So, on 13 May 2017, I got a new puppy.
In the days and weeks prior, I told many people about how perfect the situation had been. I spent months shopping for a breeder on the East Coast. When I found one I liked, I emailed, and voila, she had just had a litter four days prior, and had two males to choose from, if I’d like to come pick one out and put down a deposit. The puppies would be ready in mid-May. Perfect! I’d be done grading the spring semester, summer would just be starting, and I’m not teaching in the fall, that gives me six months with the puppy. Plus, I am embarking on a six-month writing sprint to get the body of the dissertation written. A new puppy would provide structure and order to my day. So on 13 May 2017, we brought this little guy home.
His name is Duncan. (As in Duncan Idaho.) He’s a good puppy, but also a monster, equal parts evil genius and total dope, as all puppies are. He is also horribly cute. In this post-truth, alt-fact world, we can all agree that here, embodied in this little creature, is at least one objective truth. May that bring us all a respite from the storm.
In the days following Puppy Acquisition, I found myself spiraling into what I lovingly refer to as “Disaster Mode.” There are a lot of similarities between puppies and human babies; human babies are babies longer, and I get that, but you also don’t have to take your human baby outside in the rain at 2 am. He cried through the first few nights. I didn’t get a lot of sleep. I had a meeting with my advisor coming up, and a self-imposed deadline I wanted to meet. My work wasn’t getting done, because I was overtired and stressed and outside with, or playing with, the puppy pretty much constantly. I am a long-experienced dog owner and worked professionally in the dog business for a decade, but it felt like decades of knowledge fell out of my head the moment we got this puppy.
This is how I found myself the puppy101 subreddit. It got me through the first few days, and as our situation improved, I started posting on other people’s threads, sharing my own experiences. There’s a great community there, and I like it for two reasons: 1.) commiseration, and 2.), and I say this in a low whisper, whoa other people’s puppies are way worse than mine.
As I posted on people’s threads and asked my own questions, I started to realize that a lot of the things I was saying mirrored many of the things I think and say, in a supportive context, about grad school, the PhD process, dissertating, and academia in general. When I was typing up responses on either platform, it had me playfully asking myself, “Is this post about my puppy, or my dissertation?”
And then I realized the two are basically the same thing.
I’ve been wanting to blog for a long time, and didn’t know how to start. In the increasingly hard-to-navigate-successfully world of academia, my supervisor has been on me to develop a digital footprint. I’m still not sure I know how to write about my research – I will definitely be trying to do that, though. I think my research is very interesting, and other people seem to agree. I mean, I work on UFOs. That gets people’s attention. So I’d like to try to figure out how to write about my research. But I also want to share with you how this puppy reflects dissertating. The daily struggles sometimes feel one and the same; but I’m also trying to lift puppy lessons out of that world and place them as an overlay on my current writing efforts. “Celebrate each and every positive, no matter how small.” “Face this with love and patience.” “Develop a consistent schedule and stick with it.” “Vary his available toys every day.” “A frozen Kong saved our lives.” (I’ll explore this analogy in a later post, I promise. It has to do with ending the day with a reward and going to bed happy and quiet.)
So welcome to “What’s This Post About? Puppy, or Dissertation?”
Kate Dorsch 