6 lessons I learned during grad school

things Past Haley likes to remind Present Day Haley of a lot lately

Hi friend,

I’ve been compiling notes on this type of essay for a while, and I hope it’ll be the first of many short essays about the things I learned in graduate school, as a student of literature for over 10 years.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve seen quite a lot of back-to-school posts where people have been reflecting on the things they wish they could have known before they began their graduate work.

It made me wonder what I’d tell myself in 2011 — the year I started my master’s degree — if I could go back in time and catch her for a cup of coffee before her first day on Oregon State’s campus.

But then I thought about how often I wish I could go back to the 2011 and 2012 and 2013 versions of me again. She was really smart and brave and ballsy and cool, in ways that, ten years later, sometimes feel hard to access.

So, instead of thinking about the wisdoms that Present Day Me could impart on Past Me, I thought about what Past Haley might want to rush to the present to remind me she already knows.

Maybe you’ll hold onto a few of these for yourself or maybe my list will inspire you to try creating your own. Either way — here is the first installment in a long list of “things I learned as a student of literature.”

1) “Where’s the fire?”

My college roommate and very dear friend Nat used to saunter into the Honors Program study space in the afternoons, when all our English and philosophy classes were done for the day. She’d take in the scene of frantic students, frazzled study sessions, and anxious chatter with a sigh. She’d look at me, sitting behind the main desk where I worked part-time, as she sunk into the giant green armchair across from me: “Jesus,” she’s smirk, “Where’s the fire?”

Nat was never in a hurry. She was that friend who, when I invited her on a Sunday morning hike, would show up with a water-damaged paperback copy of Rumi poems and a paper bag full of half-smashed raspberries. Ten minutes into our hike, she’d wander off the path to make a daisy chain or read a poem or breathe in the mountain air, remarking on how she could smell the sage in it.

She reminded me, over and over again as I panicked and worried over my future, “Where’s the fire?”

Her point was: babe, you’re not on fire.

Her point was: slow down. It’ll be okay. Take your shoes off and collect a few wildflowers on the way.

2) Ideas need time.

I had a professor during my PhD who told me that he and his partner got in disagreements all the time about what constituted true “writing time.” She argued it was only when you were sat at your desk writing that you were actually writing.

He argued, however, that even when he was playing a game or jogging that his brain was working on ideas — he was “writing” even when he wasn’t “writing.”

After a few hours of playing Tetris or watching re-runs, he could show up for his next writing session filled with ideas—and ready to put down what processed in the background on the page. He taught me to give myself time to process the enormous world of ideas I was encountering in the literature and to give my subconscious the breaks it needed, for video games or exercise or pizza at the bar, so my ideas could grow without being forced into shape.

3) When you have writer’s block, read.

Every single time — I really mean every single time — that I’ve been stuck in a writing project, reading gets me through it.

It can be almost anything, but a great piece of cultural criticism or literary analysis does the trick most reliably, even if (especially if?) it’s about a completely unrelated topic. Seeing how someone else shapes their ideas, forms an argument, gets to a point…all of it helps me shake the cobwebs off of whatever has started to settle and reminds me that I can take any direction I want with my next move.

(This process actually reminds me of a favorite board game, which makes literal the process of building and establishing, then dismantling whatever you’ve just created, so you can keep moving up in wisdom and knowledge.)

4) All-nighters are worth it.

I had a lot of guilt about pulling all-nighters to get my work done, especially during my PhD. I felt like if I needed an all-nighter in the library, I had wasted my time during the day. I fretted that I was setting myself up for a weak immune system or that my work would be worse depending on the time I wrote it.

But writing through the night is a really sacred experience for me. During my MA program, it was truly the only time my world was completely still and silent. It was the only time I could be wholly alone with my thoughts. And it was the only way I could ever read all the Henry James my advisor kept assigning me.

Plus, a mug of hot black drip coffee at 2am absolutely slaps.

5) Find peers you trust.

During a particularly difficult semester, I struggled to come up with a good thesis for a final paper. One day, over coffee with people from class, I casually threw out an idea I had been taking notes on. It was just an inkling of an idea. I told them I felt it was loose, but could work as a starting point.

