Senior year of college for Luke Brown was a mix of highs and lows: He got engaged to the woman who would become his life partner, but he also got rejected from every history graduate program to which he'd applied. He got back on track a year later, but ultimately let go of the PhD he'd thought he'd been destined for. Find out how sometimes adjusting your expectations and giving yourself grace to find a new identity can take a bit of time.
Guest Luke Brown had a long-standing desire to become a professor. Though both English and physics seemed plausible at one point, he was pulled into the study of history through a classics course. His senior year of college, he thought he had it all figured out: he got engaged to his college girlfriend and he was applying to graduate school. He ended up getting married, but he also got rejected from every history graduate program to which he had applied. He got back on track a year later, but ultimately let go of the PhD he'd thought he'd been destined for.
In pulling away from the program and academic life completely, he found himself in an identity crisis. He landed jobs that were enjoyable, but in a different field and not quite what he had in mind for himself. Of course, when he reflects on things—especially his wife of more than 25 years and three children—he recognizes that life isn’t all about one’s career.
In this episode, find out from Luke how adjusting your expectations and giving yourself grace to find a new identity can take a bit of time …on Roads Taken with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode’s Guest
Luke Brown continues to hone an eclectic set of interests and currently lends his talents to help organizations use technology to operate more effectively. While he's continuing to figure out who he'll be when he grows up, he is working on putting his three kids on paths of their own. He lives with them and his wife in Minneapolis.
For another story about career expectations being mismatched with reality, listen to our episode with John Strayer.
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
Luke Brown: And so then I find myself in this place where I have taken actions that pretty much torch my previous plans and intentions, and so I've got this…It's going to sound melodramatic, but let's go ahead and call it a crisis of identity.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: Senior year of college for Luke Brown was a mix of highs and lows. He got engaged to the woman who would become his life partner, but he also got rejected from every history graduate program to which he applied. He got back on track a year later, but ultimately let go of the PhD he'd thought he'd been destined for. Find out how sometimes adjusting your expectations and giving yourself grace to find a new identity can take a bit of time…on today's roads taken with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley.
Today I'm here with Luke Brown and we are gonna talk about expectations, and expectations we put on ourselves and where that leads us and how we come out the other side.
So, Luke, it's lovely to have you here.
LB: Thank you. Thank you.
LJR: So we're gonna start this the same way we start each of our episodes with two questions, and they are these: when we were in college, who were you and when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would become?
LB: Well, That second one's a doozy. So let me just dodge it and play with the first one a little bit. In some respects, you've heard this answer a lot because, like a lot of people, I found Dartmouth you know, surprising. It was substantially more rigorous than my high school, and I had that very conventional small fish in a bigger pond than I'm used to kind of reaction in my case, is best short-formed by the time in the middle of the freshman fall that I thought I had failed my chem midterm. I was absolutely convinced because I had never had this tough a test in my life. People would stop me on the street and go, Luke, what's wrong? And it came back somewhere in the B range and everybody laughs and some people give me a disgusted. But you know, it only came back in the B range because it's on a curve. I had done, in fact, awfully. It's just everybody else did, too, and that's not really a good thing. I also had gotten very, very few Bs in my academic life before Dartmouth, and I have never been so incredibly grateful to manage a B before or since.
The other aspect of being at Dartmouth is that it is the most socially expansive part of my life. I was a very reclusive person in high school and anybody who knows me will be scratching their heads going, Well, what's he talking about? Luke was always sort of standing on the edge of the room in the party, and for me, this is socially expansive. It was just sort of a tremendous release to be in a place where nobody knew me, and so very many people were willing to take each other and themselves very seriously, and it was wonderful.
When I left Dartmouth, I was in a, in some ways, in a bit of a disarray. I had gotten engaged a few months before the end of our time there, and that was of course fantastic. But I had also gotten ding letters from every graduate school I had applied to, which is a somewhat less pleasant situation. Cause I had at some point decided that I wanted to be a professor of history if I ever grew up. And to be honest, I did not do a particularly good job of applying in this field. And so retrospectively all those ding letters were not very surprising. But, you know, Audra and I get into a car at the end of, after my graduation—she's a 95 and had gotten her degree a couple terms earlier—and were headed south because at that time, both of our families lived in Virginia, which was tremendously convenient and I really didn't know what the heck I was going to do. And what I turned out to actually do is figure out all the things I had done wrong with the application process and apply again. And I got some acceptances and I ended up—a year late as it were—going to the University of Chicago. And in that summer before I left, Audra and I got married in 1997 and that means that we're looking at 25 now.
