I’ve been checking in with some of the first-year Ph.D.s I know, seeing how they’re holding up. They’re all uniformly dazed at this point in the semester. They want to know if it’s just them, if it’s always like this. It reminds me of a dinner last summer, when a friend who’s finishing up her master’s asked, “What was your worst semester of graduate school?” And I immediately answered, “First semester of Ph.D. work. No question.”

I am very interested in the fact that this came out of my mouth, and that I still think it’s accurate. This would mean that (for me, anyway), the first semester of Ph.D. courses was more traumatic than doing a master’s thesis on a topic which I was the only subject expert in the department, (expert being an extremely relative term). No running to your committee with questions in that situation — it’s all you, baby. And it was more traumatic than a semester in which I broke my ankle, had major surgery to insert various titanium whatnots to put it back together, and was stuck in the apartment for six weeks straight, all while keeping up with coursework and teaching. I’ve felt very supported and been very happy in this department, but I still feel this way. This seems quite bizarre to me, but not necessarily all that odd. Judging from what I hear from others who lived through first semesters, this is not an uncommon opinion. Professors who have been past that semester for decades still remember it.

I’ve heard the whole process likened to hazing, and I think ... yes and no. Hazing, in the traditional sense, requires you to perform an extraordinary feat. Ph.D. work isn’t asking you to do that. What it does ask you to do is to, right from the moment you step in the door, act like a grown-up, functional academic. Of course you don’t know how to do this — that’s why you’re in a Ph.D. program in the first place. But if you’re smart enough to be there, you’re smart enough to figure out how to do it.

There are three sets of pressures in play at this point: The department wants to see if you can figure it out, because if you can’t then they need to spend their funding on someone who can. The discipline is depending on the department to do a decent job of gate-keeping and training, which translates to the pressures you feel to present and publish without embarrassing yourself or anyone you’re associated with. And there are the pressures you inflict on yourself — at this point, most likely in the form of the worst sort of imposter syndrome*.

You have to find a way to deal with all of this, and to teach and research and produce all at the same time. If you’ve been a practitioner all this time, you have to find a way to deal with theory. Because all of that’s what real, grown-up academics do. And the process of figuring all this out is painful, and ridden with trial and error. You drown until you learn to breathe underwater.

So all you readers who are feeling bereft because you’re not doing PhDs, and all of you who are thinking about it: that’s what you would have to live through. And to those of you who are in the throes of it now: it does get better. The imposter syndrome fades, the brain-training routine kicks in, you get to know your way around. You get to know people. If academic work is what you really want to do, it’s worth it. But you never forget your first semester.

*And if you’ve moved a substantial distance to work in a program, then you have the additional problems of not knowing anybody and not knowing your way around the city or the campus. It’s easy to feel very alone and lost at times.