Just as it Sounds

In this episode, Nilüfer talks with Kristen Roupenian about writing a dissertation without fear and without silencing your voice. Everyone who pursues a Ph.D. knows the challenges that come with writing, but Kristen offers a refreshing take on the process. She reminds all of us that instead of writing to the imagined hostile audience, we should picture ourselves writing to someone who is willing to meet us halfway. Hearing this interview gave me a feeling of relief; I wish someone would have given me this advice years ago.  She also taught us that if you find the writing process excruciating, then perhaps you can find another way, a more enjoyable way to write. If you are working on a dissertation, or any form of writing, you don't want to miss this interview!

Stony Brook, the New School, and Baruch College are among some of the schools where graduate students have started to protest in order to abolish fees; similar protests continue on a number of college campuses throughout the United States. In this episode, we discuss the harsh reality of student fees. Should graduate workers, who are not so different than school administration and staff, have to pay fees? Are we financially secure enough to allocate part of our already limited budget for services that the university then offers to both faculty and students (while only charging students)? In this episode, we look at the history of tuition and fees in the US and listen to the first-hand experience of two members from the graduate unions at Stony Brook and SUNY Buffalo, who are both actively a part of the organized movement against fees.

In this episode, we talk with Veronica Shepp about gender-based violence in academia and introduce the idea that Title IX protects universities more than the victims it was supposed to protect. Busra and Veronica discuss re-traumatization as well as ways the system could be improved. 

In this episode, we talk with Dr. Simone Kolysh about the experience of navigating the academic system while being a part of the LGBTQ community. Dr. Kolysh draws from their research and their own personal experiences, as they share their story with us. As Nilufer and Dr. Kolysh talk, their conversation ranges from the reasons why LGBTQ students drop out from their PhD programs to the ways that academia forces many to hide their true selves if they want to succeed. The stories they share are heartbreaking, but also importantly serve as a call to action. As Dr. Kolysh reminds us, there is a lot we can do to make a change because all of this is made up, and it is made up of us and we can un-make it.

In this episode, we talked with Dr. Mateo Duque from Binghamton University about teaching. For each of us, teaching means something different. For some of us, it is a way of funding our PhD education. For others, it is the reason we decided to pursue a graduate and academic career. And, just like every other experience, teaching comes with its own unique challenges. Listen to Mateo and Aaron discuss the joys and perils of teaching!

I don't have an Instagram account but I am frequently on Instagram. My guilty pleasure is looking at pictures of people and tracing moments from their lives. I have thought for a long time why I am so interested in other people's lives. One viable explanation that I came up with was that as I often feel unsuccessful as a PhD student, I might be able to become more "successful" by imitating their lives and life choices I see in these pictures. I am constantly curious about how to be a PhD student. I am always looking for answers to these questions as I scroll down through the pictures: How does a PhD spend their day? Where do they travel to? What novels do they read? What movies do they watch? What are the fun activities that they are engaged with? Do they ever have fun? How many hours do they study in a day? How many days off do they take in a week? Are they in relationships? Or are they flaneurs? Do they have kids? How many hours do they spend with their family or by themselves?

Now that I am analyzing all of these representations that I subject myself to, I have noticed that while monogamic relationships are portrayed as a magic elixir to have a balanced and successful PhD life, motherhood during a PhD occupies a more ambiguous place in our minds. To go beyond the cloud of various opinions and interpretations on the subject matter, we wanted to see its complexity by listening to a first-hand experience. In this episode, we talked with Sandra Portocarrero about what being both a mother and a PhD student is like.

In this episode, we look at the mental health issues that graduate students face. It is truly an issue because graduate school affects the mental health of students in peculiar ways that we might not be familiar with in other professions or lifestyles. In an era where we have a multiplicity of practices that promise us sanity and happiness, we wanted to backtrack and understand how we have reached this point of needing these practices in the first place. In this episode, we interviewed four graduate students who each offer a unique perspective on mental health.

In this episode, we are focusing on one of the most complicated and crucial aspects of the PhD journey: the relationship between advisor and advisee. Advisor and advisee relationship, like any other interpersonal relationship, is unpredictable and mysterious. It is impossibly hard to predict what the future of an advisor-advisee relationship will look like or how it will develop over time. Despite the unknown nature of this relationship, many PhD students start their interaction with their advisors with ideas, hopes, expectations, dreams, idealizations, and a complexity of emotions.