LJR: Congratulations.
LB: Yeah. And I am going to be, you know, extremely pessimistic when I talk about aspects of my career track, and it's very worth noting before I do that, and probably after I do that, that I have been married to this wonderful, wonderful person for 25 years and we have three amazing children.
So most of the time these podcasts are very much about our professional lives and I don't think mine is a very happy story, at least not as I experience that. That's an important part of my life story, but I need to remember that it is not the totality of it, so…
LJR: Right. But they're so intertwined and usually they are intertwined in the lessons that we learn ourselves and that we tend to pass on to others. So let's go back a little bit though. So it's senior year and I'm actually unsure of the response time. So when are you hearing these rejections?
LB: Well, the rejection letters come in. Oh heavens. When do the ding letters come in? Winter? Pretty much.
LJR: Okay. Yeah. Okay. And again, here's where you have the positive and the negative. The yin and the yang, as it were. The I know I wanna spend the rest of my life with this person, and I'm deciding I'm getting engaged and that's all very positive. And then I feel like, oh, the other part isn't as well conceived. And, and really it gives you an entire term to either, at best wonder what's next and at worst, wallow. So, which side of that coin were you on at that point?
LB: This was more of a wallow, and this is also the period in which I had to re—I did not complete the…The history major has a honors program that involves a bachelor's thesis. And this is not something that I completed. And so I had to restructure this in this term. So I was actually doing quite a bit of wallowing. And when we want to start talking about life lessons, one of them that's going on. I don't know that I had the tools then to understand my reactions to what's I perceive to be going on in my life. And there's a limit to how much reflection and retooling and planning you can do under those circumstances.
And it was absolutely an incredibly confusing period in my life because on the one hand I was seeing this collapse of this great intention of mine and, you know, re retrospectively one should not call it a plan because if I had actually planned it, I probably would've executed it better. And on the other hand, I have this tremendous affirmation. There is…there are not words for how comforting, encouraging it is to have somebody who is interested in sharing your life.
But one of the things that I actually need to take more seriously in my own retrospection here is that this year long period or so is one in which I did manage to retool because when we get to the fall of 1997, Audra and I are taking a U-Haul out to Chicago and landing in Hyde Park and I'm starting at graduate school. And graduate school at the UofC was then and there for me academically very much like Dartmouth on steroids. The same “Oh my gosh. I thought I knew what rigor was, but I didn't.” At the end of that first year, I remember one of my classmates telling me, Luke, I didn't think you were gonna make it through the first term. I thought you were gonna have a nervous breakdown. And I'm looking at him going, Well, I thought I was gonna do too.
LJR: That's right.
LB: But in that program, you write a Master's thesis in the first year, you complete some classwork, and then you start working on some assisting professor stuff and working toward, through, towards your dissertation. So I got the in-process masters and came back in the fall and started working on more things. And then in the subsequent spring, something changes for me, and I don't really know what that is, but I can talk about the sort of signs I see of it. I feel kind of I'm doing to myself what astronomers do when they find exoplanets. And you know, I can't see that extra planet, but you see how that light blips, I know there's something there.
So I very late in the second year, I actually stopped working on my graduate school stuff. And then as time progresses, because I'm beginning to feel guilt and shame about doing that, I start hiding from people. And this got so bad that I would go to grocery stores at weird hours and walk strange routes across the neighborhood. And I remember very nearly having a panic attack in an airport because I thought I re recognized somebody. And this is what way back before texting and cell phones and I was using the answering machine to screen calls. And, you know, if this sounds like very unhealthy behavior, that's because I know it is. And I don't to this day fully understand it. And it comes to a point that it's starting to be a major stressor point in our marriage. And at some point of that, Audra comes to me and says, You know, I need to understand what's going on. You need to know what's going on, because whatever is going on isn't sustainable. I have no idea how that conversation goes. I don't really remember it other than a markedly unpleasant conversation when you get right down to it. Because in part one of the things that I have to recognize by the time we have this conversation is that whatever else is true of me, I am no longer a graduate student. I haven't been there for a very long time and I haven't taken basic adult steps for exiting those relationships. And so then I find myself in this place where I have taken actions that pretty much torch my previous plans and intentions, and they go right to my definition of identity because, like a lot of people, I put a lot of weight into my professional background as my identity. And so I've got this—It's going to sound melodramatic, but let's go ahead and call it a crisis of identity.
