Proud Not to Be PhD

My Journey in English Academia

Every Sunday afternoon in the 3rd grade, sometime after lunch, my mom would drop me off at the old playground tire-swing, waiting by the sandbox with my little brother while I traveled to fairyland. That tire swing, bearing the weight of my two best friends and my imagination, transported us into another world—the fantasy world I had cooked up at eight years old that was the backdrop to the many whimsical stories I would tell my friends. 

Ever since the age of 4, I’ve wanted to be a writer. My piles of composition notebooks, populated with penciled thoughts and stories, documented the progression of my imagination over the first decade of my life. As I got older, swapping the realms of fairies and wizards for more mature representations of our reality, I transitioned to exploring more realistic fiction and fell in love with the classics that mark our robust literary history. 

Thus I became a reader and a writer, yet as I transitioned into high school, reality smacked me in the face as it dawned on me that being a writer might not be the most stable career for my future. I would sit around in math class panicked, unable to envision a profession for myself that would allow me to effortlessly provide for my future family until, transitioning out of my thirteen-year-old Jodi Picoult phase and picking up Jane Austen and Kurt Vonnegut—two of the earliest literary beasts that propelled my love of literature—I began to envision myself in a professorial setting, lecturing on Jane Austen’s use of free indirect discourse in Sense and Sensibility and Vonnegut’s stunning political acuity in Harrison Bergeron. Perhaps I could apply my writerly prowess to a professorship in English literature. 

By the end of high school, I had zoomed through virtually the entire English literary canon, reading more books than any of my English teachers. I was set on becoming an English professor. Yet the moment I stepped foot on campus to begin my academic journey, I sensed that something was wrong. I knew that so much of being a professor was fostering connections, yet I found myself unable to mesh personality-wise with the overwhelming majority of my department, gravitating instead to folks in the economics and hard sciences, who seemed more pragmatic and sensible than their literary counterparts. That was strange. I had never felt at home in math classes. I had always been told that I was idealistic, but was I not idealistic enough to thrive in academia? I brushed these thoughts aside as I studied for the GRE, prepared my personal statements and rec letters, and upon college graduation, braced myself for a smooth transition as an English literature graduate student at Columbia University. 

Immediately, in grad school, I felt the same premonition I had experienced at the start of college—I did not fit into this environment. I was too practical, too systematic, perhaps, to thrive on an interplay of ideas wholly disconnected from reality. Just as I had discovered through the progression of my composition notebooks, my relationship with fantasy had eventually found itself more grounded in reality, and I lived for tangible ideas and empirical facts. Perhaps this made me an outlier in the literary world, but coming from an immigrant background—with parents from the USSR who had suffered under the socialist system—I was substantially to the right of my graduate cohort, all of whom equated literature with socialism, though I’d always considered myself a liberal. I didn’t agree with Marx’s interplay of ideas separated from the dictates of human nature, and I certainly did not see a connection between studying Marx and understanding the English literary tradition—at least, not to the extent that Marx was pushed in my English classrooms. To me, literature was not a vehicle for social activism, nor should it have been. I had always seen literature, rather, as a unique window into human nature, tackling questions of the human experience that were far more fundamental than political divisions. Yet I met not a single student or professor in my cohort who shared my views and felt directionless as a result. 

Around that time, I also began to come out of my shell—I reveled in reading, but I understood that literature is not created in a vacuum; as any great writer might tell you, experiencing the world is a core prerequisite to making insightful observations about it on the page. I was certainly a lot more extroverted than the average bookworm and needed people around me to thrive; as an English grad student, on the other hand, the bulk of my work entailed me shutting myself up in my claustrophobic dorm room and writing sentences about nothing in particular. I began to experiment with several of my new convictions both in class and through homework assignments, rebelling against the history of literary criticism, which I perceived as heavily influenced by left-wing ideology, and soon learned that my professors did not look kindly on some of my hot takes. By then, friendless and isolated amidst a group of 30 graduate English students who addressed one another as “comrade,” I began to suspect that 17-year-old Liza, who had once set her eyes on becoming a professor of English literature, had made a grave mistake. 

After finishing up my MA thesis in the midst of the pandemic, I walked away from my graduate study with a Master’s Degree in hand and no set course of action after setting myself up to be an English professor for the past ten years of my life. And I felt, for the first time in my life, that I was at peace with my decision. I had dispelled the cloud of premonition that had been hanging over me for the past 5 years ever since I stepped foot on campus. Leaving behind the fantasy world of academic life and entering the bustle of the real world, I knew that finally I would thrive. 

So where am I now? I’m working on a few different ventures: I spread the love of literature through my literary project Pens and Poison and I teach teenagers how to write through my college consulting company Invictus Prep. I am working on a novel that I hope will immortalize the imagination of that little girl on the tire swing—and I am proud to say that I am not an English PhD.