Alysha Kassam (same cohort as me) and I are the first two women of color ever graduating from my PhD program.
I’ve always read about people being firsts and wondered what it’s like, which makes it a little surprising it took me this long to realize that I am one, too. I suppose one reason is that the program used to be very small, and has since diversified with its expansion, so it never felt like I was that much of an island in a sea of white people. — I am, of course, an island in a sea of white people, but that’s the nature of philosophy anyway.
The realization that I’m a proper ‘first’ gave me a kind of legitimacy that I probably shouldn’t need to be a first to feel. But here we are. I’ve also realized that my graduate career was probably somewhat unusually eventful. I figured I’d write some of those down.
CW: suicide (not me)
1.
The objectively hardest time I had was in my third year. I say “objectively” because I still think that the best way to get through a period of intense stress is through sheer denial of the existence of the stress, which was what I did. I felt fine as it was happening. I was slightly concerned over how fine I felt, sure, but I got stuff done. I got a shit load of stuff done.
I was grad rep in my third year, which was unusual. Grad reps are usually fourth years because we go through qualification in our third year, which meant it was a stressful time and also very awkward if the grad rep fails out of the program. But nobody in the year above us wanted to do it, and I know no fear. Later I discovered that a good friend of mine in the same cohort as me also ran for grad rep, resulting in one of the very few actual elections. The previous grad rep (also a good friend) kept us both in the dark to make this happen. To him who is reading this: I’m not complaining, just stating facts.
Prior to my third year I had been working with a logic prof who was leaving for another school. I worked with him not because I liked logic but because I liked his supervisory style, so it wouldn’t make much sense for me to continue working with him afterwards (which a couple of his logic students did). I had to find a new supervisor. A dissertation committee chair.
I had not thought of what dissertation I wanted to write because, to prevent possible disappointment, I had not allowed myself to think about what would happen if I passed qualification, in case I didn’t pass. But I had to make a decision soon. My logician mentor thought it was crucial for my qualification that people had a sense of who I’d be working with if they passed me.
I had been wanting to work with Kent Johnson since I started the program. The only reason I hadn’t was that he was famously elusive. It didn’t help that I didn’t know how to talk to professors. My logician mentor managed to get him to agree to supervise one of the papers I’d have to write for qualification, and we had been working together for about a year. It was a year in which I turned in one terrible draft after another. I learned a lot in the process but felt like I had thoroughly disappointed him. But now that I got the hang of it, I thought, I could change this impression and write a good dissertation. I had been feeling lost ever since I discovered I couldn’t bring myself to be an actual logician. How do other people decide what they want to do? And why do those decisions always conveniently fall within the purview of some faculty member? I thought I didn’t have to figure these questions out. Or at least I would have more time. I would just do what Kent told me to do until I knew enough to start having ideas.
Kent Johnson died of suicide in the summer prior to my third year.
It wasn’t discovered until he failed to show up to teach, but I had suspected something was off since he had not been responding to my emails for a month. I suspected bad news.
I have grieved deaths before, of course, but people are right when they say that suicide is different. It doesn’t let you grieve. I remember telling the police officer over the phone: “no, I had not noticed any signs of distress.” Maybe if I had been a more sociable person, reached out more, better at relating to others, I would at least have noticed? Perhaps then I would feel entitled to blame myself more. The weirdest part was how I knew I wasn’t supposed to blame myself. And I didn’t. Not because I knew I wasn’t supposed to, but because I didn’t feel entitled to. How am I allowed to grieve when I didn’t even notice?
Somehow, throughout all this, I got shit done. We used to not have a mailing list for students and every email was sent with everyone’s address individually in the cc, which the sender almost always has gotten through someone else’s email chain. This means that if one person’s email address is mistyped at some point, that person will just randomly not get emails for months, which has happened a few times. There was no way else to contact each other either. So I made a mailing list. “UCI does not do mailing lists,” I was told by the then-department manager. “The school sets up mailing lists; I don’t think you can create one yourself,” said others. But I went on the IT website and made a mailing list. The IT person did not think “logic and philosophy of science” was a legitimate department. “We don’t do mailing list for student groups with special interests,” they said. It was hilarious to me and hopefully also to the department chair who emailed to correct the record. On the suggestion by my friend Will, I also made a Slack for the department.
Both of these felt like big achievements back then, to a third-year me who wasn’t sure what I was allowed to do and received no encouragement from anybody with authority. I suppose they are not impressive in the grand scheme of things. We have recently discovered that there has in fact been an “official” mailing list all along. And faculty members who have refused to use my list after repeated urges from me, first by giving them administrative access to the list with a user guide and then by offering to maintain the list for them, insisting on cc’ing individual possibly-misspelt emailing addresses, are using the school list now with no problem. Some students have contemplated kicking Will and I off of our Slack once we graduate, and are surprised that we find this proposal hurtful.
