It was a palace-like setting with marble walls, high ceilings, and portraits of the Queens and Kings of England.”

Entrance to Examination School, Oxford. Steve Cadman, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.

“There, we were ushered, as a group, upstairs to a room with desks which had our names pasted on them. I then had two hours to do a transcription of two passages of handwriting (one from the Elizabethan age and one from the 20th century). After the Palaeography exam, we had a two-hour lunch break, then returned at 2:30 for our exam in Bibliography and Textual Criticism.

I now have two weeks to polish and type a 2,000-word essay on my dissertation topic. I have already submitted a rough draft of the essay to my supervisor, and he said that it was meticulous and interesting. He feels that it will be accepted with no problem. This essay will be submitted to a committee for review.

The third part of the process is an oral examination on April 23–24. I must appear before the committee to answer questions about my thesis and the two exams. The results of this whole process will be announced on May 2nd. If everything goes as planned, my status will be changed from M.Litt. (probationary) to full M.Litt. I will remain an M.Litt. candidate for two terms, then I can apply for a change in status to D.Phil. candidate. The good news is that from this point on I can concentrate solely on writing my thesis.”

The skills that Oxford tested were very different than the knowledge I had to possess to pass my Master’s degree prelims at the University of Wisconsin (UW). Oxford wanted its English Literature majors to have the ability to read handwritten manuscripts and evaluate and describe various printed editions of the text. This meant that Oxford students would be able to create the authoritative editions of literature on which sound scholarship was based.

The UW had a reading list of one hundred canonical works of British and American literature, ranging from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. The exam chose a few of the works (not revealed ahead of time), and students had to write an essay showing that they had mastered the content of the selected works and could present an articulate interpretation of them. This meant that UW graduate students would be able to teach a general-education literature course to sophomore students in college. After passing the Master’s examination at UW, students were offered teaching assistant positions, which were designed to provide income and prepare them to take tenure-track teaching positions after completing their doctorates. By going to Oxford, I did not have either of those things.

Being a textual scholar or teaching sophomore literature students was not really what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I wanted to spend all my time reading academic books and articles, thinking, and talking about ideas from a wide range of disciplines (note that writing was not on this list). I just wanted to figure out what life was about and live it in the best way possible. Perhaps, misguidedly, I thought that by becoming an academic I would be able to do that.

Coming to an Understanding of My Situation

In an audio tape to my housemate/boyfriend, I said, “Last night at dinner time, I got a copy of the Graduate Studies Report. Toby Lennox [president of the MCR] wants to hold a meeting next Thursday to discuss it, and he wants me to help him lead the discussion as part of my role as GRC representative.

It took me at least four hours last night and another four or five hours today to read the whole report. It was kind of a waste of my time. Although the material in it wasn’t irrelevant, and certain parts of it were rather useful—the discussions about transferring, for example, from M.Litt. to D.Phil. What seemed to me, at first, to be an uncertain and uncomfortable position of being probationary M.Litt., then going to full M.Litt., and not actually getting to D.Phil. status until the end of two years, especially considering that they want you to complete the D.Phil in three years, meant that two of the three years you were working on your D.Phil. you did not officially have that status. I’ve now come to understand that that is the position of most people here.

For anyone who has any understanding of Oxford, if you say that you are an M.Litt. student, it means that you are in the early stages of a D.Phil. In fact, of the 3,500 or so graduates that are presently registered as graduate students at Oxford, well over half of them are in M.Litt. status. So, it’s no reflection on me that that’s what I am now. That’s the way it goes. And apparently in the change from M.Litt. to D.Phil, the major hurdle is from probationary M.Litt. to full M.Litt. The transition from full M.Litt. to D.Phil. is really mainly a matter of having a certain quantity of work to present to them, to say ‘here are so many words of my thesis.’ That’s about it. The assessment of your capabilities to carry out academic research and writing is determined at the probationary stage. . . .

Last night at dinner in Hall, I was sitting next to [think Neville Longbottom]. He is very worried. I asked him what was wrong. He said that his supervisor did not think that his written work was good enough to make the transfer from probationary to full M.Litt. I’m sure this doesn’t come as any great surprise to you that it seems somewhat likely that he will be screened out at the probationary stage. You could probably have guessed that by talking to him. I tried to console him with the usual stuff. You will find other things and ultimately be happy, and even if they kick you out of Oxford without the degree, they can’t take away the experience that you have had here. [Postscript: My housemate (after we were married) word-processed “Neville’s” thesis, and we both made suggestions for improvement. He did get his degree but did not go into academia.]

The report has generated some weird little offshoots.

It is true that of the graduate students starting in 1977, university-wide 4% of them are still working on their doctoral theses [10 years later]; in the Arts, as opposed to the Sciences, 7% are still working on their theses.

Of the people who started in 1977, 49% successfully submitted a thesis that passed; 5% had to rewrite them; 3% had to take a lower degree than D.Phil; and less than 3% out and out failed. This is the outcome for people who submitted a thesis.

The big problem is 39% of the people who started in 1977 did not finish their degrees. That is a rather substantial number of people who didn’t even bother to submit a thesis for one reason or another. They did a survey of people who left to find out why they didn’t finish. Predictably, in about 25% of the cases where people did not finish, it was for financial reasons. The grants ran out and they were forced to take jobs. The other large proportion of people who did not finish were those whose topics were overly ambitious or who discovered that their topics were far too narrow. I worry a little bit about being too narrow, and that when I get down to the work, I will find there is not enough there. Although, I have some things in mind that could build it up. The upshot is I am much less worried now, assuming that I do submit the thesis, about whether I will get the degree. If I can’t write the thesis on Bérard, then to me it would be worthwhile to find a new topic and start all over again, even though it might take me eight years, maybe ten years, to do it. It would still be worth doing.”

The aspect of my situation that I was ignoring, at least for the moment, was money.

1. Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015).