Getting a PhD vs Getting my PhD

I’m reading Happy for You by Claire Stanford, and in one scene, the protagonist’s best friend is giving her advice. He says, “You could go back to grad school. Finish your PhD” (158). (The protagonist is on leave from her philosophy PhD program while she works at a tech company.)

The scene reminded me of a thought I’ve had at least once when answering small talk questions about my grad school work. If someone were to ask me what I’m doing at Penn State, I think I’ve usually said, “I’m getting a PhD in English and Visual Studies.” I think that I’ve subconsciously tried to avoid the phrasing “I’m getting my PhD,” as if it would be presumptuous to call mine something that I haven’t yet earned.

It might be a PhD, but it’s not mine yet.

But thinking more about that, and perhaps overthinking a choice in phrasing that I’m not even certain whether I’ve consistently made, even if “my” is not technically accurate, it can perhaps signal a good and healthy mindset. Because while the PhD does evidence some amount of training and experience according to some agreed upon standard of what it takes to know a thing really well, the particular experience that it signifies is also very different from person to person. The intellectual development and training undertaken by two persons in the same department taking almost all the same classes and holding very similar interests are still likely (or at least ought to be) quite different from one another.

The dissertation, that capstone project at the end of this whole thing, too, is going to be quite singular, the thing that hopefully no one else could write (or maybe, would even want to), and written in a way that only you can.

So maybe it is “getting my PhD,” not just as a colloquialism but as an intentional mindset, indicating that one’s in the process of charting out that course and development of thought and project that are particular to oneself. And for the imposter-syndrome-prone, a category I hadn’t considered myself to be in until I’d reached the middle stages of dissertation writing, the sense of ownership that that phrasing suggests might give a helpful little boost.