How might we imagine the tenure track in ways that account both for individual preference and for societal impact? How might a Ph.D. in Philosophy learn to embrace (and maybe even love) new ways of thinking about being a philosopher? What are some ways the entire landscape for Ph.D.s is changing, and how might graduate students best navigate these changes?

Join Barry Lam *07 and Ph.D. student Hellen Wainaina for an engaging and personal conversation about the ways they are rethinking what a Ph.D. can be. You'll be encouraged to center your own strengths, values, and preferences, and you'll hear firsthand about how the ways academia values public scholarship is changing--and why it must!

 

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Hosted by Princeton graduate student Hellen Wainaina, the GradFUTURES podcast centers on the futures of PhDs: both those in training at Princeton, and Princeton graduate alums who are in and beyond academia. The podcast is shaping new narratives about success with a Ph.D. by telling the professional development stories of graduate students, graduate alums, and those who partner and collaborate with them. 

The podcast is available on a range of platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, and Pocket Casts.

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Transcript: 

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;45;29

Eva Kubu

Welcome to the GradFUTURES Podcast, produced and hosted by graduate students at the Graduate School at Princeton University. I'm Eva Kubu, Associate Dean for Professional Development. We're on a mission to shape new narratives about professional success with a Ph.D. to help graduate students everywhere envision and create their futures. Thank you for listening and subscribing.

Hellen Wainaina

I'm your host, Hellen Wainaina, a new media fellow at the Graduate School and a Ph.D. student in the Department of English at Princeton.

00;00;46;01 - 00;01;19;05

Hellen Wainaina

Barry Lam received his B.A. in Philosophy and English at the University of California, Irvine, in 2001 and defended his Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton University in 2006. Barry was previously an associate professor of philosophy at Vassar College and has recently moved to UC Riverside as a professor of philosophy. He produces a story driven podcast about philosophy called Hi-Phi Nation, which has received critical acclaim in The Guardian, Huffington Post and Indiewire.

00;01;19;08 - 00;01;54;24

Hellen Wainaina

Barry, thank you so much for being here. I'm really happy to be here, Hellen. I mean, so we've already had this conversation, and this is a recording, and I don't know if it's like a stroke of good luck or misfortune that the first audio is unrecoverable. But I thought I might just as well use this opportunity to take a break from the format that this podcast was taking shape in and the direction that it was going in and sort of do a kind of introduction.

00;01;54;27 - 00;02;28;03

Hellen Wainaina

I thought that this conversation might actually serve as a great opportunity for that. As you podcast or yourself, and that this might be a conversation of introduction. So to who you are, to who I am, which the listeners actually don't know very much about me. And, and to your work and sort of this convoluted conversation around inside, outside academia and what this podcast for the GradFUTURES program is intended to do.

00;02;28;07 - 00;02;57;03

Barry Lam

So you got to introduce yourself. I have to introduce myself.

Hellen

And so yeah, I'm Hellen. I'm a Ph.D. student in English. I am African. I my family came to the United States when I was ten years old, and my sort of introduction to the academic world has been a radical departure from what a lot of the women in my family have been able to do in their lives.

00;02;57;03 - 00;03;19;21

Barry Lam

And so say, what country?

Hellen

Oh, right. I well, many countries. I was born in South Africa, but I grew up in Tanzania and my parents are my dad is Kenyan and my mom is Tanzanian.

Barry

Oh, okay. Yeah. So kind of mixed south.

Hellen

It's the south and east cultural experience that I'm coming from. Yeah. What about you, Barry? Who. Who are you?

00;03;19;22 - 00;03;56;13

Barry

Oh, I am the child of Cantonese immigrants. My family is from Quang Jo Province, southern China, and my mom was part of the generation that during the Cultural Revolution, so they were refugees. She was able to escape and flee essentially. So fleeing back then meant getting to the shore, jping into the water and swimming.

