It's where you live, but you don't know how it's built

All in all, I'd say the thing that surprised me the most about earning a PhD in English is that no one ever actually tells you how to earn a PhD in English. Academia seems to be lightly subscribing to Fight Club rules.

An illustrative anecdote: 

On Monday, September 15, 2014, I passed my major field exam, which focused on British Modernism (1890-1940). After you pass your qualifying exams (minor and major), you're at liberty to start working on your dissertation -- or at least the prospectus, which is the 10-20 page "pitch" for your dissertation idea that needs to be committee-approved before you dive in to The Thing itself. After the exam was over, my committee members congratulated me and gave me some feedback on what I'd done well and on what points I could improve. Before we wandered off to our respective scholar dens of solitude, I think my advisor said something to effect of, "Great, okay, so, let me know when you have a prospectus draft you want me to look over."

I had only the loosest idea of what a prospectus was. (Basically, I knew it was a 10-20 page "pitch" for your dissertation idea that needs to be committee-approved before you dive in to The Thing itself.) I went home and promptly googled "How to write a dissertation prospectus." Also, "How to come up with a dissertation topic."

My advisor wasn't being unsupportive or neglectful; it's really not her job to handhold me through these things. As a result, quixotic googling was a recurring theme in my graduate student career, and I know that others in my program have done the same. If you were to parse my Google search history, in addition to finding numerous variations of "What's the difference between foundation and concealer and what is contouring and also why do I never feel competent when it comes to makeup and is this the patriarchy???", you'll discover that I have at various times asked Google to tell me "How to publish an academic article," "Field exam reading list examples," "How to write an abstract," "How long are dissertations," and finally, "How to write a dissertation."

As of late the internet has been very enthusiastic about diagnosing and discussing imposter syndrome, but that's not the phenomenon I'm describing here. I didn't feel like I was unqualified or as if I'd cheated the system to get where I was. (Plus, once I bought enough sweaters and started relying more on my reading glasses, I was pretty much nailing the Google image result for "female English professor.") More accurately, I was experiencing Oh-Okay-I-Guess-I-Just-Need-To-Figure-It-Out-From-Here syndrome. At most stages of the game, I'd expected that there would be more guidance, more instruction about how to actually Be an Academic. But, of course, no one -- not even our Google Overlords -- can tell you how to write a dissertation, or how long it should be, or what your topic should be about, because the whole point of a PhD is figuring all that out for yourself. Doing things independently and on the strength of your own ideas is arguably the most essential part of Being an Academic, at least in the humanities, where collaborative research is nearly as rare as timely retirement. For the last three years, I've been researching and writing and crossing my fingers every time I submitted another fifty pages to my committee, doing my best to assemble something that passingly resembled a dissertation.

It reminds me a little of how my sister has described being a new mom. You're determined not to screw it up, and you take in all the guidance you can, but in the end you just muddle through, and nothing is quite like what your guidance prepared you to expect, and it's really only the muddling that, eventually, enables you to function competently.

Happily, the muddling paid off. Despite never being precisely sure of how to do it, a month and a half ago, I earned my PhD. My degree will be conferred in December. I'll have to wait until May to put on the Medieval robes and wear that majestic octagonal hat (because apparently not enough people graduate in December to justify mid-year pomp and circumstance). On that day, I will never be so pleased to look so ridiculous.