Academic Courtship

We have reached the time of year. Winter has begun to thaw. Birds renew their perky morning songs and wake everyone up at the break of dawn...dissertations are in the air.

My fellow master’s students and I have been dreading our dissertations like an approaching junior high dance when Jimmy Baker asks arch frienemy Lindsey Arnold even though every day in pre-algebra you have been staring determinately at the back of his head, willing him to turn around and ask for a pencil. Choosing the topic that will define your professional specialization is nothing compared to the agony and potential public rejection of selecting a dissertation advisor. The experience is teenage dating angst all over again.

After spending months in class with a professor, you are still left with all those too familiar uncertainties: “Does the professor like me enough to want to see me over and over again into the summer?” “Does she remember the time when I confused Hamas with Hummus?” “Does he even know who I am?”

Worse is when that one professor who would be perfect for your dissertation is not one who is leading a class. After admiring from afar and after pouring over the potential mentor’s publications and theories, a moment to converse finally arises and you hope beyond anything that your comments exceed the academic equivalent of saying, “I like cheese” in the dating arena.

Whether the professor is personally known is practically irrelevant to the amount of nervousness that builds when having to ask that all important question, “Will you be my dissertation advisor?” That request has all the pitfalls of that ultimate, “Will you go out with me?”

And just like that dating black hole of insecurity, possible answers of “I’m already advising as many students as I can handle” or “I don’t think your topic really aligns with my expertise” or “I don’t think it will work; our research styles are just too different” could drive any hardworking student to the anonymousness of online degrees.

The litany of possible rejections is enough to reconsider career choices and opt for gardening instead.