Oh well. My goals were for there to be a mailing list and to be a Slack community. The goals are accomplished. So what am I to complain?
2.
Still in the same year, I got into a big dispute with a central figure in my department with whom I had also wanted to work. I will not talk about the details here but a lot of people were involved — a lot more than I had anticipated. The initial issue was small, but grew bigger and more confusing through extreme (and, in my view, strange) defensiveness on the other party. All I can say is that I was safe and I did nothing wrong. I also wrote pages of prose arguing what I thought was an obvious point three days before I had to hand in papers for qualification. I passed the qualification.
There have been things in the past where I tried my best but, in retrospect, I can see I could have handled it better. This is not one of those cases. Even after numerous revisits, reimagining every counterfactual, reexamining every decision, I still believe that I did everything in the best possible way. Nevertheless, it took me three years to see this not as a source of shame but as an accomplishment. It is still an accomplishment I cannot share.
Still in the same academic year, I organized my first conference with someone from the statistics department. It was on the philosophy of machine learning. Everything about it was a learning experience, and not always a good one. It also took me years to see it as an accomplishment. I remember having 90 people register, panicking over not having enough food or drink, apologizing profusely in advance for not having enough food, only to show up to a room of at most 40-50 people and carry an intense shame for over-promising an audience to speakers the entire time. I remember a speaker, Frederick Eberhardt, came up to me repeatedly during breaks to tell me how amazing he thought the workshop was and how impressed he was at the attendance. That was when I realized that what I had seen as an obvious failure was actually an objective success, and I would be able to see this if only I could see past my warped expectations.
Still in the same academic year, I got into a TA-related dispute, also known as being screwed over for no reason. Because my department doesn’t have a major, we frequently teach at other departments. I taught for the psych department. The prof asked 4 of us TAs to split ourselves for proctoring duty between 2 exams. I was assigned the final. Sometime after the midterm, one TA asked if any of us could cover one of his discussion sessions and he’d offer to cover ours back. I covered his, and told him he could proctor the final for me in return. He agreed. I didn’t show up to the final. The prof emailed me asking why I didn’t show up, and I told him I had an arrangement with this other TA, who apparently also didn’t show up. Prof did not email back, which I thought was an indication that he talked to that other TA, who was a psych student and worked in the prof’s lab. Months later, I discovered that I had received an A- in the “TA class”, which is a for-credit class our school forces all TAs to sign up for that assigns a grade to each of us. Our union has not been happy with the class for awhile, but the administration always ways “but you’ll just get As anyway”. Well, I did not.
3.
The bulk of the (failed attempts of) resolution of this happened over the summer and into my fourth year. First, I emailed the associate dean, who is the one officially assigning the grade, to explain the situation. He gave a bunch of deflective answers and said that he stood by his decision. He even had the audacity to comfort me that an A- would not affect my academic standing. I talked to a union friend who explained that he could help me file a grievance but grading is technically not a work issue and so the chances are low.
Next, I talked to the “graduate division counsellor”, who is a very likable guy that does yoga at grad student mental awareness events and goes out of his way to tell us that we should feel free to contact him about anything. I did feel free and contacted him about this. He was utterly useless. He suggested a total of zero resource for me and seemed discouraging of me going to the ombudsperson’s office, which I only knew existed because my master’s school had one that was good about outreaching (as in: they outreached at all).
The ombudsperson’s office was also useless. The lady probably had a degree in gaslighting. Some time ago I wrote about how we sometimes should resist offering resources as solutions because most such resources are useless. I learned that lesson here.
Having been thoroughly disillusioned about teaching, I took a job at the graduate student writing center. It was the first time in my life where I began to realize I could be good at academic writing. It’s not that I thought I was bad at writing — I’ve just assumed that ESL people like me were graded on a different scale. We could write “well” or “poorly” depending on the accuracy of grammar and spelling and approximation to native speakers. But “good writing” in the sense of good prose exists on a different scale; one which I did not think applied to me. But a faculty member whose interest did not overlap with mine came into my office after the qualification meeting to tell me how impressed he was at one of my papers which I wrote very much last minute and did not edit. I took it to heart. I stopped doubting my writing ability since.
