The Grad School Diaries: Barry’s Cross-Time Paradox

In East Lansing, as in most college towns, I suppose, the first sign of spring isn’t a groundhog failing to see his shadow, or a handsome brown-and-red bird looking for food, or even a small purple flower sprouting bravely through the snow; it’s the arrival of applicants looking for admission the following fall. In the Business School each department has its own procedures (and traditions); in Management we start seeing and hearing from applicants in person during the early months of the winter/spring semester. This was news to me, of course, since my admission appears to have been up in the air until the last moment – I was still having telephone interviews the week before I had to commit to a graduate program. But then I’m definitely what you’d call a “non-traditional” student; unlike most of the people who have gone through the doctoral program I’ve already spent two decades in corporate America, lived and died through an endless series of mergers and acquisitions, and hustled just to stay alive. There have been older Ph.D. students in the Management department; there’s at least one of them now. But as my beloved wife is fond of observing, “It’s not the age, it’s the mileage…” And I’ve been down more miles of bad road than most…

This has never been more clear to me than it is now, meeting a half-dozen shiny new candidate for admission to the doctoral program. A few of them have some years of their own, but most of them look and sound as young as they actually are, and they seem very earnest as they listen to what the current corps of students has to tell them about life at MSU. It was while I was listening to the various grad students in our department talking about their own experiences that I was first struck by how much those present and the process we are all navigating resembles a river. On any given day there will be students ranging from first to fifth years in the program, and while those individuals flow through like individual drops of water, the course of the river itself changes only very slowly over time…

One day soon, if all goes well, I will be in the second or third year; five years from now I should be gone altogether. And perhaps next year the students we are meeting with will be in the First Year, filling in behind us as we move on. Somewhere out there in America the students who came before us are reaching the end of their careers and preparing for retirement, and elsewhere there are children being born who may – twenty-five or thirty years hence – be sitting where we are sitting now. Collectively, we will (hopefully!) advance the discipline we have come here to study, before we pass into history and are remembered only in a series of peer-reviewed articles and by our own students, assuming we ever have any. Becoming part of a great continuity of students and teachers, never ending or beginning, as we voyage slowly toward a greater understanding of the quirky science that dominates our lives…

As previously noted, several authors have made reference to a metaphorical River of Time that carries us from the headwaters of our birth to our eventual end in the ocean – the great equalizer, the one true democracy that awaits us all. American Humorist Dave Barry, in particular, also notes that with the right equipment, the right decision made at the right time – in his case, an electric guitar that he bought instead of something much more sensible – it’s possible to paddle against the current in the River of Time. Or, at least, to hold your position for a while…

It’s certainly not the ONLY reason I’m doing this, of course. It’s also about finding a new way, since my old ones aren’t working anymore; about finally standing up to my shortcomings and finding out if I’m really all of the things they tell me I am, or if that was just an illusion, too. It’s about character, and courage, and all of the intangibles that a man my age has usually worked out. But part of it, beyond question, is my last, best chance to swim against the current and see where I end up. It’s just a rare event when you can see the whole course of the River reaching out before you – and in this case, behind as well. I’ve come a long way since last summer – and I’m just getting warmed up…