Today marks five years since the award of my Ph.D. at Northwestern University.
I sure didn't think, on June 20, 2003, that - half a decade later - I would not only not have a full-time teaching job, but that my "career" as a historian would be more or less done. I mean, yeah, I teach a class on the side (actually, I teach four classes a year - two-thirds as many as a Carleton prof, with no terms off, and don't even ask about the pay) and I am working on an article for an special issue of a history journal, but those two activities don't quite sum up to anything like a payoff for having slogged through grad school.
On the other hand, it's almost certainly true that I would not have my current job - which is, frankly, as good a gig as I can imagine - without those three consonants behind my name. And yeah, I suppose that six years in grad school drove the "historical habit of mind" pretty deep into my brain: I think in terms of causal narratives, and always seem - for better and for worse - to seek after "first causes," whether I'm reading a magazine article about China, writing a proposal for a half-million dollar science grant, or wondering which circle of hell produced the TLC channel. As mental habits go, it's not a bad one, and often pretty handy. So there's that.