00;03;56;15 - 00;04;15;06

Barry

And so, she was part of that generation. She swam basically you jp into the water and you hope you start swimming and you hope this is like 71, 72 that the Hong Kong Coast Guard would find you pick you up and you'd survive. She was one of the people who was lucky enough she was in the water for 11 hours.

00;04;15;08 - 00;04;45;18

Barry

And so they picked her up and Hong Kong was accepting what they call the legal immigrants at that time. Right. Shortly thereafter, they closed off the border. And since Hong Kong was a British colony, , you know, you showed up, and you're not part of the communist government. And she eventually found her way through an aunt of an aunt of hers who had was able to immigrate to the United States, you know, maybe a decade prior.

00;04;45;21 - 00;05;09;00

Barry

She was able to immigrate to the United States, I don't know. Late seventies. And so, I was born in Chicago, So I wasn't born abroad. I was born in the United States. And as well as my sister. And then they found their way to Southern California because the only skill most Chinese women had at the time was sewing.

00;05;09;02 - 00;05;31;13

Barry

That's what they all did. And the garment industry was still I think it still might be a little garment industry in Los Angeles. And so there was actually work. You can go to Southern California. And I remember my childhood consisted of like the sewing machine, and she would just bring home bags and bags of fabric. And it would just be sewing all day.

00;05;31;19 - 00;05;53;27

Barry

And that's what you did. You got like, whatever it was, $0.25 a thing, a unit or something. That's my background. And from that point on, it's like I'm probably like you like majored in something like that and then like, applied to Princeton. So, like, 20 years apart.

Hellen

Yeah. I've had a radically different experience than my brother, who's older than me, who was ten years older than me.

00;05;54;00 - 00;06;17;28

Hellen

So when we first came, he went directly into community college. He's older. He's older. He was 18.

Barry

Yeah. If you don't get into high school at all when you when you immigrate over here, then you have a much tougher path.

Hellen

And I think, because I ended up going to a four-year institution, I've just been exposed to a different world than he was.

00;06;17;28 - 00;06;42;01

Hellen

And I've had a kind of different advantage. , which is sort of jarring to think that we come from the same kind of situation and ended up in sort of radically different places in, in life. I mean, he's an engineer, so he also has experience in higher education. But his path to that was so much more difficult.

00;06;42;02 - 00;07;10;10

Barry

It's much harder like the difference between being 17 and being 19. It's a huge difference when you immigrate because if you're 17 you can get into a high school and once, you're in, you could spend four years as a 17 year old because it's like, Oh, you're behind. So, then you can go through that system and, and high school gives a way for a new immigrant to structure their socialization into the new culture in a way that but like junior college, community college or what doesn't.

00;07;10;12 - 00;07;31;29

Barry

Yeah. Like you kind of learn very quickly. It's painful, but you learn like, how do Americans interact with each other, right? How do they talk? What like how do you make friends as an American? Like all of that stuff if you don't have. So even in my family, the people who are like 19 or like, like their command of the language is much worse.

00;07;32;01 - 00;08;06;20

Barry

Their success in life is much worse. And then, like, if you were 17, you're just might as well be like anybody else, right? You could have spent four years in high school and went to college and whatever.

Hellen

Yeah. It makes a huge it makes a huge difference. Well, I thought that I kind of second introduction might be the graduate experience itself, because I think I came in sort of thinking that the more education I have, the better off I would be in terms of prospects of what I could do.

00;08;06;27 - 00;08;33;04

Hellen

And I think that's something that I've kind of inherited from my parents. Like, education is positive and it's good, but then coming into grad school and actually realizing that my prospects are complicated, that they're not it's not like you get a Ph.D. and that equals success or professional success. So that I think that might be obvious to some people.

00;08;33;06 - 00;09;02;29

Hellen

, the sort of job market. Yeah. Issues but that for those for people who for whom it's not obvious having sort of done this gone through grad school or graduated and got into the job market and taught at Vassar for years and then also, you know, you've been here for a semester now teaching at Princeton. Yeah. And you have a kind of re-introduction to this sort of obstacles that graduate students are facing.