A woman across the table lit up. She asked if it would be okay if she ran with the idea, too. She felt stuck and she “really liked” what I said and felt “inspired” by my reading.

I was stunned someone would openly ask to take my idea and use it as their own, but I also felt put on the spot; maybe it didn’t matter, because I shared the idea so casually. I stammered a half response: “I mean, if you have something to say about it, that’s okay, I guess?”

The next week, she took my idea to our professor and pitched it as her paper’s thesis — but, when they asked her to explain more about the idea, she couldn’t. She abandoned the idea and joked about it over lunch, shrugging at me and the rest of our peers and saying the idea must’ve not been that good, after all, if the professor hated it so much.

I sat there, stunned once more, feeling confused and upset. I had to start my final paper all over, from scratch, with a different idea and totally new direction.

After that experience, I learned not to casually toss out ideas with the larger group until I felt more sure of how I wanted to develop the ideas—and had practiced how I’d respond the next time someone asked to take one of my ideas as their own. Yes, it happened again, and I didn’t stammer when I said no.

(For any students out there: if you’re in a writing or study group that has dynamics anything like what I’ve described, please leave that group immediately!)

6) It’s okay to ask for help.

When I was twenty years old, I read The Death of a Salesman for the first time and something in the story broke me into a million pieces.

I was absolutely shattered by the ending, which I was asked to write about in a philosophy and literature class. We were studying capitalist and Marxist theories, and Willy Loman was teaching me something about life that I did not want to think about. Did not want to consider. Could not muster any clarity to write about.

And so, for the first time in my life, I didn’t get my homework done on time.

The day before a short essay on the play was due to my professor, I nervously went to her office hours—the first office hours I had ever attended. I thought office hours were for people who were failing or couldn’t keep up or who couldn’t do things on their own; I didn’t think they were for me. I was so wrong.

My professor’s door was slightly ajar as I timidly knocked. She looked up from her desk and welcomed me in. She asked why I was there that day, and I peeped out in the quietest voice that I was having trouble writing about Willy Loman. I anxiously twisted the three and a half page draft I’d come up with in my hands, embarrassed to show her how little I’d been able to do, even though I’d had all week to work on the essay. I remember being very shaky and teary-eyed as I said, “I think I might need some extra time, if that’s okay?”

“Of course!” she said, and she gestured to the mangled draft in my hands. “Are those your notes? Can I see?” She had a small, round table with chairs set up in front of her desk and she pointed both of her arms at it, and then grabbed a sharp pencil from a mug with dozens of sharp pencils in it and invited me to sit down.

I spread the pages out and she nodded, pulling the mess toward her on the table: “I’m going to read for a minute. Okay if I take notes?” Her pencil was positioned at the ready. I nodded and looked out the large window behind her, terrified that I’d get in trouble or be reprimanded for falling behind.

She read, nodding and wincing and grimacing, slicing sentences in half and then using her pencil to circle and draw arrows and link paragraphs pages apart with a long dotted line.

“So,” she said after reading for several long and silent minutes, as I peeled at my fingernails in agony, “there are a few things here. But what’s going on? You feel stuck?”

She didn’t look mad or upset or worried. She just looked curious.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I’m just really stuck. I don’t know what to write about,” and I started to trail off as she looked at me, a bit skeptical.

Then, a big sob choked in my throat. “I don’t know why he has to die.” I started to cry.

“Ah, there we go,” I remember her saying. “It’s so sad, isn’t it? But what a fantastic question to ask.” she said, handing me a tissue box. “Why does he have to die?”

She wrote the question across the top page of my draft.

I left her office an hour later with a clear outline, sketched on the back of my draft, where the point was not to answer the question, but to explore it. She gave me the freedom to believe that it wasn’t my job to unravel what felt like an impossible mystery, but to grapple with it. To ask questions about it. To closely read it and see what I found when I looked closer and closer.

Going and asking for her help that day, and admitting that I didn’t have all the answers, and hearing someone I respected tell me that knowing all the answers wasn’t the point changed something inside me forever.

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to learn more about the lessons I learned in grad school, let me know in the comments. My notebook pages are brimming with so many memories and it’s been very tender and magical to revisit parts of my past I haven’t normally paid much attention to. It’s really a gift to feel like it’s safe to share it here with you.

‘Til next time, happy reading.