Working with an advisor, in other words being an apprentice of your mentor, is an ancient tradition that goes back to early civilizations. Similar to the mentor-apprentice relationships built in other professions, craftmanship, for instance, the advisor-advisee relationship is about carrying the legacy of intellectual camps and transferring the knowledge and experience to new generations. We, the team of Just as It Sounds, do not know much about the shortcomings of the mentor-apprentice relationships that have occurred in the historical past, since we have not conducted extensive research on this topic, nor have we read memories on the topic. Maybe these apprentices suffered a lot, maybe they entered into painful conflicts with their mentors or they felt like they were exploited. However, we realize difficult it is to let go of the hope for a happy ending. Always, we wish for a happy ending! A student meets their mentor. As they are guided and prepared for their future profession and crafted by their mentor in their relationship of care and trust, they happily become the successor. But we know that these models change over time, we know that we have a tremendous capacity of remembering the past differently. Maybe we don't know much about the past experiences, but we want to learn what advising in modern times looks like in this episode.

For this reason, we talked with four PhD students who come from four different schools. In this episode, we wanted to share with you different accounts on this issue, and visit the very real and hidden spaces, the heard and unheard corners, of this relationship. We wrapped up this episode with hardship. Listening to two female students' experiences were especially difficult. We were truly happy for Ross and Ian because their cases prove that there is still hope for good practices. It is really difficult to come up with a conclusion after having heard these peculiar stories. Without condemning or glorifying advisor-advisee relationship, we wanted to show that like any other type of interpersonal relationship, this relationship is multi-layered too. It requires both the good parts about being a human, such as care and generosity, but it also requires setting boundaries.

We were able to create this episode with the incredible help and support of some people that we would like to share our gratitude with. We would like to thank Elif Sendur for providing her insight on the master-pupil relationship in Ancient Greece. We would also like to thank Kaitlyn Sirna and Hakan Doğa, who narrated the stories of Alice and Donna. Even though they did not know anything about who these two people were, they did an amazing job in presenting their stories with their own voices.

In part 2 of "Is Academic Coaching the Solution?", we relentlessly ask the same question. We really did our best: we re-listened to the interviews many times, we did some yoga and meditation, and then we interpreted these interviews from a positive perspective. Alas, it did not help, we still think that academic coaching is not the solution.

This week, we go beyond the individual aspects of working with an academic coach and jump to a higher level. It was impossibly difficult to put the script together because we were dealing with a phantom–the unequal nature of higher education. Our three interviewees agreed on the fact that a system that is unequal and unpredictable by nature cannot be saved nor cannot it be ameliorated by academic coaches. The success stories of some PhDs are there for reasons that we are not 100 percent sure of. It is impossible to imitate what one PhD student did to find a job, because this system is not a meritocratic system; the system cannot be untangled by a strict calculation or formula. We need fortune tellers and some luck. Thus, academic coaches who benefit from the dark side of higher education, though that might not be their intention, exploit the desperation of PhD students in the current job market. But they do not reverse or even transform the malaise of the current system, let alone guarantee a job to an applicant.

We would like to thank one by one our guests: Craig, M, and Matt. While working on editing this episode over the last two weeks, we felt like we became friends with them. Talking with these three special people was an exceptional moment for us. Not only did we fall in love with their hearts, but we were also amazed by the fact that they stood bravely, genuinely, and honestly by criticizing a strong figure in the world of academia. Once again, we would like to thank them for helping us explain "what the hell is wrong with academia."

In this week's episode, we talk with Dr. M Adryael Tong, Dr. Craig Gallagher, and Dr. Matt Luckett about their experiences with the phenomena of academic coaching. For the uninitiated, academic coaching is a service that you pay for to have a professional look over your application documents–your CV, your cover letter, your research statement–and offer you tips and strategies for improving those documents. Academic coaches can also be hired to give you one on one interview prep. 

What interested us about this now growing sector of academia is the fact that the services offered by the academic coach are in theory something that graduate students should be able to access for free within their own institutions, either through working with their advisor or utilizing the resources on campus. Why are academics paying someone for personalized coaching? Is the training they are getting really worth the cost?

