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"'Cause I've seen a lotta hot, hot blazes/
burn down to smoke and ash."--Joni Mitchell

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A LETTER FROM YOUR HOSTESS

Dear Fellow Phoenixes,

Welcome to a site designed especially for you, by a graduate student who knows precisely what you're going through right now -- because she's been there herself.

Want to know more about the mission and raison d'etre of this site? Read on.

ROLL CALL

What do Joan Bolker (psychologist and writing counselor), Rudolph Byrd (professor), David Duchovny (television and film personality), Evelyn Ellerman (professor and founding coordinator of the Communication Studies program at Athabasca University), David Filo (Yahoo! Inc. co-founder), Barney Frank (U.S. Congressman and Democratic bulldog), Larry Gonick (cartoonist and author), Green Velvet (underground musician), David Hall (professor and historian of American religion), bell hooks (professor and theorist), Erica Jong (iconic writer) Evelyn Fox Keller (physicist and historian of science), Barbara Kingsolver (Pulitzer Prize-nominated novelist), Andrea Lee (journalist and fiction writer), Barbara Lovitts (sociologist and corporate and educational consultant), Vonda McIntyre (sci-fi doyenne), Bill Steinberg (Memphis Flyer financial columnist), Jerry Yang (Yahoo! Inc. CEO and co-founder), and scores of other intelligent and successful people all have in common?

Each was a full-time student in a Ph.D. program, and each experienced a temporary or permanent interruption in her or his doctoral studies en route to the degree.

For some of these folks, the decision to either temporarily 'stop out' of or permanently withdraw from his/her degree program was her/his own -- a choice that each made for reasons as unique as his/her individual personality and circumstances.

For others, the leave of absence or withdrawal came as a result of university or departmental decree: having failed to master a required language, fumbled a required course or courses, botched a set of exams, bungled a dissertation proposal or prospectus, fallen short of timely completion of the dissertation, or proven unable to mount a convincing dissertation defense, these folks found their graduate school careers stalled or terminated in accordance with official rules.

Within both groups of leavetakers, forced and unforced, there were many who eventually returned to the same department -- either overcoming ennui and rediscovering desire (in situations in which leavetaking had been voluntary), or petitioning their universities and departments for readmission (in situations in which leavetaking had been ordered).

Some others found that an unvanquished determination to earn a doctorate was not mated with a desire to return to the same institution. Those in this number applied to other schools, undertaking fresh doctoral studies there once admitted. (Note: At least one of the famous folks listed above actually went through this 'new beginning' process more than once!)

And still others took the advice of the immortal Satchel Paige -- i.e. "Don't look back; they might be gaining on you" -- to heart. Whatever the initial reasons for the interruption of their studies, these brave souls packed their bags and lit out for territory all their own -- often moving into fields that, while completely removed from academia, were nonetheless fertile ground for the intellectual skills they'd developed and honed in graduate school.

All of these disparate paths, certainly, characterize a wide variety of 'graduate school drop out' circumstances and outcomes -- outcomes that disprove that the wide-spread belief that either taking time off from graduate school or quitting it altogether forever brands a person 'inferior,' both inside and outside of the Academy.

Look at the names above again. Can you tell -- from the career outcomes in parentheses -- which person took which path? That is to say, do you think that not even one of those eminent professors could have been booted from a doctoral program? That no one who anticipated taking one of the non-academic paths listed above would have gone back to grad school to complete a stalled program? That none of the incredibly focused and driven individuals listed above could ever have had a false start? Think again.

SO WHAT?

The bottom line is that each of the former graduate students listed above crafted a great, lasting, and enormously personally-satisfying success story out of the 'ashes' that were the beginnings of her or his graduate school career. Literary laurels and Emmy nominations; endowed chairs and MacArthur 'Genius Grants'; outlaw chic and hero/ine status; beautiful families and loving friends; strong businesses; immortal theories; canonized books. Dropping out, stopping out, or flat-out getting kicked out did not keep those above from 'making good' -- even on the tenure tracks of Academia itself.

"It's very well to show me how the great and good rebounded after crashing and burning in graduate school," you may be saying, "but what about me? Exactly how can I rebuild my own life after taking a leave, withdrawing, or being required to withdraw from a doctoral program?"

The question, my friend, is not if such things are possible for average slobs like you and me, but instead what resources we must access in order to re-chart our paths after ennui, burn-out, or the axe have either halted or hindered our graduate careers.

Unfortunately, my fairly exhaustive web searches for a page, link list, or online guide that provides just such resources have yielded a sad truth: namely, that there are no such resources for stalled graduate students on the web. There are fabulous sites to help graduate students who, still fully-engaged in the process of graduate school, are having trouble surmounting hurdles like the dissertation or sets of exams. (The pioneer in this area is the nonpareil web site PhinisheD. Founded by grad-student-sympathizer Amy Bellinger and now beautifully maintained by Webmaster Tom Jankowski, Ph.D., this exquisitely-well-run site may very well be the best ABD resource on the web.) Likewise, there are also several excellent sites for those fully-enrolled students who have decided -- often, after much soul-searching -- to leave Academe once they have completed their graduate studies. But there are no sites dedicated to students who are leaving or pausing their graduate education.

Hence, this site -- my own attempt to rectify the dearth of web resources for stopped-out, dropped-out, or kicked-out graduate students.

I hope that this little corner of the web will provide succor, companionship, and practical advice to any wayward graduate student whose weary soul, fried brain, battered ego, and murdered innocence coexist with a willingness to build a new and better life atop the scorched earth of an arrested or truncated graduate career.

So dry those tears, search the ashes for an unburnt chair, and come join the circle as we put our heads together to rebuild your life. You CAN rise again.

With Affection,
Your Fellow Traveler, "Carine Bichet"