00;09;02;29 - 00;09;40;00

Hellen

Going out of school, could you sort of just talk about the job market and what it is and the challenges there?

Barry

Well, the immigrant mindset is that education is a path to professionalism. And that's to a large extent true. , it's true that of all the professional schools our profession professionally tracked and the idea of having a liberal arts advanced degree is kind of foreign to, to, you know, our parents.

00;09;40;03 - 00;10;12;18

Barry

But it's not foreign to say that you're training to become a professor. And so when I came to graduate school, that's what I thought. I thought I was going to be training to become a professor, and I ended up succeeding at that. What happened is that, I mean, as an undergraduate, you don't think that, you know, as an undergraduate, you think you're just going to go to school for longer and the thing you liked as an undergraduate and it would be nice to keep that kind of ideal idealism alive.

00;10;12;18 - 00;10;37;11

Barry

But you're in your second year, and even by the end of your second year, you realize that that's not really what's true anymore. Either this is a professional. This is a track to becoming a professional in English, which means becoming a professor or it's not and it's not. You would have spent six years doing something that it's not going to be related to directly.

00;10;37;17 - 00;11;11;01

Barry

Really what graduate school at Princeton is, is training to be a professional. Now, if it's in the sciences, if it's in STEM, there's like so many things that you can do outside of the academy because there's research everywhere. If you're in the humanities and a lot of the social sciences, they're not all of them. The fact of the matter is, since 2008 or 2009, I don't know what the exact numbers are, but I think it would be probably closer to 50% or fewer of the people who get PhDs.

00;11;11;01 - 00;11;32;16

Barry

At Princeton's in the humanities and social sciences will end up becoming professors. Right. I think it's something like that. And so, what else are all those other people going to do now that way of thinking about it means that this advanced degree in which you're trained in something else well will make you come out the other side.

00;11;32;17 - 00;11;56;04

Barry

A lot of the ways that undergraduates come out, right, when undergraduates come out, they don't think that they're trained in the profession. They know they're not trained in a profession, except that you are trained in a profession, but then you're come out of it and that profession isn't there for you. It's for about half of people. And so, you know, one of the things that I was brought to Princeton to do this semester, at least in the philosophy department.

00;11;56;04 - 00;12;15;07

Barry

But Hellen, you were in my seminar also, So, you know this was two I thought I was showing people. Here's how you could stay in touch with the kind of things that you wanted to do while you were in graduate school in the professional space. I didn't come to it thinking I was giving professional training. I thought of it as well.

00;12;15;08 - 00;12;37;27

Barry

You still want to write and think about certain things. Here's a way to do that and do it for magazines and newspapers and like online publications and podcasting and so on. That's all I thought I was doing. It was a way to like connect graduate students with keeping their intellectual interests and their and their desires alive, whatever you end up doing.

00;12;37;29 - 00;13;20;00

Barry

So And then when it comes to, like the job market outside of academia, well, there's two ways of looking at it, right? One is like, you have no idea where to go or the other ones. Actually, the sky's the limit because there isn't one thing like out there that's like the academic job market. There's like a lot of things and it's like, you know, like you would have never thought, yeah, I mean, I'm, you know, this is just from my experience with other students, but you would have never thought that, you know, you know, the top hospital in New York needs somebody to write their newsletters to their donors.

00;13;20;07 - 00;13;47;17

Barry

But like, that's a job. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, that's like or like, you would have never thought about that, but that exists. And.

Hellen

Well, now I think we're sort of getting into your particular career and situation. So, can you sort of describe to people the relationship between the podcast and what you do as a professor, especially the transition from Vassar to your new institution, you see?

00;13;47;20 - 00;14;11;10

Barry

Sure. So, I was just a really standard college professor. I got my first job out of grad school at Vassar, and Vassar is a liberal arts college where I've taught five courses a year, like a three to and, you know, just moved up the path, right? You have to publish certain things to get tenure. Then I got tenure.