I mentioned earlier that creating the mailing list and the Slack felt like great achievements to me — and they still do, but most of the actual achievements (ones that get written into CVs), happened during my fourth year. My writing center experience helping students with grad school application materials gave rise to the idea of Wonder Philosophy. I don’t remember where the idea of a climate survey came from but I wrote one that year. I was given a grad student researcher position to analyze a school-wide survey the following summer, working with that very associate dean who gave me an A-. I helped a few other women in my department organize a nice and cozy “women and philosophy” workshop which invited women (most of whom alums of the program) to give research talks and then mentorship panels.
I also took a “mentoring excellence” certificate program at grad divisions. It sounded like an awful idea but I have a problem of doing things that sound like awful ideas (we’ll see more of that later). It turned out not to be as completely awful and useless as I thought it would be. In one of the sessions, the Office of Equal Opportunity & Diversity (OEOD) came to give a presentation and the person was pretty cool. I’d off-handedly mentioned that the ombudsperson’s office was useless when I went, and he sought me out afterwards to follow up on what the issue was. I ended up having a meeting with him about it. I don’t think anything “official” was done (since it wasn’t egregious enough or obviously discriminatory) but at least he didn’t try to gaslight me.
4.
Subjectively the hardest time I had was in my fifth year. Objectively it was probably pretty successful by all accounts. Subjectively it was pure hell. Not sure I learned anything from it, either.
I had arranged to visit a big shot prof in the Netherlands. It started on very reasonable grounds: my logician mentor believed it would be beneficial for grad students to visit other schools at some point in their career, especially if the visit would lead to an external reference letter. I invited this prof to the workshop I organized on machine learning and he was impressed. So, we arranged for a visit.
A lot has changed since the workshop, though. The visit was postponed for a year because it turned out to be very complicated for me to get a visa. There was no funding for me, which didn’t pose a real challenge but posed a huge psychological one as I shall explain later. My interests have changed — the reason I organized that workshop at that time was because I would like to know if there is anything in philosophy of machine learning I would like to pursue by inviting experts in the field to talk about what they consider to be important topics. After considering my options, I decided I did not want to go into the field after all. I thought it was a great outcome of a conference. The thing is, though, that I had only connected with that prof through machine learning stuff.
Given all the above, the rational thing to do is probably to cancel the visit. But for some reason it never existed in my mind as an option. All I could think of was that I made a promise and I had to follow through. So I did.
I was miserable the entire time I was there. I cried myself to sleep everyday only to wake up crying through the new day. I would not have survived if my partner wasn’t there to make sure I ate.
The thing is, there wasn’t anything substantive that I could name and complain. I was under an immense amount of shame — for no reason. The problem was also that I knew exactly why I felt that way and why I shouldn’t feel that way, but it didn’t help.
What was going on was this sense that I should not be at a place unless I was specifically desired. In the past I have often chosen not to go to conferences when I was not on the program despite the fact that 1) it was not a financial burden on me; 2) I would very much love to hear those talks, and 3) I imagine the organizers and speakers would love to have a bigger audience. I dread the occasion when someone inevitably asks “are you on the program?” in which case I’d have to say “no, I’m just here for fun”. It’s a strange source of dread since nobody ever minded that I was there just for fun. “No, I paid out of pocket to be here because I can afford it and I enjoy this.” So much shame is attached to this sentiment and for no reason — I’ve never heard of anyone making fun of others for it.
But this is what I had, except 100x as intense. Objectively, I paid to go to a nice country which I’ve always wanted to visit, which I could afford, to potentially talk with interesting people on subjects I used to care about. What could remotely be wrong about that? Subjectively, though, I dreaded every interaction in which anyone might remotely ask why I was there. I thought I would die of shame everyday. I just wanted to get it over with and never think about it again. I still don’t like to think about it, but forcing myself to write about it has been helpful in convincing me that my emotional experience of the whole event was not realistic.
Sometime during my stay there, another nightmare scenario happened. In a way, I was glad that it happened at all and that it happened at a time when I couldn’t have been at a worse place.
I had been working on this paper on sampling for a year. The main point of the paper is that random sampling does not work practically and so we should try something else. Obviously (I thought), the way to go is to look at sample demographics and see how those match up with population demographics. I had planned to do some philosophy about non-epistemic values in demographic selection until I realized that this “obvious” way of doing things wasn’t obvious at all. But how could people not have thought of it? It was so obvious. Besides, random sampling clearly does not work, so someone must have tried something.
It appeared as if no one had tried anything. I read every psychological manual I could find that had a “sampling” section and everywhere I looked it was just two pages on the meaning of random sampling and that’s it. But no sample of humans is ever random! It was the weirdest roller-coaster where one day I’d wake up thinking: this is it; this is how my philosophy makes tangible contributions to science. The next day I’d think: there’s no way it’s such a big problem and yet nobody has thought about an alternative; I must be wrong in thinking that this is a problem.
