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You had to fight a big snake for your thesis defense. One of the largest ones you'd ever seen—and you'd attended plenty of defenses, seen the fear in the doctoral candidates' eyes as they sought out their snake in the shadows. You don't actually know if it's the biggest snake the facilities department had to offer, because they don't like to give out that much information. But it was a very big snake indeed.
Bigger than you thought it should be. Bigger than seemed fair. Your outside reader really liked your thesis, whatever your advisor had said about it. And even your advisor had agreed that it was ready to defend.
Looking out into the audience and seeing the massive constrictor slithering up to your lectern had been like a punch in the gut.
The rules say you have to defeat the snake. They don't say anything about killing, which is good because that snake was bigger than you are and they don't let you bring weapons on campus. You spoke to the snake to defeat it—told it about your life, the long hours, the scant stipend, the annual crises of conviction. You told it about the capricious academic job market, and the lack of respect for 'fake doctors.' You told it about going home for Thanksgiving and having to tell your great-aunt that no, you really didn’t know where you’d be working when you were done, and yes that was normal, and sure you might end up at the state university twenty minutes from your grandparents’ house but you might end up in the middle of nowhere Oklahoma too and that was fine.
You told it that it wasn’t really fine.
You told it that your undergraduate advisor had said you never should apply to grad school, that she didn't want to see a bright student making the same mistakes she had.
Get a real job, she'd said. There's nothing for you in academia but freshmen’s badly-written papers and the tepid but insurmountable insights of reviewer two. How will you feel when all of your friends are making money as stock traders and IT support, and all you have is sleep deprivation and ramen packets? I'm one of the lucky ones and look at me.
She'd gestured at her brightly-lit office and her shelves full of interesting books and you'd thought, oh fuck off you are one of the lucky ones, you think I wouldn't kill to be paid to learn for a living?
But you wouldn't kill, in the end. You just talked and talked until the snake curled around you and buried its head in the crook of your neck, not squeezing, not biting, just holding you gently while you refused to cry in front of your committee and the rest of the audience.
There was a first-year grad student in the back row who looked shell-shocked. 'It's not usually this bad,' you mouthed at him.
Now it's two years later and the snake lives in your apartment, because there's some obscure rule that says that if you don't actually kill the snake then you have to take care of it until you're done with your thesis corrections. You'd never heard that one before. You're about ninety percent sure that your school is making it up so they can off-load care and feeding costs onto beleaguered grad students, just like they do with everything else that’s inconvenient.
Sometimes you wonder if your undergrad advisor was right. Maybe you should have taken a few years off at least, gotten some experience in the real world before you dove back into academia. Learned how to snake-wrestle. There are actually classes for it, you’d just never bothered. You were so confident that your thesis would merit a garter snake at the very most.
You're adjuncting while you do thesis corrections. Once a month you send your committee chair your new final draft, and three weeks later he sends it back with seven new points to address. You've been doing this for two years. You're teaching four classes at once, two of them online, and none of them are really in your field. You're so tired.
Sometimes the snake curls around you as you sleep, hungry for your warmth. You wake up to a cushion of scales.
On the day you decide you're done with this, you print your dissertation in hard copy, all the many hundreds of pages of it. Your home printer jams—you don't have access to the university printers since you're not really a grad student anymore. Not really an alumni either, though you'd walked at graduation after your defense. Still waiting to fill that final form.
You pull the jammed paper from your printer and load in a new cartridge when the old one runs dry. You print the form too.
The snake piles into the backseat of your ancient Oldsmobile as you drive onto campus and park in the lot at the bottom of the hill where no one knows it's $2.25 for the whole day if you pay in quarters. It slithers behind you as you take the back way into the building you spent six years in, taking classes and doing research and trying all the time, you tried so hard.
Your advisor's office is on the top floor. The snake fills the floor of the elevator, coiling over itself when it runs out of room. You watch the numbers tick up and up and up.
Your advisor's door is open—it's office hours on the last day of the exam review period. He barely glances up from a paper he's reading as you walk in, the snake close at your heels.
"I'm submitting my dissertation to the archives today," you say. "It's done. I need your signature."
"It's not done," he says, making a note on the paper with red pen.
"I've defended," you say. "I defended two years ago, and I'm done."
"There's a fundamental flaw with your core argument," he begins, and then he sees the snake. "Why's that thing here?" he demands.
"The time for core critiques," you say through gritted teeth, "was during my prospectus defense."
Your advisor isn't listening. He's pulled his feet up onto his chair to avoid the inquisitive tongue of the exploring snake.
"I'm going to the department chair," you warn him. "They want me done and out of their 'time to degree' statistics."
The snake nips at his ankle.
Your advisor defeated a snake once. Was it a small one? Or did his advisor make it larger than it needed to be, one last hurdle to overcome and then perpetuate? Everything in graduate school is harder than it needs to be.
You pick up your dissertation and you take the form away. You leave the office, shutting the door behind you. The snake stays behind.
If there are screams, you don’t hear them.
You're a doctor of philosophy. You defeated the snake, the rest is all bureaucracy. It'll be a month before you have the official title—all the forms need to be processed, even if the bureaucracy is made a little easier by your former advisor's sudden disappearance and your snake's subsequent reclamation by the facilities department. In two months you'll have an interview at a tenure-track position, and in a year you’ll sit down in your brightly-lit office and look at your shelves of interesting books, and you’ll think how lucky you are, really.
But you were a doctor when you defeated the snake, when you first saw it at your defense. That's how the world works, after all.