Do I really want a PhD?

Like so many children growing up in so-called America as a South Asian, I was encouraged (if not manipulated) into wanting to become a doctor. It was as if my future wasn't my own, and was actually for others to decide. But as I grew older, I realize now that I cannot lay all of the blame at my parents--or even at my community's--feet.

I mean, I don't think it's a stretch to say that this drive to become a doctor is a shared experience within the diaspora. Just in my own family, seven out of twelve of my cousins are doctors. I spent years trying to make it into medical school with zero interest, just trying to keep up with the herd while my calling felt like it was elsewhere.

In a lot of ways, I was the prototype of what alternatives could be outside of the medical field. I tried out law for a little bit, only to open the passage for two of my other cousins to veer in that direction. I tried social work, only for another cousin to take up the mantle. And so on.

I was even condescendingly called "brave" for "venturing out on my own" by an uncle--whose daughter took a cue from me and decided to also “be brave” and “venture out on their own”.

Four degrees later--two of which are master's--and I still don't feel like I am worthy enough or know enough to get out in the "real world". (You know, as opposed to the “fake world” we students live in day after day...)

It would be so easy to point fingers at my community and my family. And while they definitely do have their own part to play, a bigger more sinister legacy has taken root in our communities that hardly go addressed.

The root, the soil.

When I finally told my parents that I no longer wanted to pursue medicine, my mother was still fixated on the honorific of becoming a "Doctor". She started encouraging me to pursue a Ph.D. and even considered going back to school to pursue one herself. However, cancer had other plans for my mother.

Her desire for me to obtain a Ph.D. didn't die with her, though. The more I meditated on it, and after obtaining my second master's, the more the desire took root in my being too.

For my master's dissertation, I was able to study security, silence, and trauma. Three things that I never knew I would have any interest in putting together. Three things that play a huge role, and have had a lasting effect on, our community. These three things helped me see my upbringing in a completely different light.

For instance, my mom would always remind me that people can have access to our bodies because she witnessed the ways in which our bodies within the Indian State were marginalized and violated. She would remind me that our homes, clothes, and belongings could be taken from us at any moment because she grew up seeing how Partition affected us just a mere decade later. She would conclude, "Knowledge is the one thing that cannot be taken from you."

And with this mantra, my thirst for knowledge remains unquenchable despite how academia perpetuates structural racism as a legacy of British colonialism.

Academia: The Colonial Monster

When I found my way to my current University, it was marked with the cold welcoming of knowing that I was out of my depths. Not because I was dealing with the deep-seated imposter syndrome that is inherited through intergenerational trauma from a singular point of the colonial encounter--but because I was forced to endure my own colonial encounter at a table that was most certainly not made with me in mind during the diversity and inclusion meetings.

At this point, I have been reaching for a Ph.D. for three years. I already obtained my first master's and was in the program for my second master's degree to get a bit more experience in researching before I applied for the Ph.D. program. But, when I asked the program convener about the ESRC funding and whether or not it was available to an international student, I was surprised to be met with a condescending answer.

"Well, that depends on whether or not you're even good enough to apply," he said.

He didn't know me from a hole in the wall. It was the first time we were even meeting each other; he didn't know my grades or my ambition. He didn't know that I received a 3.8 cumulative GPA when I graduated with my previous master's, or that I had three awards under my belt. Or, even, that I won a research competition at my previous university. All he could see was what I looked like.

But, I still tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he was just talking about it more generally for the benefit of everyone else and not directly at me, I thought.

A month or two later, however, there was another incident with another lecturer. I reached out to him thinking that we might be a good match as a supervisor for my Ph.D. since we both focus on the same region and seem to have the same interests. Yet another spanner found its way in the gears. He would put up roadblocks where there wouldn't need to be any for, what seemed like, the sake of doing so.

"You need to read more," he would say when I sent him a draft of my proposal.

"Ok, what would you suggest?"

"I don't really know because I don't know what you're interested in."

"Well, I want to explore [insert a rewording of the proposal here where I explain what my interest is, why, and what it means to me]."

"Yeah, I get that. But why do you want to look into that?"

"Because it's something the entire community is affected by and understanding it is important so we can understand the effect it has had on the community."

"Ok, but why is that important?"

"Can you rephrase, because I feel like I'm telling you why it's important and it seems like it's not really answering your question? So I'm a bit confused as to what you're looking for here."

It went on like that for ages.

Then, after his trip to India and speaking to the Sikh community there. He wrote me an email saying he liked my proposal--all of a sudden--and that the people in the region were saying exactly what I had said to him just months before. So my mediocre proposal that I needed to "read more for" was all of a sudden worthy of working on after he corroborated my interest in my community for himself.

But then another few months went by, and we were back on "reading more" again. At this point, I was incredibly frustrated with him and told him that I have read whatever there is about my particular interest and that it still doesn't answer my specific question. He denied that this was possible.

So, I left. I stopped trying to collaborate with him as a supervisor and tried to find someone else.

That's where my current supervisor stepped in. She was amazing at supporting me during my master's dissertation. She trusted my writing and research process, and she trusted me when I said that I read what needed to be read.

I received a First on my dissertation.

So we set out on collaborating on my proposal. We submitted it to ESRC for funding and submitted it to the University. But, while I was extended an unconditional offer to join the Ph.D. program, I was rejected from funding.

When I talked to my current supervisor with zero funding to back me up, it led to very awkward conversations where I am still trying to find alternate ways to fund myself. But she is continuously discouraging me from attending the program altogether, saying that there are other jobs that I could apply for that don't need a Ph.D.

After a year and a half of navigating academia through the pandemic, I continue to try to give her the benefit of the doubt and give some grace that she must be burned out. She is just looking out for me after all and reminding me that academia isn't all it's made up to be. It's not this romanticized profession where we just sip on coffee and read all day while trying to put the world to rights. Or, taking it even further, academia is doing to her what it’s doing to me: racially traumatizing her through a legacy of colonialism (which says more about the institution than it does the people who exist within it).

I get it.

But no matter my persistence, my doubling down that obtaining a Ph.D. is something I really want to do (even if I end up not doing anything directly with it...though I really hope that isn't the case), that I would regret never having done it at all--I was met with a passive, "If this is what you want, while I don't agree, I would be happy to work with you."

Now, at this point, all this might seem like I'm just whinging. You might be thinking, So what if people don't believe in you? Just flat out do it anyway, Sophia!

But at what point do we stop expecting people to continually and perpetually swim against the tide? Have you ever swam against the tide? For your entire life? Since the moment you were born where people thought you were stupid because your skin color is darker than others within your community? Maybe if my supervisor didn’t have to swim against her own tide, her advice to me would be vastly different.

At what point do we start realizing that the way we expect people to fight and claw their way to reaching their dreams is just as traumatic as anything else? That maybe “imposter syndrome” for people of color, especially people of color who are assumed to be women, is so much more than just believing that we might not be good enough. That every step of the way we are microaggressed into abandoning our ways of survival--the only ways we have left.

With a simple Google search, and even connecting with other Ph.D. students, you hear the horror stories of the trauma these academies perpetuate. I have already experienced it in simply trying to apply (and only named it as such thanks to Eric Anthony Grollman). There is no shortage of articles, even studies, that talk about the inhumane treatment of graduates--and how it disproportionately affects Black scholars and scholars of color. Some articles validate my current supervisor who is probably dealing with her own disillusionment.

Really, it turns out that my mom was lucky to never learn that yes, even education, even knowledge can be taken away and kept from you.