I don’t have a tattoo. I probably won’t get one, but I do have a Ph.D. While the degree is one I’ve earned and will always be with me–kind of like a tattoo is permanent–the goals that got me the Ph.D. and the tattoo are different in their permanence.
When I see people who have invested in tattoos, I have a lot of different thoughts. Sometimes I like the picture and the message and sometimes I loathe them, but mostly I’m a little amused at the thought that I once might have gotten such a prominent badge that displayed my transient nature so publicly. When I was in my twenties, I often thought of myself as having finished growing and changing. I figured that what I liked then was what I would like years later. One result of that thinking was a lot of household stuff–much of it pretty–that no longer suits my tastes. Another was some expensive (for then in my life) jewelry that I felt represented me and how I wanted to appear in the world. Those purchases were symbolic tattoos for me because I believed they would always represent me.
But my life is too transient for any one thing or earthly symbol to represent me so fully or accurately. So it is also with my career, which is a part of my life as a whole.
A tattoo is an investment in permanence and indicates a sense of non-changeability in one’s nature–or, at least, a representation of one’s life captured in time. I’ve realized that a tattoo probably wouldn’t work for me because the dolphin or tree of life or butterfly or dove that appeals to me now most likely would not appeal later when I’ve moved to a new phase of thinking or being. With household stuff or jewelry, I can sell or give away what no longer suits; with a tattoo, I’d be faced with a costly, painful laser treatment or regret in living with my purchase.
Some people mistake a Ph.D. or other terminal degree for a permanent mark, like a tattoo, in the sense that the goals they had while earning the degree must also be permanent. While the degree is theirs for the keeping, the goals that got them there may not be. I think that issue with goals is the root of much dissatisfaction with the post-Ph.D. project called life.
For most of my adult life, for example, I had the goal of being a traditional academic with a professorial post, tenure, and the pleasure of seeing undergraduates and graduates through their programs. Life didn’t work out that way for me, though. I could have had such a job at various institutions in different geographic settings after I earned my degree, but a previous life as a military wife taught me that I wasn’t willing to uproot my husband and son, nor was I willing to play games with my research agenda to get tenure. It took me awhile–through my forties and into my fifties–to understand the many reasons that I didn’t fit my traditional goals. Yet, having come to such an understanding, I think I’m happier than I might have been if my initial dreams had been fulfilled. In the meantime, I’m allowing my career to unfold more naturally in the unusual, oddly shaped, and interesting ways that is has been.
The Ph.D. holders who seem the unhappiest to me are those who hold onto their original goals despite their own natural life changes and during times of changing (and shrinking) academic opportunity. I don’t mean that they shouldn’t work toward what they want, but rather that they shouldn’t allow their goals to dictate all their choices, to include going against the wind in directions that are almost certain to make them distressed or unhappy. In that way, the goals that engendered the Ph.D. work function like a permanent tattoo that no longer represents what the individual’s life is or can be. It becomes, instead, a sort of symbol of lost opportunities or hopelessness in achieving the goal–or at the least, a sign of what once was a dream that cannot be now.
This message is about being flexible with goals after achieving the terminal degree that is being sought. Put shape to the dream, yes. Work hard, yes. Achieve, yes. But also know that the dream is, in the end, simply a dream. It has the potential of being reshaped both by life and by the dream holder who, along the way, may have had to jettison some pieces of the younger self that no longer fit the degree holder. That’s not a bad thing. That’s life after the Ph.D. Understanding this basic reality can make one’s actual career trajectory even more enjoyable than the dream career itself!