The Need to Walk

What motivates a 40-something-year-old woman to chase a PhD at a time in her life when she has a demanding fulltime job that is regularly uprooting her to far parts of the globe; a fairly new marriage that she just wants to enjoy; and all the usual pulls of life: elderly parents and in-laws, young children, an old house that needs a makeover, good friends and relatives that need help finishing off a bottle of wine or a six pack of Corona? Not to mention a garden that needs tending?

The easy answer: an employer who pays full tuition and offers a bonus of company stock shares upon degree completion.

The deeper answer? I needed to “walk.” Intellectually, professionally, and spiritually. I needed more than the daily grind of a corporate communications job to stimulate my creativity and intellectual growth.

For a couple of years before starting my job at a company that offers a generous employee tuition program, I had been considering going back to school part time. I had taught as an adjunct professor and enjoyed it, but I learned that most universities require candidates for full-time professor positions to have a doctorate. If I ever wanted to consider a second career down the road, I would have to get that additional sheepskin. If there’s one thing about me, I like options. Life is boring without them.

Of course, it is not as simple as that.

I began to research schools to figure out what I could possibly be interested in enough to sacrifice a huge chunk of my life for. Truth be told, when I started my program, I had no idea it would be so painful. On the flip side, I also had no idea that it would be so amazing. One thing was certain: it would not come easy.

With a Journalism bachelor’s and master’s degree, my options were limited for PhD programs. Most schools seemed to require a master’s in the same subject as the PhD program you are seeking to enter. My journalism papers have been good to me, but they were not going to get me into a Literature or English doctoral program.

Most schools also required full-time residency, and as my circumstances did not allow this option, many schools had to be ruled out. I had to find a program within reasonable driving distance or online.

At the suggestion of a professor at the University of Rhode Island, I found Salve Regina University. It has a Humanities PhD program that offers “rolling enrollment,” meaning I could apply and begin classes immediately -- even before my formal application had been accepted. The study of the humanities includes Literature, Philosophy, Art, and Religion. It would teach me the meaning of words like zeitgeist and clearing. I saw it as something akin to a liberal arts major, but taking it to a whole new level.

Sold! I began classes in the fall of 2006, taking two classes per semester and the required summer classes to stay on track to finish my coursework in three years.

The odometer on my Jeep Liberty started getting jacked. My coffee consumption tripled. I was driving to Newport, Rhode Island, sometimes back to back during the work week for my 6 p.m. classes. For three years.

On school nights, I would start my workday before 8 a.m., get on the road to Salve in late afternoon and return home sometime after 11 p.m. The coursework was intense: read a textbook per week, write a paper on it and be prepared to engage in vibrant discussion to demonstrate that you had read, digested and dissected the material. It was insane. This was work.

Did I mention this went on for three years?

But really, you don’t need to know all this. What I’m getting at is the fact that while a PhD was my apparent objective -- even a means to a possible end should I decide to explore a teaching career one day -- it became the vehicle for my awakening.

As I embraced my doctoral program with all its grueling assignments and even more grueling “deep thinking,” I was mining the coal that will eventually become a diamond. I was unknowingly collecting and identifying the themes and concerns of my life. Reading the works of Michel Foucault, Joseph Campbell, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, I was gravitating toward the truth. My truths. My questions. The very essence of who I am, the career I have nurtured, and the passions I have developed.

My PhD director had consistently advised our class that our dissertation topics should be something that we are passionate about so that we would be motivated to see the work through to its glorious end. By the time I started the Capstone class, I had been wracking my brain to “find” my topic. I was panicked, really, to figure out the next phase of my degree work so that I could graduate, stop being a student, and finally get on with LIFE.

I forced myself to examine media-related questions, thinking I was meant to “come full circle” and return to my journalism career roots through the doctoral research. What will I care enough about to spend -- or rather, continue to spend -- time researching during my “after work” hours that already have so many other activities clamoring for a piece of the action?

“Look for the common themes,” the Great Professor said, “and then start pulling at the threads.”

Well, I started to pull, and what started to come into fuzzy focus blew me away.

When we meet again, I’ll share with you the source of my great inspiration, and how I found my research calling.

For now, let me leave you with this: Sometimes when we think we know what we want and are on a course to get it, we realize that it wasn’t what we wanted at all. It was the experience of exploring that goal that we needed to unearth the “real” need inside.

How many of us can think of an example of that happening in our lives? (And don’t name your favorite Disney movie here...) I bet quite a few.

This is a great gift. You can thank whomever you like for it -- God, Buddha, the Universe -- but do acknowledge your greater power for this blessing in your life. For me, I am sure that God had something to do with it, but he also had the help of the angel on my shoulder.