Sometime when I was in the Netherlands, I found it. I found a series of papers proposing and working out an alternative based on just the idea I had, except with a lot more statistics than I knew.
It was simultaneously validating (I wasn’t crazy in thinking there was a problem) and exhausting (would I have to work through this in every future project). I rewrote the entire paper and submitted it to a journal. What’s the worst that could happen? The worst has already happened.
5.
My fifth year was also the year I went on the job market for the first time, but that’s not exactly why it was hard. I had always been very lucky in my immediate philosophy circles — if I were not, I wouldn’t be here (this is partly why I think about attributing success to luck and hard work the way I do). It just so happens that I met many great friends throughout the journey and people are generally very supportive of me.
I have, of course, been very aware of the fact that this was an anomaly. Many of my friends in the same circle do not feel as supported as I do, let alone horror stories I’ve heard from elsewhere. I suppose I have always just thought of those things as happening “elsewhere”, to “other people”. I’m glad to help other people deal with them, but ultimately I’m only “helping”.
Being on the job market was draining in a variety of unexpected ways. One such way is that, to make yourself appealing, you have to imagine vividly what it’s like to work at that particular place so you can make a convincing case for why they should want you, all while knowing that, as a matter of fact, even if you make it to the final round of interviews, your odds are lower than 1/3. I have always dealt with disappointment through denial of expectation and so I was especially bad at this kind of practice.
Another one such way is that, as you branch out and meet new people and start (forcing yourself) to imagine what it’s like working at various places, you realize that those things that used to happen elsewhere and to other people are not actually that far away. The people on Daily Nous who think philosophy doesn’t have a gender/race problem or that whatever discrepancy there may be is all due to natural discrepancy in philosophical talent or interest, the people who piled on that one person who suggested that mass hiring in the form of five white men and one white woman was something worthy of raised eyebrows … aren’t going away just because I stopped reading Daily Nous. In fact, they hold the keys to my dream. If they do not, others do. And those others may not agree with them, but what they don’t agree with more is me having a lot of opinions about them.
Frankly speaking, I can live with that. I’ve always had trouble relating to people around me — in fact, grad school was the first time in my life where I didn’t have that trouble. I’m okay with it. If I wasn’t, I would’ve quit. I suppose some part of it is the surprising discovery of the proximity of “it” to me which, in retrospect, really shouldn’t have been all that surprising.
The job season was a bad season as job season have been since 2008. It wasn’t as bad as the pandemic one that followed it but this somehow made it worse. When there is a pandemic, the pandemic explains all. But when there isn’t, your competency is back on the table, and any conclusion you draw carries the threat of generalization. Within my immediate circles, three Chinese women got to the final on-campus stage of the interview for (three different) TT jobs, in which all three thought they performed quite well and felt they were strong contenders. All three jobs went to white men. But what can I say? I’m sure there are individual reasons for each case. It’s a numbers game after all. Maybe all three women were just all over-confident in their judgments. Trends don’t exist anyway.
6.
As my (unsuccessful) job season came to an end, my paper which I wrote in the depth of hell in the Netherlands was recommended for publication with minor revisions. I know peer review is often criticized for its arbitrariness and how you shouldn’t base your self worth on other people’s feedback, but I do anyway. I find it easier to stop myself questioning other people’s judgment than it is to stop myself questioning my own. If Other People think something is good, it must be good.
In retrospect, a lot about that paper was done sub-optimally: it was not organized very well; I didn’t have to do that much historical reconstruction; I definitely undersold my own ideas. But that’s okay. There’s something about the fact that it wasn’t the best I could possibly make it to be that added value to the high approvals from two strangers. That it was possible for me to think of something other people have not thought of before and for that thing to have value is just such a strange revelation. I can trust myself because other people seem to trust me.
In the mean time, of course, the world has gone to shit. I suppose the world has been going to shit for awhile and it’s not like nobody noticed, but it still feels quite shitty dealing with the ramifications. And since I have always been lucky, I have not actually developed skills to deal with this. But that’s okay. I have a degree in developing new skills now.
I’ve always thought it unfortunate that we don’t get to read (positive) references of us. I tend to think that appreciations don’t really work unless the person being appreciated is aware of it. Or I’m just bad at imagining other people’s mental states, which is also true. In any case, I’d like to share my acknowledgement page if it’s not an infringement on my school library’s copyrights.
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