By Joe Mills, Ph.D. '98

Recently I spent a weekend transferring files from an old computer to a new one. I found hundreds of letters, including ones I wrote while at Davis. Looking at them reminded me of the roller coaster of emotions I experienced in the doctoral program. I was also amused to realize that many of them focus as much on my experiences at Rec Hall as in the classroom.

September 1992. Here I am in California. I don’t know if that sounds strange to you, but it feels pretty weird to me. I mean California, seriously. And get this—people really do surf here, some of them are blindingly blond, and there are palm trees across the street from my apartment. I went to Point Reyes, a national seashore, last weekend. It’s a couple of hours away. This seems to be Davis’ motto: “Only a couple of hours from everything.” As I’m sitting in the sand, two seals pop their heads up and look at me. I thought I was hallucinating, but it happened again. Then again. Then again. Indiana seems a long ways away.

Today was the first day of orientation, and the hardest thing for me was not the fact that I never had the right handout during the meetings or that they teach a half-dozen different composition courses and I couldn’t keep them straight but that I didn’t know anyone on the entire campus. Anywhere. There was a potluck at the department, and I was so obviously the new kid, it was painful to all involved. Either no other new students showed up, or they’re already tapped in enough to mingle smoothly. To comfort myself, I went to the bookstore afterwards. So, the very first book I bought as a new Ph.D. student was the Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes anthology. I highly recommend it.

October 1992. Well, I had my first grad school assignment-type production thing on Thursday. I had to lead a three-hour seminar discussion on Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards. I prepared and prepared, and with all modesty I have to say that I went down in flames. It was an awful experience. I’m having big doubts about whether I’m cut out for graduate school here.

February 1993. I helped get a departmental basketball team together. We signed up for the bottom-level league thinking we would be awful—our volleyball team never won a game, much less a match—but it turns out we’re fairly impressive. Not only are we undefeated, we’re stomping our opponents with scores like 55 to 20. It helps that we have a woman who played semi-pro in Germany and another who was a college star. The three men all stink. Our basic play is give the ball to someone with long hair. Our second play is don’t give the ball to someone with a beard if you can help it. The corollary to this is if you have a beard and the ball get rid of one as soon as possible.

August 1993. The wailing you hear on the wind is me. Why, oh why, oh why, did I take an Incomplete? Why, oh why, have I let it drag out for so long? Why am I not watching reruns of “Gilligan’s Island” and reading Raymond Chandler novels instead of sitting for hours in front of the computer trying to summon the energy to turn it on?

May 1994. What fools we have been! All those years wasted playing volleyball and basketball when we could have been playing inner tube water polo. It is possibly the dumbest sport in the world. We won our first game by forfeit and enjoyed a week of being undefeated. Then we played a team and got pounded 24 to 2. And we had to keep asking what the rules are. The great thing is how can you feel bad about losing a game played in inner tubes? Truly this is a sport of the gods.

March 1996. I have now officially advanced to candidacy. What that means is Thursday I passed my last exam—an orals examination. I went into a little room and five professors stared at me for two hours as I mumbled words like “discourse” and “modernism.” During one particularly strained answer, my adviser got a horrified expression as if she were watching me poke a rattlesnake with my finger. She had asked an easy question, one we had discussed last week, and I responded like someone suffering from amnesia. Nevertheless, they took pity—perhaps they didn’t want to have to submit all of us to this again—and I am now what’s called ABD—All-But-Dissertation. No more classes. No more tests. I’m going to read comic books for a month or so, and then it’s into the dissertation woods where people often get lost for years. You may not hear from me again.

September 1996. I’ve spent the last two days organizing my desk and coming up with some kind of system for attacking my dissertation. Binders, notebooks, good luck charms, special pens, etc. It’s been looming over me for some time and now it’s finally here, and I realize that I have no idea how to write a critical work of approximately 250 pages. A little at a time I guess. So, today I’ll start with “the,” and tomorrow I’ll add to that.

May 1998. Sorry I haven’t written in so long. I’ve been either writing or avoiding writing, and both activities take an enormous amount of energy.

June 1998. It’s done. The committee signed off. The chancellor shook my hand and gave me a degree. I’m officially Dr. Mills. Now what? I suppose there’s always law school.

Joe Mills, Ph.D. ’98, is a professor at the North Carolina School of the Arts. He’s currently writing a guidebook about North Carolina wineries.