The PhD rite of passage

In the strange world of academia, there is a period of time when the PhD student sequesters him or herself for several months with the ritual objects referred to as academic literature. She may reduce her social activities, change her eating, drinking, and sleeping patterns, and show signs of acute stress. This period of intensive studying and social isolation is the first step in the Comprehensive Exams rite of passage, a step commonly referred to as separation or segregation.

During the second step of the rite, the liminal phase, the PhD student enters a room with her advisers for a couple of hours for her exams. During this stage, as anthropologist Victor Turner characterizes it, "liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony." Thus the student is neither in coursework nor in the dissertation phase while in the room; her fate is still to be decided. The "decision" is preordained; the student who enters the ritual will almost always be passed. The tension is created by the ritual, rather than the reality.

The liminal phase climaxes with the end of examination, when the advisers ask the student to leave the room and await her fate. After perhaps 3-5 minutes, the student is asked to reenter the room and congratulated for her success. The student is now ready to be re-integrated into the graduate student community as an ABD--a term mysterious to those outside of the academic culture, but highly significant to those within it.

The student begins re-integration, the final stage of the ritual, by consuming alcohol and snacks with other students down the hall from the examination room. The process continues with more alcohol and likely inebriation in the evening. From this point on, the ABD student will no longer take courses and has attained the status necessary to teach at the collegiate level.

I write this having completed the ritual yesterday, and I can only excuse the arch anthropological tone by having read far too many books in the past four months.