Sailing Away on the SS Academe: A Discussion of Current Graduate Student Experience in Leisure

Abstract

Navigating the roles and responsibilities of graduate work is a complex, and often confusing business of workflows, labor (emotional and physical), and moving in several different directions. As graduate students, we find solace and compassion in the words and (mostly) shared experiences of our colleagues, and challenges in the desires, requirements, and “this is your life now” statements of our supervisors and faculty mentors. To be a trainee in the academic context of leisure studies is to make an already complex work of personal development and intellectual labor even more complicated. Building on personal experience and the collective experiences of my colleagues, this paper will discuss PhD student experiences in leisure, and the deep influences that structural and social changes are having on those same students. It will explore our perceptions of post-PhD horizons, the challenges of student lives, and the complexities of being both a professional and a novice at the same time. As graduate students, we navigate these issues using the tools at our disposal (both traditional and modern), all-the-while wondering if we are doing any of it the “right” way. Enlisting the attractive metaphorical spaces of sailing and the crew of a tall ship, this paper explores the academic seas as a trainee on the SS Academe.

Keywords:

• Student experience
• gradaute student
• complexity
• neoliberal
• sailing

Acknowledgment

I would like to acknowledge the contributions of the individuals who shared their feelings and experiences with me to help craft this work, as well as for the support and critique early on in the development of this manuscript I received from some very smart colleagues.

Notes

1 The Viewmaster is the best-known stereoscope, where you can see a series of images from places and activities as a way of experiencing them for yourself, and is a precursor to modern VR used for the same purpose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View-Master

2 This research was conducted, and this paper written, before SARS-COV-2 (COVID-19) rocked our personal, economic, and educational landscapes. While all of the elements discussed in this paper will be affected by these events, many of them are likely to be deeply exacerbated.

3 What I mean here is really white, upper (and maybe middle) class people who have enough money, time, and cultural capital to engage in a sport which is expensive, time consuming, and elitist to the highest degree.

I also say this with deference to the fact that these are not the only people who engage with sailing, and that populations all over the world sail, but when you think about going out on someone’s sailboat, what do you envision?

4 I want to be very clear about the metaphor here, in that I don’t mean to talk about graduate students dying or taking their own lives, but rather a broader idea of falling away from PhD studies and the academy. The issue of graduate student death and suicide is, however, an issue we should all be conscious of and account for in our lives as academics, peers, supervisors, and people (Di Pierro, 2017; Garcia-Williams et al., 2014; Luo et al., 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.