00;14;11;12 - 00;14;35;18

Barry

And then shortly after tenure, I just got really bored of doing these. Like so in philosophy, you have to write a lot of technical stuff and it's read by like 20 or 30 people that, you know, out in the field and it doesn't really matter all that much to even people outside of the field, in academia. And it mattered even less to the world at large.

00;14;35;25 - 00;14;57;20

Barry

That's less true now, but it was definitely true then and it's still somewhat true now. It's kind of like if you think about more obscure, academia has gotten to the point where a lot of people do very obscure research, right? Like so even if you are the best scholar of late Plato's dialogs. Right. No, but like, that's a thing, right?

00;14;57;22 - 00;15;27;08

Barry

You're really only writing for, like the other ten people who are like that, other only Plato dialog scholars or whatever, whatever it is. And even and even if you do like political philosophy, which upstairs from where we're sitting right now, there's a lot of political philosophy, you're doing it for like 25 people or 35 people. Very seldom does something break out and become impactful outside of that.

00;15;27;11 - 00;15;50;25

Barry

Anyways, I knew all of this, and I was kind of a little bit burned out about it and bummed out about it. And you know, not to judge people who aren't. They're very happy with doing that. And so, I basically had this idea going back to 2012 before I got tenure, when I was kind of enamored with narrative audio.

00;15;50;29 - 00;16;17;06

Barry

So, this American Life and Invisibilia and these other podcasts that were starting to do very thoughtful things, some of them were doing academic adjacent things, Freakonomics Radio was doing academic adjacent things, right? So, they were yet talking to an economist about something and then like connecting it to something in the world. You know, Gladwell had been doing this for quite a while in social science research.

00;16;17;13 - 00;16;45;21

Barry

I think his first season came out that year, my first season came out also.

Hellen

Is it kind of familiar model of like telling a story and then bringing in an expert to sort of tease out the nuance. And so, yeah, there was a model in print journalism for that kind of thing, and it because it existed in other areas, I thought it surely can work for philosophy, but nobody did it for philosophy, right?

00;16;45;21 - 00;17;09;00

Barry

It wasn't on the radar. There wasn't a person like me who wanted it done for philosophy. That's probably not true. Or honestly, I bet you there's like ten other people, one person in our seminar. But back then there wasn't. So, it was this. It seemed like a very weird idea at the time, which is let's incorporate nonfiction narrative with philosophy.

00;17;09;07 - 00;17;52;00

Barry

So what I did was I bought basically the mic that you're sitting at the mic I'm sitting at right now at the stand and a case which is right under my desk right now. And I just bought it, and I said, okay, I'm going to try to do this. So the idea I didn't worry about because I already had an idea for 2012, which was I am going to find soldiers returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who are using their experiences of war to think about the ethics of warfare, which is a big field in philosophy that was like me jumping in headfirst, like, I'll just do it, I'll just interview

00;17;52;00 - 00;18;17;16

Barry

people, I'll just have it transcribed, have a transcript. I try to strike them like that. Back then it was by hand. There wasn't any software, you know, and then I'll just do something with it. And what happened was halfway through the process, so maybe three months in, as I was putting something together, I got an email that said, Hey, there's this fellowship at Duke University.

00;18;17;18 - 00;18;41;17

Barry

It is for liberal arts college professors and professors at HBCU's who are doing nonstandard humanities projects. So like, you're not just writing another book or another research article. And I thought, Oh, that's me, right? And so, I wrote to some people I saw at Duke, and I said, Hey, I want to come for this fellowship. Will you listen to this thing I'm making?

00;18;41;19 - 00;19;06;00

Barry

And like, just write of recommendations and you're willing to sponsor me and sponsor meant there's a department who will give you an office. And, and they wrote back. Sure. And then I ended up getting it, which meant I got to for one year, not teach anything. I moved to Durham, North Carolina, and I decided myself, I'm going to make ten episodes.

00;19;06;00 - 00;19;25;02

Barry

I'm going to make a whole season because that's how people were thinking back then. Like you make seasonal stuff.

Hellen

Can you talk about? So for on the one hand, you said you were saying that you were bored and you wanted to sort of have a different relationship to your philosophical training and incorporate it in this way.

