Scholarship Guilt November 22, 2009

During my two years, thus far, as a PhD student I have coined a few phrases to express some novel emotions I’ve felt. I don’t by any means think I invented them from scratch, but they seemed to cover what I wanted to say, so I started using them.

Today I want to talk about one of these phrases: scholarship guilt.

I come from a middle-class, working family. We work, that’s what we do. It’s not necessarily work that defines us, but we are not a family who slack off. (This is a shame really, since I am quite a lazy person at heart). I got my first job when I was fifteen, and I worked all the way through undergraduate.

Then I got a stipend for PhD study.

At first it was naturally exciting, this is what I’d been waiting for. I’d worked so hard to get good grades in the hopes that one day someone would pay me to continue studying. Now good graces had fallen my way and I was being told “yes, you are good enough after all.” I think the excitement lasted about a month. Then the guilt set in.

Scholarship guilt. Google only found a few references, see here for an example of the guilt driving work, and here for an added dimension – what happens when your scholarship was funded through means you don’t agree with? For me, scholarship guilt is the feeling of being paid for nothing. Or possibly, being paid for doing something you would do anyway for free.

This is a bit silly really. If you had a job you really loved doing, would you feel guilty being paid to do it? Actually, I possibly would. But why? Why do I (we?) have this need for self-flagellation? Surely there is nothing to say that being working class, working a slog of a job is more honourable than a higher paid job that you enjoy and worked hard to qualify for. But I do feel that way; to me, just the idea of being a “scholar” is a bit high brow and snooty.

I think this can easily lead you to put unrealistic expectations on yourself. Much like the blog I referenced which said scholarship guilt forced the author to sit down and get work done, it’s easy to feel like you have to live up to this high value the scholarship puts on you. PhDs are notorious for having bursts of work separated by long periods of, well; the nice way to put it would be “non-work”. It doesn’t seem fair to put so much pressure on yourself that in those inevitable bust periods you convince yourself you aren’t living up to the expectations the financial support comes with.

Look, I don’t want to sound whiny and ungrateful. I could go and get a “real job” but I chose to pursue this PhD dream, and this is the way you live during that time. I do like eating and having a roof over my head, and I have my stipend to thank for providing that. But I can’t be the only one to feel the reverberations of changing from one mindset during undergraduate (you pay them to study) to the polar opposite. It’s then augmented by all the other big changes between undergraduate and postgraduate in supervision, accountability, and the nature of the work.

I also can’t help but think this relates to imposter syndrome, something I’ve definitely felt and only recently had a label for. I plan on blogging on it in the future, and will almost certainly come back to scholarship guilt and how I’ve dealt with it. At some point I’ll also be writing on women in science, and freaky feminist subjects like that. But in the meantime, I can’t avoid linking to this blog, her slideshow is hilarious and intelligent – two of my favourite things. I’ll be looking into how to make slideshows next.