By the time people get to graduate school, they generally have acquired some familiarity with the principles of probability. So why, asks Nate Kreuter in an essay in Inside Higher Ed entitled "You Aren't the Exception," do so many fail to grasp the simple concept that those laws also apply to themselves? Kreuter describes how, early in his his graduate school program, a professor marched the new students into an auditorium and explained to them in detail just how dismal were their prospects of achieving the academic career they aspired to. (This incident called to mind the famous set piece in Sinclair Lewis's novel Arrowsmith. In this former staple of high school English classes, as young Martin Arrowsmith enters medical school, a professor assembles the class and issues a similarly dire prediction about their odds of success.)
The reason for the widespread failure to believe that such warnings apply to oneself, Kreuter suggests, is that graduate students were, "almost by definition, exceptional students as undergraduates...,exceptionally bright [and] hardworking." Their experience of outstanding success in their studies has made them "very good at disregarding warnings" and conditioned them "to seem themselves as exceptions, as exceptional." So they're likely to think that the same will hold in the next stages of their careers.
There are two problems with this reasoning, Kreuter
says. First, these qualities don't make people unusual at the graduate
level, where having been an outstanding student is the price of
admission. Second, because of the miserable economy and oversupply of
Ph.D.s, the number of academic opportunities available to even the most
accomplished and lucky is excruciatingly small. This makes luck an
overriding determinant in one's outcome, a hard idea to accept for
people who have always succeeded through merit and hard work. "Merit,
many of us have realized with shock, plays a relatively small and
marginalized role in who completes a degree and secures an
appointment." Such uncontrollable factors as whether one's research
topic is in demand the year one finishes, whether someone else suddenly
scoops the work, and who else applies for the job one wants play
inordinate roles.
To help aspirants understand
the true awfulness of their chances of fulfilling the ambition to have a
career like their professors', he suggest reading an open letter that
has been getting attention on the Internet. In it, Larry Cebula of
Eastern Washington University bluntly explains to his students, "No, You Cannot be a Professor."
(A bit of Googling reveals, by the way, that Kreuter,
like the fictional Arrowsmith, persevered and beat the odds. Kreuter
received his Ph.D. at the University of Texas and is now an assistant
professor at Western Carolina University.)
