August 12, 2025

Dr. Rue: Good morning, David, good to see you as always.

Dave: Thanks, Doc. So, tell me, are we finally going to get into my HR issues today?

Dr. Rue: No. I'm sorry to say that general counsel has not cleared that yet.

Dave: You have a general counsel?

Dr. Rue: Of course, especially needed for clients who seem to want to post all of my sessions with him online.

Dave: Clients? So I am not the only one who posts these?

Dr. Rue: No. I was just trying to make you feel less targeted. Anyway, my suggestion is that we go way back again. I think your narrative requires some origin stories.

Dave: Ugh! You really want me to talk about my childhood? About my mother?

Dr. Rue: No!

Dave: Good. It is her birthday, you know.

Dr. Rue: Happy birthday in Heaven, Mrs. Fleming. Anyway, not that far back. Since our focus is on your career, I think we need to go even further back than your Detroit College of Business days in an attempt to identify how and why you chose your professional path. From there, maybe we can identify moments/events/opportunities that you regret.

Dave: Uh, o.k., I guess.

Dr. Rue: So when did you decide you wanted to be an academic?

Dave: Oh, good God, that sounds so pathetic. Feels similar to asking someone when they decided they wanted to be alcoholic.

Dr. Rue: Now, now, no jokes. Answer the question.

Dave: Honestly, I'm not sure I ever had such an "a-ha" moment. English was my undergraduate major, mostly because I liked to write and read, but I certainly had no real dreams of being a writer, let alone a teacher or a college administrator.

Dr. Rue: And yet your dad was both of the latter, right? Was he a driving force?

Dave: Is this some non-subtle way to get me to talk about my parents after all?

Dr. Rue: C'mon, no jokes. Do you think you consciously or unconsciously sought to have a career generally similar to your dad's?

Dave: No, I don't think so. Senior year in college I did a Spring Break study abroad trip to London with a group of undergraduate and graduate English majors. I do know that illuminated a path to at least graduate school. Up until then, I really had no clue what I would do after I graduated. Certainly not keep working at Lowe's.

Dr. Rue: Ah, now we are getting somewhere. So did the London trip make you appreciate studying literature more?

Dave: Um? {lengthy pause} Maybe. I think what it really did was provide me my first post-high-school friends bonding group. 

Dr. Rue: Interesting. Talk more about that.

Dave: Well, I hung out on the trip with a couple of guys almost as into music as I was, especially British rock of the last 1970s and early 1980s. We roomed together, hit the record stores together, acted goofy together in front of the cute girls on the trip. If I remember correctly, we were the only set of three participants to room together.

Dr. Rue: Hmm, fascinating, but I'm not necessarily seeing how literature/English became a clearer intellectual goal for you.

Dave: I suppose that was the secondary effect. Dr. Nelson who led the trip certainly provided us a great opportunity to see British theater and visit applicable historical venues, but the more you force me to think about it, the more I now realize that the bonding was key.

Dr. Rue: I like to think I don't "force you to think about it," but this is good. So you hung out with these guys after you returned?

Dave: Hell no. We went back to being passing acquaintances.

Dr. Rue: {sighing} You're losing me, Dave.

Dave: Bear with me, doc.

Dr. Rue: Doing my best.

Dave: Anyway, I don't believe I'd even applied to grad schools until after that trip. I think I saw the camaraderie of liked-minded people as something safe as I navigated further into my life. Honestly, until then, I really stayed locked in by my hometown crowd.

Dr. Rue: Good. Perhaps your professional identity was emerging.

Dave: It seems a crock to suggest I was professional at anything at this point. The truth of the matter is that I had been a pretty mediocre undergraduate, so with my GPA, my only option was WVU's English graduate program. And that is probably for the best. It allowed me to venture into a new life with an anchor still in the Morgantown community. 

Dr. Rue: So what happened at WVU in grad school? You did just the Master's degree there, right? How did you move forward in those two years?

Dave: In 2010, I was honored by the Eberly College of Arts & Sciences at their hooding ceremony and ...

Dr. Rue: Hold your horses. You can't jump ahead 25 years.

