Ellington

For most young, college-educated people, one’s mid-twenties are a dynamic time of change and “growing up,” with graduation, first job(s), cars, sometimes houses and even kids coming along in sudden succession. Yes, I know that not everyone gets married and starts making babies immediately. And no, not everyone’s career launches right after they finish their college years.

But most people do get their adult lives more or less underway at some point between 21 and 29, it seems, or somewhere around the latter end of that spectrum. If you’re in graduate school, however, that’s not necessarily the case, and you tend to watch friends and family march off into wedded or working bliss on an increasing basis, leaving you to wonder why you’re left in a kind of life-limbo.

Of course, you know that you’re here for a higher (academic) cause, that this is a seasonal sacrifice that will pay off, in the proverbial long run, and that you’ll probably get to the settled-life-part too, someday soon.

But the length and intensity of the Ph.D. (or the M.D., for our friends over at the UW’s medical school) demands a level of commitment akin only, maybe, to having a boyfriend or a girlfriend (and a really demanding one that requires most of every weekend and most weeknights as a matter of course).

Having seen my best friend get married last summer — and several good friends since — I’ve had to face my own mortality as a foot-loose and fancy-free young man. Another friend’s recent engagement over Christmas shook that sense of solo-self-confidence. But if I’m fortunate, I’ll continue to persevere, fully dedicated to my studies and to no other (“Yes, dear, I’ll get back to my reading for class soon, I promise”).

Basically, though, it can be a bit bumming if you compare yourself to others, and see how their lives are progressing as you’re still “stuck” in school. This is not just school, however. It’s graduate school, and it requires a once-in-a-lifetime (or at least once-in-a-long-time) amount of personal and intellectual endurance. That being said, though, as my department’s chair told me, by the time most of your friends are thinking about going back to school for their advanced degrees, enough of “life” would have happened to them to make that more challenging — not that they can’t do it, mind you — it’s just tougher to balance graduate school with careers and kids.

No, for those of us slugging away at the beginning, middle or the end of multi-year programs, now is the best time, not later, to invest in the future. Even if it’s not particularly lucrative or guaranteed, if we believe that what we’re doing is important, time will be worth far more than money, even if we have more of the latter, later.

“The future,” as C.S. Lewis said, “is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.” I would add that the present, for those in graduate school, is a fine place to be.

Reach columnist Will Mari at lifestyles@dailyuw.com.