I was a Ph.D. dropout

So growing up the only things I was ever good at were art and school. Yes, I always did well on schoolwork, but that didn't mean I was happy at school or that it went better. School is about other kids and what they think of you. If you're not popular you're not going to have a good time. And doing well on tests doesn't make you popular. But I digress. All those years I never knew of anything else I could do with my life. My parents are academics (well, a professor and a physicist.) They knew nothing about business and the thought I could be involved in business never occurred to me. I figured I was good at studying and that's all I would ever do. I'd grow up, hopefully get into the school I wanted, get into a graduate program, get a Ph.D. and become a professor. Then I'd go back to the academic factory where I would help crank out more academics. When other people studied business in college and got internships at stock brokerages they were as alien to me as people in the advanced ballet program. I could no more conceive of myself working for a corporation than I could my becoming a prima ballerina.

But when I got past one level after another - B.A., master's degree, three years of my Ph.D. I hit a wall. In a way what seemed like the worst thing that ever happened was actually the best one. Even when I was spending hours shut up in a musty library studying ancient languages and inscriptions (something highly unlikely to lead to even an academic job) and indulging in my passion for the history of languages, a part of me was rebelling. A part of me did not want to be thrifty and poor for most of my 20s and 30s. Part of me wanted to move to a big city and try to become a High Flyer. Part of me was tired of being shut away from it all, buried in books my entire life. I wanted to get out and live! But I shut that voice up.

In the end it turned out that the area of my field that most interests me, the history of languages, was completely out of fashion in the department I was in, and across the discipline in general. Only one professor, my Ph.D. supervisor, was interested in history. The rest of the department was to the absolute other extreme, occupied with creating abstract models of how language might be structured, much of which was incapable of proof either way. These abstractions were constructed without checking any part of them against actual real language as it is spoken. "Empiricism" became the ultimate dirty word. That means, studying actual languages and deriving patterns from them, rather than starting with an abstract model and trying to fit language into that.

I could have hunkered in, worked with my supervisor and his small group of students, and learned as much of the theoretical linguistics as I needed to to get my Ph.D. But for a few things. It came out immediately that my supervisor was the black sheep of the department, as was my group of students, and that he was known to be miserable there, having wanted for years to get back to Harvard. Every year it was rumored he was about to take a position at Harvard and leave us. This did not leave me feeling very secure in staying there because if he left I'd have no one left to look out for me in this very anti-historical department. And I saw that if I even got the Ph.D. I would be competing with all the students who loved and embraced the abstract, theoretical side of the discipline that is dominant these days. And those jobs would be more of that theoretical style - teaching it, publishing about it. I would be lucky if I got to do what I loved 5% of the time. Then if I actually got a job I'd be "on trial" for about 6-7 years, working overtime to try to prove myself and get tenure.

In any case, it was a devastating decision to leave academe when it was all I ever thought I was capable of and when it had been my dream for so many years. But it was the beginning of a whole new life.