The Grad School Diaries: Introduction

Starting this week I’m going to be posting an occasional series of reflections, complaints, rants, ravings, epiphanies, bad jokes, social/political commentary and occasional running gags that collectively represent my notes for a work in progress, tentatively called The Grad School Diaries, chronicling my time in this very odd passage known as graduate school. It’s a departure from our regular content, which is (usually) business-related and attempts to be a fair, balanced, or at least interesting view of topics which come up in that context – except that the doctoral program in which I find myself is a business school, and that colors everything else about this experience…

If anyone is still reading this blog, I invite you to leave me a comment (using the comments function, below) and let me know what you think. If you don’t want your comment published, just indicate that and I’ll delete it after I read it. I don’t pretend that I will have anything especially profound to say about the process in question; I also can’t promise that the persona you will encounter in these ramblings will be any closer to the “real” me than the narrative “voice” you’ve come to know over the last 300-plus short essays. But that said, I have noticed a few things during the first year of this journey that I think might be worth listening to – and part of keeping a web log is that you don’t ever know who might be listening…

So let’s start with projections, since (if anybody is actually out there) somebody is probably already projecting their feelings about going back to school and/or changing careers in early middle age onto me right now. I had no clear expectations when I began this mad quest; getting a Ph.D. was never a particular dream of mine, nor was being a professor or even a teacher. For years I shied away from (ran away and hid from, if you want the truth) the idea of becoming a teacher, saying I didn’t have the patience. And yet, nearly every management job in the world involves teaching people how to do something, and coaching them on how to do it better – and I love the manager’s role; I always have. When you consider that I have been curious about absolutely everything for as long as I can remember, and that I really enjoy watching the (metaphorical) light bulb come on over someone’s head when you teach them something, it seems likely that I really should have figured out that I wanted to do this earlier than I did…

It was only after coming here, settling into this new role, and trying to make it in one of the best strategic management programs in the world that I came face-to-face with the real reason I’ve hidden from this for so long. It has been said that the only thing I’m arrogant about is my intellect; I try not to be that way, but I grew up with everyone telling me what a genius I'm supposed to be, and I suppose I have developed sort of a blind spot in that I don't really believe anything is impossible if you have enough time (and are willing to put in the effort). I’ve refused to do things, decided that some things were too much work, convinced myself that some things are not worth the years of effort it would take me to accomplish them, even employed the “jock” thought pattern of dismissing anything that does not interest me as “stupid” – but I never really believed I could fail at anything if I tried hard enough. Eventually it occured to me that I was just avoiding any challenge I couldn't easily overcome…

Until now, that is. Over the course of these ramblings you are going to learn a lot more about the motivations and thought processes that brought me to this place, but let me just admit up front that one part was finally confronting my own intellectual laziness, and realizing that if I didn’t take this chance I was going to die a mid-level manager who never accomplished anything beyond thinking some relatively deep thoughts, dreaming some naïve adolescent dreams, and making a few snarky comments on business topics as one of 100,000,000 bloggers nobody ever reads…