Unpopular Opinion: Surviving the Ivory Tower Has Made "Real World" Work a Cakewalk.

“What are you going to do with a PhD in English?”

While completing my doctoral dissertation, I would always answer this skeptical question the same way: “Become an English professor, I hope.” Little did I realize that my PhD was preparing me for a much healthier, happier, and easier life outside of academia and teaching.

It’s a common myth that a humanities PhD is a deeply impractical pursuit, almost completely divorced from the concerns and needs of the world beyond campus borders. When I started freelancing, however, I was stunned at how well my writing was received and how quickly I was able to impress people in a variety of writing styles. That’s when I realized that the rigorousness of my academic training overqualified me for “Real World” work in a good way.

To complete my PhD in English literature, I had to write a dissertation: a book-length document in which I advanced a complex argument about a variety of literary works and used quotes from those works to prove my point. Dissertations are rarely masterpieces, since they are almost always a first attempt at a really difficult task. All you have to do is ask an academic how much they had to revise their dissertation to make it a published book to realize how messy they usually are.

However, few training programs give writers the opportunity to gain so much experience practicing how to communicate complex ideas clearly and concisely. While Malcolm Gladwell’s famous “10,000-hour” rule has been rightly debunked by the very researcher whose paper inspired Gladwell to make it up in the first place, writing is a notoriously painstaking and inefficient process. I spent six years, give or take, working on my dissertation. That’s a lot of years to hone very difficult skills.

In the same piece linked above, the author mentions that the quality of practice times is far more important than the quantity. One of the most daunting aspects of a dissertation is that you should be able, as the sayings go, to explain what you’re working on to your mother (who presumably knows nothing about your work), or an intelligent 13 year-old. That’s one of the toughest and most valuable writing skills I’ve ever encountered. Another valuable skill you learn when writing a dissertation is to take what is usually about a 40-page document and trim it down to half its size for a journal article or a conference paper. In short, you’re learning how to take a complex idea and scale it up or down depending what you need to do with it.

You’re also doing this work under crushing pressure. No editor or client I’ve worked with has been even half as demanding or critical as my PhD advisors. I don’t necessarily condone this “tough love” approach; mental health statistics showing that PhD students are far more depressed than the general population suggest that they need building up as much as tearing down. (In my experience, professors seem to assume that you’re already at the top of your field and therefore already know you’re good enough. The opposite is true; impostor syndrome is pervasive.)

These are just two of the many examples of how the rigor of my PhD experience more than prepared me for writing and editing outside of academia. I have received a depth and quality of training most writers and editors lack, and it has given me an overwhelming advantage when it comes to my work now. The best analogy I can give is the difference between running a marathon (which I’ve done, twice) with a 50lb weight on your back compared to running unburdened in the latest, most innovative training shoes. That’s not to say I don’t have things to learn, or that I don’t have room to improve. Rather, I’ve been able to learn what I need to know and implement it very quickly. Better yet, I have so much more confidence in myself and my work, and it shows.

So, if you’re an editor looking for a writer, or a writer looking for an editor, let go of the myth that PhDs in the real world have a steep learning curve. We’re more likely to be the most skilled, as well as the most knowledgable, people in the room. Even better, we love to keep learning, and we’re always ready to embrace a challenge.

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Hello, I’m Sara!

Words are the writer’s fabric that weave bridges across cultures, countries, and centuries. I’m happy you’re here to read them! Grab a cup of tea and enjoy. You can relax here.