A First Gen's Journey into Doctoral Work

My experience of higher education and going back to school.

It’s junior year of high school.

I walk into the laundry room where my mom is unloading clothes from the dryer and transferring them to a laundry basket.

“Austin thinks I could get a doctorate if I wanted.”

Austin is my boyfriend, and the first person to ever tell me this.

“I think you could, too,” Mom says, now the second person to ever tell me this.

I smile, shy, surprised.

I neatly fold the idea and tuck it away in the bottom of a drawer.  

It’s junior year of college.

I’m doing an independent study on psychological assessments with Dr. Seitz.

“Have you ever thought about getting a doctorate?” he asks.

I smile, shy, heartened.

“I’ve thought about it,” I say, “but I don’t know, that feels really intimidating.”

“Well, I understand,” he empathizes. “But you are more than capable of getting a doctorate if that’s what you decide you want. In fact, you’re working on a graduate level already.”

The way he frames his encouragement, with respect for my timeline and autonomy to decide, makes me think.

Maybe I want it?

But I do not dare admit this, most especially to myself.

As a first-gen, I live in the tension between “the world is my oyster” and a tightness in my core, a localized fear I ignore, because for starters, I am twenty years old. I know God has called me to certain things, but with no direction outside the spiritual, there is so much else I’m invisibly tasked with figuring out on my own. And in a future of my own making, not figuring it out, whatever “it” is, is not an option.

This is as much as I know right now:

• The only women I know with doctoral degrees are my professors. I can tell they love their work, but their lives seem—how shall I put it—stressful. I want to understand what’s going on there before pursuing a PhD or similar path.

• What I might want notwithstanding, I cannot imagine being able to afford such a luxury. Even after a thirty percent academic scholarship, a $1,000 writing scholarship, $2,000 of in-state money, and a small inheritance, I will still need to personally cover a portion of my college tuition.

• Marriage is something I want and, assuming I’ll have kids, I want to make sure I can pay for their college tuition before paying more than my career choice requires.

• I have a Type A personality, and thanks to Psych 101, I know that I am exactly the type of person who is more prone to stress-related illnesses than Type B personalities. I’ve already watched women in my family suffer the illnesses in my textbook, so any goals I wish to accomplish must include a quality of life that supports my thriving, not my surviving.

• I will not trade my mental, financial, or relational health to pursue a doctoral degree.

But these are personal, private issues.

Things I will navigate on my own.

It’s my third semester of grad school.

“You are a thoughtful and capable scholar,” Dr. Offutt scrawls across my final paper, an ethnography of a local church congregation. “Have you considered a PhD?” he follows up as the semester ends.

I’m newly married. My husband and I have just combined our savings and paid off the loan I took out for my first semester of grad school. I do not intend to incur more debt EVER—if I can help it. I’ve never felt more imprisoned, constricted, or beholden to something outside of myself.

This semester, alongside my job as a teller, I’ve also accidentally started a business teaching gymnastics to kids. It was supposed to be a ministry, a service to fellow seminarians with families, low incomes, divided attention, and kids who ran wild around our neighborhood. But I’ve worked in a gym since I was fifteen; I know how to provide gymnastics instruction, emotional safety, and structure. Parents are happy to pay me for the resource.

For just twenty dollars a month, their kids get four hours of skills-based, developmentally healthy, formative classes. I earn enough business to cash-flow my next semester, and the next, until my husband and I have paid our own way through both of our master’s degrees.

Anyway, by Dr. Offutt’s encouragement, I am flattered.

I tuck his compliment in my pocket and hand him a gymnastics flyer for his daughters.

It’s fall of 2019.

I am seven years into business, still offering my skills and services to meet the needs of individuals, couples, and families. My husband has started his doctorate, a practitioner degree in educational leadership. I’m as excited for him as I have been about anything.

As I watch him do it up close, I can feel my confidence building.

I engage him in what he’s learning: educational psychology and philosophy, institutional budgeting and higher ed law, high impact practices for student belonging, and first-gen student retention strategies.

“If you enjoy my doctoral program this much, and it’s not even your subject area, you are going to love getting your doctorate one day.”

I smile, unshy, seen.

I now know how to feel my fears and desires fully, and trust another fully with them.

This is no longer a personal, private issue.

I no longer navigate these things on my own.

It’s 2024.

I email Dr. Dean, my professor of Psych 101 and my only professor to ever share that she, too, is a first-gen. She’s asked me over the years when I plan to go back to grad school.

At last, the answer is now, when all the conditions have aligned: subject matter, location, tuition, life stage, level of confidence, and circling back to the stress I perceived in my female professors, full support for women in their callings.

The hidden curriculum of higher education for first-gens is that all the things you feel you must figure out all on your own are the very things your professors have already done, already know how to do, and which the best ones are willing to help you with—if you let them. (Note to current and future first-gens: this is what office hours are for.)

I email Dr. Dean to tell her I’m applying to a Doctor of Ministry program in Spiritual Formation and Relational Neuroscience—and again, three months later, to share that I’ve been accepted.

“We've always believed that you were one who should go on to get that degree.”

I am nearly twice the age I was when I first had her in class and her words mean more to me now than they likely would have then. To mean less then than now, however, does not mean they meant any less.

Maybe I just needed more time to let others’ confidence become my own.

Maybe I needed to heal from and deal with some things to believe myself ready.

Maybe a doctorate is something I’ve grown into desiring over the years.

Or, maybe I’ve wanted it all along.