It takes a village to raise a child, but it also takes a village to finish a PhD—especially as a first-generation academic.

Pursuing a PhD felt, at times, like writing a skeletal screenplay and then directing it in real-time, with no guarantee of an audience at the end, and a terrible budget. The existential weight of research, the endless revisions, and the creeping doubts about whether my work would ever matter outside of my dissertation defense often made me question the entire endeavor.

I won’t romanticize the struggle—it was exhausting. Academia can be an isolating space, and for first-gen scholars, the loneliness is compounded by the lack of informal guidance networks. We navigate it with a silent urgency, knowing that a misstep could mean financial instability, lost years, or an unfulfilled promise to the people who believed in us.

And yet, despite the imposter syndrome, the futility of it all, and the looming employment crisis in the social sciences, my passion for fieldwork and ethnography never dimmed. In fact, it was in the messiness of navigating research that I truly understood why we need more first-gen scholars, not fewer. Because if we don’t tell our stories, who will?

Looking back, I don’t regret finishing my PhD. What I do regret is how unprepared we are, as a system, for the mental toll it takes. The journey is not just about producing knowledge—it’s about learning to survive in an academic culture that wasn’t built for scholars like us. And for me, surviving it wasn’t just my own grit; it was the invisible labor of my mother, my husband, and my closest people, who carried me through this rickety journey of doubt and determination.

If you’re in the middle of a PhD and thinking of quitting—I see you. If you’ve finished and are still grappling with what it meant—I feel you. And if you’re considering a PhD and wondering if the journey is worth it—I won’t lie to you, but I will tell you this: finishing matters, if only because the world needs more of us in these spaces.

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