Perseverance and a PhD

Pushing through when we come up short.

Back in 2012, I took a job as an intern. It was a great opportunity, but it meant living away from home for a year. I worked hard, learned a lot, and when the year was over, I felt I was saying goodbye to some of the best people I'd ever met. During the final week, we parted ways, and shared hugs and going-away gifts. One of the gifts I received was a motivational calendar. You know the kind - it's basically a stack of post-its for every day of the year, and each page has a different motivational quote on it along with a pretty picture.

The calendar remained tucked away in a moving box for some time until I found it and started tearing through the pages a day at a time. In the fall of 2015, I turned the page and read that day's quote:

Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did.

Sometimes you come across things in life that, for whatever reason, connect with you in just the right way. This was that moment. I had been enrolled as a doctoral student for an embarrassing 10 years and couldn't seem to wrap up my dissertation. I had entered into the dreaded slow death that all doctoral students fear. It even has a name - All But Dissertation. Despite acing all my classes, doing thousands of hours of clinical work, moving to a different state to complete an internship, putting off having a family, and racking up a hefty tuition bill, I had been ABD since 2013 and had burned through my last drops of patience many months ago. More days than not, I wanted to throw my hands in the air and give up. There were only a hundred pages of research between me and a PhD but it might as well have been a million.

I found renewed motivation when I read that quote, and I promised myself that I wouldn't turn the page to read the next day's quote until I had finished my dissertation. If this were a Hollywood movie, I would cut to the scene where the protagonist has a sudden burst of positive energy, and rapidly moves through an entire year's worth of productivity in a minute-long montage of cool scenes of midnight coffee-drinking, typing furiously on a MacBook, and staying up all hours of the night to get it done! All overlaid with an awesome soundtrack, of course.

Let me go ahead and say that's definitely not what happened. Here I am in 2017 and I'm still trying to finish my degree. I kept true to my promise, and haven't turned the page in that calendar in over a year. It's still stuck on the same old page, same old quote.

I keep the calendar on my desk and look at it every day for strength. I'm still plugging away on my degree, and I don't take for granted that the greatest accomplishments in life don't always feel rewarding when you're in the middle of achieving them. I don't think the giver of the calendar could have conceived of how important their gift has been to me over the past year. But to me it is a small treasure. I am looking forward to earning my degree this year, but I admit that I am more excited at the prospect of turning the page and reading what comes next.

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