00;19;25;02 - 00;19;55;13

Hellen

But does that not count towards your teaching? How like how does the institution sort of

Barry

It didn't count. And the thing is, I need we need to change that and it's changing slowly. So, academia by and large, let's say 99% of it doesn't recognize this kind of work as academic work. Right.

Hellen

Which is really so this is news to me.

00;19;55;14 - 00;20;22;27

Hellen

So, for, you know, earlier we were talking about this sort of unfamiliarity with academic. Expectation or academic professional expectation. So, I coming in thought, Oh, I really want to sort of develop my writing voice and to write publicly. And that that might count towards my own professional journey as a professor.

Barry

But yeah, 99% of academia will not count that, which is to say 1% does.

00;20;22;28 - 00;21;01;13

Barry

Right. But the reason why it doesn't is because most of academia is built on a prestige, more economic model and prestige, meaning you're valuable if you are a prestigious person. And most of prestige occurs in the context of specialized research and not rich. Right, I mean, just to give a concrete example, right? Cornel West was a philosopher originating in this department that we're sitting in right now is the hallmark of the public intellectual and the generalist.

00;21;01;16 - 00;21;20;19

Barry

But in every respect, Cornel West is a generalist. He was already tenured at Harvard before he left for Princeton and then went to other institutions and then went back to Harvard as a professor of the practice. And they wouldn't tenure him even though he was already Disney were there. Yeah, Why? Well, because he's not like, what's he published?

00;21;20;19 - 00;21;46;13

Barry

What do you mean, what's he published? Lots of everything. Oh, well, what we mean is we mean like they meant some. Like, he could have written two technical things and some weird journal and then, like, they would have went, Oh, okay, that. So that's like a great example. Like, that's somebody at the top of the food chain in academia and like, some prestigious institutions like we would.

00;21;46;13 - 00;22;20;09

Barry

That's the thing. So, but another way of so your questions bringing it back to my path is, yeah, it didn't count. And so, what happened was I couldn't sustain one institute and out there were a couple that were like, interested but had an enterprising dean. So, UC Riverside had a department that talked about whether they want to hire me on the basis of the public stuff and not on the basis of the specialized research, which I have.

00;22;20;09 - 00;22;47;16

Barry

But it's not, you know, it's not as up to date as the public stuff. And to their credit, the department said voted to make me an offer. Right. And that's rare probably in philosophy. That was I'm one of the first if not the first. I would guess that in history I know in history there's more like there are public historians, there are jobs, like we're looking for public historians.

00;22;47;19 - 00;23;15;18

Barry

I don't think that exists in English, but there are figures in English that have succeeded. But I don't think they've succeeded because of their public work.

Hellen

I think, I think the model has been more that they have established their careers first as professor and have manuscripts and research work and then sort of in the later turn of their career, they, they focus on their public intellectual work.

00;23;15;22 - 00;23;49;01

Barry

Yeah. So, there was an enterprising dean at Riverside, Daryl Williams. He is a public historian. But he was the dean and he said yes to the department. And so, what happened was not only did he say yes, but he actually pushed the department to update their tenure and promotion guidelines so that not only the stuff that I do, but if there was a younger person who wanted to come up, then they could succeed on that track as an option, not as a requirement.

00;23;49;01 - 00;24;12;01

Barry

You don't want to make everybody do that. And, and if he has his way, which I'm not sure where this is, I'll know when I go back. That might affect the entire school of humanities and social science there. Now there's one example. It took an enterprising dean to do it. I know of two other places that are talking about this.

00;24;12;04 - 00;24;37;11

Barry

So, Michigan State is doing this. Three other places. Utah State is doing it. Yeah. So, if you think about this, they're like public schools. It's kind of smaller tier. So, like not Berkeley, not Michigan, All right, Not UVA, but like, okay, we're not that, but we're Michigan State. We're like Utah State. And Rutgers is talking about this right now.

