A few months ago, I was getting ready to finish my second year as a Ph.D. student in the German Department at the Ohio State University when I found out I had far less time to finish my degree than I had anticipated. One more year, in fact. One year to complete my research, pass the oral exam, finish an entire dissertation, and defend it. For anyone unfamiliar with the inner workings of American graduate programs, this is nothing short of a herculean feat. Not to mention, I would have to continue teaching my courses in the meantime. Most graduate students in the Humanities take 2-3 years after passing their exams to completely write, edit, and defend a dissertation. And many take even more; it’s not unheard of for a student to be well into their eighth year in a graduate program still writing a dissertation.

So, after finding out this news—I was very frustrated and disappointed. All this hard work I had completed over the past year, reading articles, meeting with advisors, attending talks, and writing presentations, was essentially wasted. I felt like someone had invited me to their house for dinner, asked me to take a seat, and then swiftly kicked the chair out from under me just as I had committed to sitting down. I was right to be upset since what had occurred was a monumental misunderstanding between my department leadership and what financial funding I had been promised as a Ph.D. student. 

I began to think about the past few years I had spent as a student and consider what I would do next. I do not quit easily, and I am especially not one who likes to feel like they’ve been bested. So, I started scheming.

Scouring the graduate handbook and speaking with other students who had recently left, I was convinced that I had one option left to finish grad school in a year. Ohio State allows funded graduate students to take leaves of absence for up to two years, provided they haven’t yet taken their oral exams for Ph.D. candidacy. During these two years, the University will hold your spot in the program should you decide to return and admit you after a review of your academic standing in your program. For me, it was obvious what I needed to do. Go to Germany and do the research myself, write as much of this dissertation in the next two years, and go back to OSU for my last funded year and throw everything at the wall and see what I could get to stick.

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Fast forward to July, and I arrived in Berlin with no suitcases (these were lost in the great European luggage mix-up of Summer 2022, but thankfully via AirTag were found days later), with an appointment at the immigration office the very next day. Getting an appointment with the notorious Ausländerbehörde (alien authority) is almost as difficult as finding an affordable apartment inside the Ringbahn. I was lucky to find an open appointment two weeks before my flight. I stayed up until 2:00 am every Wednesday morning in the US to check the Ausländerbehörde website since this is when the appointments are released—for almost a month—and finally got an appointment for the day before my flight left. Changing this appointment was no option, so I changed the flight instead.

For any of this to occur, I had to have a solid job offer before applying for a residency permit. After many unfruitful interviews, non-responses, and bad leads, I landed a project manager position at a translation agency in Berlin—just five minutes by foot from my apartment. I spent the month of August feeling like things were finally looking up, I had managed an entire trans-Atlantic immigration, including getting a job I was actually qualified for. 

But I soon realized that the job I had landed was not all I had hoped it to be.

Adjusting to a 9-5 after having so much freedom as a graduate student to devise my own schedule was way more difficult than I had anticipated. I constantly felt unproductive and unmotivated because I was forced to be “on” when it didn’t feel natural. I enjoy working and getting things done, but I really enjoy having a say when I get things done. And a normal corporate role doesn’t usually allow for this type of flexibility. In addition, a 9-5 job isn’t compatible with the state library in Berlin. The library is only open until 7 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and including a 30-minute U-Bahn commute, I had only an hour to do any meaningful work. After talking it over, I finally admitted I needed to quit, and I realized I wasn’t doing anything that pushed me creatively or intellectually like at OSU. So, I decided it was time to do something else. 

Currently, I am working at a language school in Berlin, I also do freelance translating and interpreting. And I feel so much freer. I didn’t want my career change to be from one 9-5 to another, so I am also picking back up with my writing. I will be writing on a wide variety of topics here, hoping that at least someone will find them interesting. Let’s see if I can get this thing done, and let’s hope I can finish in the next three years as Dr. Davis.