On the Edge

Introduction I had climbed these stairs countless times during my four years of graduate school, usually two at a time with little effort. But this time the journey up the stairs seemed to take forever. My heart was beating out of my chest, I was short of breath, and I knew that it had nothing to do with physical exertion. It had everything to do with an ominous message from my adviser and a looming sense of dread. For as long as 1 could remember, I wanted to be a college professor. Given this goal, after completing my undergraduate education, I began applying to graduate school and was initially accepted by a highly ranked university which was far from home. I accepted their offer without even visiting the campus or meeting my adviser. That was a big mistake. The first time I knocked on the door of the individual assigned as my adviser, he yelled at me to only come back after I had made an appointment. When I finally met him for the first time, he told me that I was fortunate to be able to work with someone of his caliber and that my research interests were not a good fit with his program. Discouraged, 1 looked for another graduate program. This time, 1 applied to schools where 1 could find an adviser that would be more supportive. I was accepted at several schools and traveled to each school to meet the faculty in person and to make sure that they supported my research interests. At one of the schools that accepted me, I met for a long time with Dr. Littlewood, who had expressed interest in serving as my adviser. He seemed very different from the adviser at my previous school: friendly, open to my ideas, and easy to talk to. I felt a sense of relief, convinced that Dr. Littlewood would be good to work with, and 1 settled into my classes at my new school. My first few years in this new graduate program went well. After passing my comprehensive exams, I started working on my dissertation. It seemed like I was on the right track to earn my doctorate and start looking for a job. However, right about that time my relationship with Dr. Littlewood changed. He started calling me at random times to make sure that I was in the office. Instead of smiling and asking me how things were going, he now seemed cold and distant. I used to regularly visit his office to chat or to ask his advice, but as he became increasingly grumpy and short with me, I rarely went to visit him and only came to his office when he called me. My increasingly distant working relationship with my adviser bothered me--a lot. I am not the kind of person who thrives with conflict. In my personality psychology classes, I always scored high on Agreeableness (Big 5) and, on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), I showed a strong preference for Feeling over Thinking. As the impasse with my adviser persisted, I found it harder to sleep and to concentrate on my work. The Conflict The downturn in our working relationship came to a head during my fourth year in the graduate program. I had been helping Dr. Litttlewood with a research project in which I would learn the publication process by collecting and coding the data. This research project was a massive undertaking that, we hoped, would lead to a high-level publication, with me as a co-author, at a top quality, peer-reviewed academic journal. The stakes were high for both of us. I needed a high-visibility publication to be able to get a job at a university. Dr. Littlewood, meanwhile, was spending most of his research budget on my salary for the work that I was putting in on the project. The amount of time that I had spent on the project was daunting: 300 hours over nine months just collecting the data. I had finally completed the data collection, but the responses from the participants still had to be coded into categories based on a pre-established rubric developed by Dr. Littlewood. The coding was tedious, labor-intensive work that took many weeks, but I finally finished the coding and emailed the results to Dr. …