00;24;37;16 - 00;25;05;00

Barry

Yeah, they're talking about updating that. What I'm trying to do now that I've had some medium of success is trying to open doors for your generation. Right. And the goal is like, number one, make it prominent enough that departments think, oh, that's interesting. And number two, well, if somebody does succeed in academia, that's one path they could succeed through.

00;25;05;02 - 00;25;29;28

Barry

And of course, long term number three is like, maybe we should have somebody like that in our department, Right?

Hellen

Like a job offer. Yeah. Concrete path.

Barry

You know? And what I've learned is it's not for every academic, but it's definitely for more than zero of them, which wasn't true. Right, you know, when I started six or seven years ago.

00;25;30;01 - 00;25;51;16

Hellen

I mean, even involved in a project like the GradFUTURES podcast list, or maybe why I would say I'm passionate about this work. I didn't think I would go to college. And then being a successful student in college was a revelation to me. To me, I thought that by the time I was like 23, I would be married, and I would have kids and that that would be the path that I would take.

00;25;51;18 - 00;26;19;22

Hellen

And that's just to say that I, I didn't have another vision for who I might be. And so having a kind of success in writing and in in literature and in English gave me a different picture for what I might be able to do. And then coming to grad school and sort of seeing the academic job market prospects being so limited in certain ways.

00;26;19;22 - 00;26;57;14

Hellen

The reason I'm really passionate about sort of cross-pollination between the training I'm getting here as a, thinker is so that I can sort of broaden the avenues for how I might be in the world and self-actualized. I think something that was really surprising to me, and I thought about being in, in, in your class with sort of meeting editors and agents who were really excited at the prospect of graduate students or scholars sort of thinking about engaging in more public forms.

00;26;57;22 - 00;27;21;01

Hellen

And I didn't think that the reception would be enthusiastic. I thought that it would be I don't know.

Barry

Now, why do you think that was what you thought before?

Hellen

Well, I just thought that they would be more inclined to a kind of gatekeeping.

Barry

Now, what does that tell you about where you've gotten your ideas from that.

00;27;21;01 - 00;27;50;15

Barry

That's right. That's exactly what I want to get clear. So, people are like, what are you talking about with Hellen? What I'm talking about is Hellen, just like a lot of people had this disposition to think that the world is a world of no. That the point of having a person stand there and talk to you is for them to show you ways that you can't succeed at something, right?

00;27;50;18 - 00;28;14;19

Hellen

Or ways that you were wrong.

Barry

Ways that you were wrong. That's a very distinctively academic way of thinking in the academy. Right. And that's and seriously, what? If you ask me what an Epiphany is. That's one. It's not just you who had that epiphany. I'm not saying the media world is not a world. No, there's a lot of no’s over there, right?

00;28;14;24 - 00;28;38;06

Unknown

It's just that it's not only a world of difference, right? There's also a lot of people who are trying to get to. Yes, there really are like those are really the two sides of just about everything.

Hellen

Well, just sort of thinking about current graduate students and the experience that you've had here at Princeton with the graduate students.

 

00;28;38;06 - 00;29;12;08

Hellen

Do you have any parting words of wisdom, advice, takeaways?

Barry

I think, gosh, my biggest advice is to try to do a little observation, to come up with a hypothesis of who you are. Looking back, I didn't know who I was as a graduate student. I thought that there was a way I was supposed to be, and I tried to be the way that I was supposed to be.

00;29;12;10 - 00;29;38;14

Barry

So let me give you an example, next door from this office was somebody I went to graduate school with. His name is Boris, and Boris lived his life the way that he still does. He gets up, he goes to the library, thinks about philosophy, he writes, he goes to the gym, then he gets a slice of pizza and he goes and he thinks about philosophy more right until about 6 p.m. Then he gets some dinner.

00;29;38;14 - 00;30;03;20

Barry

Then he goes back, and he thinks about philosophy more. Yeah, I don't think Boris would have it any other way. That's the kind of person that he has. Back then. We'd be like, Oh, there's Boris again. Like, like in the library in philosophy, right back then, I didn't think too much about you. Kind of like knew there were some people like that, and other people were like that.