Dave: Patience, doc. I am setting up the answer to your questions.

Dr. Rue: Meooowww!

Dave: I'll ignore that. Anyway, early on in my speech, I talked about how no one should ever really want to leave graduate school. It's like a perfect pocket of intellectual maturation. You finally move from studying a little bit of everything to studying a lot of a few, or even a singular, thing that you care passionately about. You are surrounded entirely by like-minded people, and your professors are more mentors and sometimes even friends than sages on the stage. And I quickly found a new group to bond with, almost two groups, because of the transitory nature of graduate work. The fellow grad students became a small group of friends that first year, continued a Friday afternoon TGIF drinking tradition done by other grad students over the years held at a local bar, and continued it with the new group of students that started in my second year.  Parties, overnight camping, long intellectual discussions, peer to peer interactions. That's what I didn't want to leave.

So to answer your question, that's what the hell happened to me in grad school at WVU. In many ways, the happiest two years of my life.

Dr. Rue: Nice. That happiness was both personal and professional?

Dave: I'm not sure it was entirely personal. I fell madly in love as I never had before, one that mostly went unrequited, but personally I could feel myself growing. Professionally, even though I could feel some imposter syndrome, I was doing exceptionally well. I was president of the graduate association, served on the committee to hire a new composition director, won multiple awards for my coursework, and was more creative than I had ever been.

Dr. Rue: Can we then say this is the origin for your ultimate career?

Dave: Probably. I certainly came to realize that I could be an academic, but would need a doctorate degree to have any kind of chance. My favorite professor, the fantastic Dr. Sophie Blaydes, convinced me to apply to her Alma mater, Indiana University, and the rest to some degree is history.

Dr. Rue: IU provided the same kind of bonding?

Dave: Hah! Not really.

Dr. Rue: {Sigh} Two steps forward, one step back. C'mon, Dave, explain that reaction.

Dave: Indiana felt more like a meat-processing plant than an incubator of intellectuals or even of academics.

Dr. Rue: How so?

Dave: With maybe five times the number of graduate students in their English program as compared to West Virginia, smaller cliques inevitably formed. Their range of interests were much broader. I certainly had my first doubts about the future of literary studies when most of the students coming in after me were interested only in literary theory and boasted of not reading novels or poetry.

Dr. Rue: Really? Why did you stick with it?

Dave: I was probably too far along. Besides, don't get me wrong. I made a couple of good friends, and met my wife, but IU overall provided a colder clime for my academic endeavors. My biggest professional humiliation was a fake interview set up as preparation for us going out on the job market. During that, one faculty member, whom I had never met (this kind of lack of interaction was impossible at the smaller WVU), ripped me a new one within seconds of me answering a question about my dissertation; she wouldn't even let me finish. As I think I mentioned before, the first job I took at Detroit College of Business is one they probably would have discouraged me from taking. I doubt I even made any newsletters about "what our graduates are doing." My dissertation director and one other faculty member took pride in my eventual career choices, but they are the exceptions.

Dr. Rue: That's a rather sad summation. Could we argue that the WVU experience gave you enough strength to get through the IU experience?

Dave: I suppose we could. The more I think about it, the more I come to realize that the two years of the Master's program built up all my ideals about the profession, while the five+ years for the doctorate showed me the reality of the profession.

Dr. Rue: The IU years didn't reverse the growth you had at WVU, didn't kill the creativity?

Dave: Maybe the latter briefly, but eventually it came back. And now that I think about it, I can name many poems and reflections about the WVU years, but none about the IU years.

Dr. Rue: So, you are o.k. with all of this now?

Dave: Sure. The end justified the means.

Dr. Rue: That's a rather cold take.

Dave: I learned a long time ago that one's life is exactly what it is. To go back and change one part of it changes all of it from that point on. I have been pretty lucky all things considered. I am in a good place.

Dr. Rue: And yet here you are with me.

Dave: What can I say? I can be in a good place, but question the surroundings.

Dr. Rue: I can't decide if that is profound or not. Let me chew on that until our next meeting.

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The Ever-Evolving Full Series of Sessions

Session Nine: That Uncertain Smile