I began this blog four and a half years ago with the intention of both shedding some light on what the lives of people writing their dissertations looked like and chronicling my own progress toward the PhD. The underlying premise throughout has been that writing a dissertation entails a lot more than sitting at a computer and typing and that these other activities are not mere distractions from writing but are indispensable features of the PhD experience. For example, teaching takes a lot of time that could be spent on writing, but it integrates graduate students into the larger mission of their institutions and helps them develop different perspectives on the significance of their research.

Whether you’ve read a single post, a dozen, or a couple dozen, I hope you come away more convinced of this argument than when you began, just as I have. Of course, I’ve written about my dissertation, both at the beginning of the process and at the end. But not everything has been about writing. I’ve talked about the nitty-gritty of trips to the archive and the things I enjoy in my free time but still find relevant to my intellectual interests. Of course, teaching and service have made appearances, too. As you’d expect from a graduate student blog, there’s been quite a bit of angst—whether about fellowships or jobs—but I’ve also talked about the people and places that have made this journey so worthwhile.

I suppose I’ve written quite a bit about PhD life, at least enough that I hardly recognize the titles of some of the old posts. Although there have sometimes been long gaps between posts, this has been more a product of the limits of my time (and energy and discipline) than of any shortage of things to write about. The blog will come to a close with a number of topics unaddressed and some posts that never made it past me opening up a draft new post and jotting a few notes or even paragraphs.

The earliest of these posts is called “It’s not Paranoia if…” As it stands, the body of the text reads, “printed catalog [line break] Mao Hongbin memorials.” Dating to my time in China, this post was going to reflect on how research requires and inculcates a kind of paranoia, a drive to turn over every rock and leaf. Doing good research requires finding a sweet spot between abandoning oneself to this paranoia—because the most valuable findings seem to always come from the most unexpected places—and keeping it in check—because research has to end at some point, and the psychological weight of an infinite number of unread sources is too much for anyone to bear. I’m not sure why I never wrote this. Maybe it’s because I never genuinely felt like I found that sweet spot.

There’s another post titled, “Excelling at History” that was going to introduce you to my forays into “digital humanities” and my (perhaps unlikely) use of Excel for analyzing collections of poetry. I actually wrote 286 words for this draft post: two full paragraphs and a partial sentence. Again, I’m not exactly sure why I never finished, but I think it had something to do with insecurities about claiming a place for myself as a digital humanist when I am very much a novice, at best.

There’s another draft post on the relationship between historical scholarship and politics that I last edited in October 2018. Even looking at the opening paragraph, I have only a vague idea of what prompted me to start this. There’s a hint in my observation that, despite popular perceptions of historians as overly invested in “arcane tidbits about the past,” practically minded people like policy makers and politicians love talking about history. “They love it so much, in fact, that sometimes you wish they wouldn’t,” I wrote. I suspect I began this post in reaction to some specific misappropriation of historical evidence by a public figure, but this is such a frequent occurrence that there’s no way for me to recollect what set me off in this instance.

Then there’s a post from February 2019 titled, “The Conference Book Haul.” Of all these, it was the closest to completion: 503 words and an image. I centered it on the various books I brought back home with me from the book exhibition at the American Historical Association’s 2019 annual meeting. It was a post about both the experience of academic conferences and how perusing book displays actually helps you realize what kinds of things interest you. There were several reasons I never finished this. I ran into a bit of a wall wondering how much I could/should say about the books in my “haul” without making the post too long. Also, I started writing this post around the time I became my daughter’s daytime caregiver, so time was in short supply. By the time I made the last edit to the post, the conference was almost a month in the rearview mirror, so it felt like the moment had passed.

My haul of books from AHA 2019

I have no way to account for the drafts that I deleted, let alone the ideas that popped into my head but never made it onto the screen. I’m sure at least some of them would have made pretty decent posts and probably would have been better than some of the ones I did write. So Breaking ABD is not a comprehensive account of even my own PhD experience.

Much less is it a definitive portrayal of what it means for any given person to work through a PhD program. The diversity of activities that surround and structure the process of writing a dissertation ensures that there is no single path to a PhD. Reflecting on paths not taken might seem like a bittersweet way to wind down this project. It’s a good reminder, though, that finishing a dissertation doesn’t just happen: it’s an accumulation of myriad, deeply personal choices. For anything to get done, some things have to be left undone. Every PhD reflects a unique configuration of choices about which paths to take and which to leave to others.

If you’re a PhD student, then, I hope that you’ve learned a thing or two but, more importantly, that this blog helps you use your unique set of skills and interests to make the world a better, more informed, more humane place. If you’re not a PhD student yourself but know someone who is, I hope you will have learned a little bit about what their journey might be like and feel comfortable asking questions about it besides, “How’s the dissertation coming?” and “When will you be done?” After all, being ABD is about a lot more than finishing a dissertation.