00;30;03;22 - 00;30;34;01

Barry

But you're too much of like, what am I supposed to be like? With what I would have really would have helped me was, I'm not Boris, right? That would have helped me. Like, if I came to that realization, even if I tried to strive to be like that, I wouldn't have been him. That's somebody who gets so much satisfaction from just the sheer aloneness of the thinking about the philosophical question, like that kind of research.

00;30;34;06 - 00;30;56;15

Barry

You could be a scientist and you're like, wait a second, so-and-so loves being in the lab for 17 hours. Yeah, well, you could be an English person and there's like, this person. Does that make sense? Yeah, but the reaction to that when you're at graduate student is like, am I supposed to be like that in order to succeed? Or is there another way to be like, right.

00;30;56;15 - 00;31;23;00

Barry

Whereas the thing that I never asked myself back then was, am I really a specialist? Am I really a good specialist? Am I really somebody who, when I get ten articles into the research, thinks I can't wait to get into it more to find the little niche, or was I miserable when I did that? And in hindsight I was the person who was miserable.

00;31;23;02 - 00;31;45;04

Barry

Does that make sense? Yeah. So I hope so. I think I think my advice is.

Hellen

And you needed a different model.

Barry

Yes, right. My, my advice would be, try all the different things. Try being in different ways, but like, but do a little bit of assessment. Are you really the person that's like this or like, or not like that?

00;31;45;06 - 00;32;06;04

Barry

And, like, do I really get the kind of joy, or I was just miserable? Because if you model yourself, I think in order to succeed, you have to be like something that you're not. You are going to be miserable even if you do get your tenure track job right now, put out seven articles or whatever in the journals right now, like do the thing, you know.

00;32;06;06 - 00;32;31;06

Barry

And, and so that's abstract advice, but it's not like concrete, right? It's not like pitch Aeon. Like, that's cool. Like, that's concrete advice, but like, you know, a little more abstract advice is like, try to figure out what it is that you're really like giving yourself permission to answer the question. Maybe I'm not like the thing that my advisor wants me to be.

00;32;31;08 - 00;32;53;22

Barry

That has to be an option right now

Hellen

I think that really resonates.

Barry

If you find yourself miserable, it's probably you probably shouldn't do it. No. Everything comes with misery. Yeah. Like this podcast is miserable a lot of times, but. But it's kind of like who I am now, you know? Like, it's not about misery. It's about.

 

00;32;53;25 - 00;33;20;06

Barry

It's about … I don't even know how to say what it's about. Like. Like, am I really the 17 hour a day thinker? No. Right. I am really the super specialist like I know, right? I mean, that that kind of thing. Right?

Hellen

But you. But you are like a 17, our podcast editor.

Barry

Yeah, that's true. That's true.

 

00;33;20;09 - 00;33;35;25

Barry

And that there is a kind of. Yeah. And I think that what people got out of at least those two classes that I taught about this is like they don't want to do it right. And I got pretty clear like from a lot of people are like there's actually very few people that think that, that they can sit there.

 

00;33;35;27 - 00;34;05;12

Barry

Like 17 is like not even close. Like, like every single episode takes me up to 100 hours to make, Right.

Hellen

But that it's a self-selection. Yeah, that's right, well, thank you so much for this conversation.

Barry

Oh, great to have done it again. Thank you for listening to this episode.

 

00;34;05;12 - 00;34;40;06

Eva Kubu

This is Associate Dean Eva Kubu again. The GradFUTURES podcast is brought to you by the Graduate School at Princeton University. Our team includes executive producer and host graduate student Hellen Wainaina of the English Department, editorial director, Assistant Dean James Van Wyck, Technical Director Elio Lleo of African American Studies, Marketing, Promotion and Logistical support by coordinator Amanda Peacock and Audio Editing by Francine Henry.

00;34;40;09 - 00;34;58;27

Eva Kubu

We hope you enjoyed this episode. Please rate and review and don't forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for tuning in. See you next time.