In part 1 of this episode, we will start to investigate the answers to these questions. We discuss some of the reasons why academic coaching exists, the way in which it tries to fill a void in academia, but also the ways that it can be predatory and harmful to the very people it claims to help.

In the fourth episode, we talked with Dr. Albert Fu, who is a professor of Sociology at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. Albert started to work as a temporary faculty member at a community college right after he got his PhD. A year after, he was "lucky" enough to get a tenure track job, so he has seen both ends. Thus, he knows why adjuncts deserve better, and he feels grateful to have a stable life with the securities that a tenure job gives him. He has seen both ends. Thus, he has observed closely how tenured faculty can contribute to the exploitation of the adjuncts.

In this episode, Albert walks us through a strike that his union had in 2016. The strike was particularly significant because it improved the working conditions of the faculty, including adjuncts. As he told us about the terms of employment for adjuncts at his university, we were surprised to hear something different than the conventional though still very real vulnerability about adjuncts.

Academia is going through a difficult time, but to be honest, it has been like this for decades. The long-standing dream job is falling apart, adjuncts are being fired in droves during the pandemic, and the number of tenure track jobs has dropped drastically. In this episode, we want to discuss the future of higher education by changing perspectives and bringing the adjunct and tenure systems in conversation together. We can take a step to fix the damage and prevent the expansion of vulnerability in the higher education by asking more provocative questions. We can start by asking this question: What does the creation of such a vulnerable group of adjuncts tell us about the future of tenure?

In this episode, we document the experience of working as an adjunct. To help us understand this experience better, we talked with James Parisot. James has been working as an adjunct for the last 8 years. He started to work as an adjunct when he was a PhD student. After he got his PhD, he moved to Philadelphia, he published his first book, and he is working on a second book, in addition to many other projects, but he has to continue working as an adjunct because he has to make money and he likes teaching. James showed us with great honesty the everyday life of an adjunct, the true emotional and physical struggles that adjuncts can have, and ultimately the unspoken feelings of being trapped in the adjunct system. He portrays the life of an adjunct so well that you can understand why an adult who works and makes money can still have credit card debts; why adjuncts might not want to fully emotionally commit themselves to their students because they might stop working at that college; why they can feel exhausted and emotionally drained as they have to teach multiple courses simultaneously at more than one location. Our goal is to portray the changing landscape of higher education and also open an avenue to discuss the fact that the main burden of higher education is placed on adjuncts' shoulders, even though they are not rewarded enough and are not provided with stable securities.

In the second episode, Dianey Leal joins us. She is a PhD student in Higher Education and Chicano/Latino Studies at Michigan State University. In this episode, Dianey walks us through the deepest corners of the neoliberal university and describes to us in detail the myriad characteristics of it. While she shows the ways that the neoliberal university crafts its members in unexpected ways, she also touches on the immediate impacts of it. As she experiences the neoliberal university as a PhD student, we wanted to ask her experience as well. She was generous enough to share with us the toolkit that she generated over the years to cope with the system. As she says, maybe we cannot destroy the neoliberal university, but with a few little steps that we can take to redefine what PhD life and academia are for us, we can disrupt the neoliberal university.

In the first episode of Just as it Sounds, we discuss what the neoliberal university is with Dr. Evelyn Morales Vasquez. Evelyn is a post-doc at the University of California, Riverside and her research focuses on the psychological and emotional impacts of neoliberalism in higher education settings. During this one-time experience of conversing with an expert on the impacts of “neoliberalism”, we didn’t want to miss the opportunity of gossiping about the mystery of neoliberalism. Evelyn did a tremendous job describing what neoliberalism is and how it has reshaped the features of higher education. As she walked us through what neoliberalism does to faculty and graduate students, we were able to breathe in and breathe out and be reminded that our conflicted emotional universe as graduate students is a product of the neoliberal university.

During our conversation with Evelyn, Busra and I felt more at ease because Evelyn provided us with some tools to better understand the source of our feelings of insecurity and fear, and helped remind us that we are not alone. We hope that this first episode will be a contribution in generating an alternative interpretation for the crisis in higher education.  We also hope that as you listen to this podcast, you will take a moment to remember that you are not alone and the challenges you have been facing in academia are real.