“My dad is a doctor, but not the kind that helps people.”

My beautiful 12-year-old daughter Addison made this rather deadpan comment earlier this year at a school function that I attended.

Well, that wasn’t the rousing welcome to doctordom as I had hoped.

October 10 will make the year anniversary of becoming “Dr. Chris Yandle.” Even a year later, it’s still taking some getting used to. While I have made “Dr. and Mrs. Yandle” return address labels and new personal business cards with the fancy title, I don’t act differently. I don’t feel differently. I only added “Ph.D.” to my non-academic work email in August.

It’s been a long year since that dissertation presentation on a rainy day in Atlanta last year. I was naive to think that with the swift motion of a pen, becoming Dr. Chris Yandle would open hundreds of doors for me, and I’d get to pick the one I wanted to enter.

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Nope. Not at all.

During my three-plus-year Ph.D. program, we were not trained for or encouraged to write publishable academic works. When I graduated (officially) in December 2019, I had zero academic publications to my name. I had one academic conference presentation and one academic award, Emerging Scholar for the 2020 International Conference on Sport & Society. Unfortunately, that conference in Granada, Spain, was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I’ve learned more in this last year than in my Ph.D. program. That’s not an indictment on the education I received. That’s an observation of mine after at least four academic journal rejections, one of which said my dissertation research was among the worst he’d read. 

About three months ago, I was ready to call it quits on my academic career. I’ll adjunct on the side when needed, but the rejections and the feedback were becoming a mountain I was fearful I wouldn’t overcome.

I thought this was all going to come easy for me. It came easy to me in higher education once before, when I worked in college athletics. However, those are two opposing forces that work in different realities. I had this grandiose plan that a Ph.D. would automatically lead to a faculty position. Man, I have never been so wrong.

It means I have to try harder.

Of course, I finished my Ph.D. at one of the worst times possible - in the midst of a pandemic that has exacerbated higher education’s financial issues. While million-dollar coaches and athletic directors remain employed with little to no financial struggle, many academics are being furloughed or let go altogether. We see it on the athletics side too, as the employees who do the lion’s share of the work (communications/SID, marketing, equipment, compliance) are losing their jobs...while coaches keep their cushy salaries.

Academia has seen better days, and I hope I get to see them.

I know what I can do in the classroom.

I know how I can build and transform the confidence and knowledge of my students.

However, what is missing is a CVS-receipt length list of academic publications to my name. I hope to get there one day as I have resubmitted heavily edited of the previously rejected manuscripts. I haven’t been rejected this much since trying to date in high school. So what’s the answer? Keep working.

To any Ph.D. student or recent Ph.D. graduate who may read this, be sure to celebrate your accomplishment. Enjoy it. Be proud of called “Doctor.” Even though we aren’t the ones that “save people,” as my daughter puts it, we still have the chance to do meaningful work that can impact many that follow us.