This echoes closely (for me) what I experienced as a grad student before ultimately abandoning it.<p>In 2005, I was pursuing my then-dream of joining the ranks of academia. I was a history &amp; philosophy grad, and my field was 20th-century intellectual and cultural history (so, you know, a whole lot easier than and not at all like the <i>real</i> sciences). I&#x27;d grown somewhat tired of the expected vulture-like hovering about what had been the standard historiographical approaches of the past 30 years. Not because I did not find them valuable, insightful, meaningful, or worth continuing. I absolutely did. I continue to find them incredibly insightful. However, it just wasn&#x27;t <i>quite</i> what I was looking for. I thought I had something better, something nobody was doing at all at that time in the field.<p>For an entire year, I found myself locked in an endless struggle of presenting my case, arguing my thesis and its philosophical framework and merit, with every member of the department. I couldn&#x27;t succeed in convincing a single prof to head my committee. Not one. There were long and impassioned debates. They asked a ton of questions, really forced me to dig further into proving the merits and value of the idea, constantly put me on the spot to really flesh out how I was going to support this idea.<p>At first, I thought I was simply failing to make my case. I could accept that. It drove me to work harder to make my case. I slowly began realizing something else was up when, without fail, every prof hit a point of being no longer interested in hearing my arguments. This was signified--every single time--when they suggested they&#x27;d be willing to lead my committee if I would choose a topic that matched their research. They offered to take me on as their RA because I had so thoroughly proven my ability to quickly gain depth and breadth of understanding in a given topic. They even granted me a TA position by the end of the year to sweeten the pot (I&#x27;d been attending with no financial assistance at that point, paying the bill myself).<p>After this happened with the last remaining prof, I finished the semester out, then emailed them all a thanks-but-no-thanks letter. I left the program.<p>A month later, I received an email from one of the professors. It was a personal heads-up and invitation to attend an upcoming conference the university would be hosting. The keynote speaker just happened to be an expert on a philosopher who featured prominently in inspiring and underpinning my proposed work. The keynote topic was a talk about that philosopher&#x27;s work, and a musing on how it needed to be included in historiography alongside the analytic categories employed for so long in modern historical scholarship. There was even a light-hearted mention by this prof of how much it sounded exactly like everything I&#x27;d been arguing in the department for a year, and how she thought I wouldn&#x27;t want to miss hearing what <i>an expert</i> had to say on the topic.<p>¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯<p>EDIT: couple word choices; formatting.