The Dissertation Tax: What It Really Costs to Be a BIPOC Doctoral Scholar

There's a tax on this degree that nobody puts in the program handbook.

I'm not talking about tuition. I'm talking about the other one. The one you pay in pieces, before you even defend your proposal, and the one you keep paying long after you walk the stage.

Before I started, I thought I could conquer the world. I had the degrees, the discipline, the drive. I was ready.

The world got a few licks in first.

I'm not going to pretend the during part is one clean story. Honestly, I still can't tell you if the during or the after cost me more. Some days I think they're equal.

There was a stretch where I questioned whether I could even write anymore. Whether I was comprehending the material the way I should. I'd sit with a paragraph I knew was solid and find myself picking it apart, looking for the flaw, because somewhere along the way I'd started doubting my own read on my own work.

I got into it with a committee member over a capital V. Veteran. Not lowercase. I am one. I served twenty years. That capital letter wasn't a typo; it was identity, and I had to defend it like it was a citation format. That's a small thing to have to fight for. It costs something anyway.

I was outnumbered in those rooms. Always outnumbered. And when you're the only one who looks like you at the table, you start second-guessing things you'd never question anywhere else.

Then a new committee member came on, a Black woman, and for about five minutes I felt something close to relief. Finally, someone in my corner.

She wasn't.

She went looking for reasons to report me instead of reasons to support me. I won't pretend that didn't hurt different than the other stuff. It did.

Here's what got me through the during part. I thought about my parents. My grandparents. My great-grandparents. All the ones before them I never got to meet. Every one of them paid a tax just to get me to the room I was sitting in, arguing about a capital letter. My discomfort wasn't the whole bill. It was my portion. My portion to pay so I could stand on the shoulders of people who paid a lot more than me and got a lot less for it.

That reframed the whole thing for me. Not easier. Reframed.

Then you finish, and you think the tax is paid in full.

It's not.

After my doctorate, the questioning didn't stop, it just changed shape. Would people take it seriously? Would they look at where I earned it and decide it counted less? I had an acquaintance question my process outright, like it wasn't real work, like it didn't measure up to what they'd done. I didn't see that coming. I had no idea that was a bill I'd still be paying after the degree was already mine.

And there's a piece of this that's mine alone to own. I never wanted to be a career researcher. I wanted to teach, sure, but the endless research pipeline was never the goal. I wanted to be a practitioner. A consultant. Somebody who does the work, not just somebody who studies it from a distance. I didn't know exactly how that would look when I started. I figured it out as I went.

That's a tax too, in its own way. Knowing your path doesn't look like the traditional one, and carrying that quietly while everyone assumes you're chasing a tenure-track you never wanted.

If you're paying this tax right now, in any part of it, I want you to hear this clearly: the cost is real. It is not in your head, and where it is in your head, that doesn't make it less real either. You are not imagining the extra weight. You are not overreacting to being outnumbered. You are not wrong for noticing who shows up to support you and who shows up to take you out.

You're paying a tax that a lot of people in that room will never have to pay. And you're still going to finish.

If you want help carrying some of that weight, that's exactly what PhinisheD Doc is here for. Book your free discovery call today.