LJR: Mm-hmm.
LB: I don't have better words for than that, even though I don't like the melodrama. And ultimately, I start at least getting out of the house and becoming eco…more economically productive in the sense of getting a temp job. And eventually I got a real job, which was really awful. It's a real job because it was not temporary. It was in every respect an absolutely awful job. And I was in the awful job for six months. Pretty quickly started sending out resumes again. And this was a difficult period because I had felt like I had burned all my bridges and didn't know that there was anybody I could go to. Retrospectively this is almost certainly untrue.
LJR: Had you made a formal withdrawl from Chicago? Or ad they asked you where are you? What was that relationship like in reality?
LB: At various points, people did try to ask me, Hey, what's going on? No. Ultimately I just sort of wandered away. I am a lost child from the University of Chicago. And in point of fact, I never cleaned that up.
LJR: Well, maybe there's a statue of limitations. I don't know.
LB: Oh, yes, there actually is.
LJR: Did you start your undergraduate career thinking you might be a science person, a chemist, perhaps?
LB: Yes. Not a chemist. I always wanted to be some kind of academic. I don't know quite where this comes from, but I loved the idea. I remember when you applied to Dartmouth, they said, What's the highest degree you want and what field do you think you might study? And I popped out PhD and the two fields that I said I might study were physics and English. And that didn't survive very long. I don't know that I ever took a physics class. I did not find the chemistry department terribly welcoming. I felt like a lot of the professors had the attitude that they might be interested in you if you managed to survive orgo and I didn't have a lot of respect for claiming that Chem 10 was an honors section and treating it like a weeding.
Okay, fine. They weeded me out.
LJR: Yeah.
LB: And that sort of seems to have spread over to the sciences. I ultimately picked history in part because I really liked my class in classical Greek history, and it's actually through the classics department and not through history, but it was a great class and I was attracted to some of the same things that back in high school had attracted me to English, which, and part of it is just the narrative. History is full of these bonkers stories. They really are. There's also this sense of, you know, can you get to why the heck is this actually happening? What actually drives that? There are all these little levers, and with history it's very difficult to you know, find those levers and you can never put it into lab and figure out if you're actually, you know, even close to right, which can be a little on the frustrating side.
LJR: Which is much what happened to you actually at various times, right? So early on you were getting these ding letters and yeah, you did kind of figure out, oh, okay, I didn't play these applications right. And there was a bit of the, you know, understanding what drives it. But yeah, the why is this happening? Comes back and back and back, right?
LB: Right.
LJR: For you.
LB: Well, this is also one of the things I learned in the UofC where I was and with the people I was working with there were very ‘why’ driven. And I don't think this is universal, but it is absolutely true of their definition of history is don't go around collecting facts like an antiquarian—and, which by the way, I actually rather enjoy doing—but figure out, you know, what has changed. And when you get right down to it, that is the kind of thing I really enjoyed about my studies and you know, I can go off on a hobby basis these days and be reading anthropology or archeology and using those same skills and really enjoying it when you can see how the authors of the paper or the book are trying to engage the Yes, Yes. We've laid out our facts, but what the heck is it that this actually means? And why is it?
I had this great book I read a couple of years ago about prehistoric archeology in Minnesota. Since I'm right here. I finished it up and turned to my middle son, Alex, and said, I think you should read this book. Because at that time he had gotten quite interested in socialism…partially, I think, to annoy some of his friends. And he looks at the title and he says, Why dad? And I said, Because it's really all about how we don't have to live in a capitalist society and we're capable of building social structures that are actually egalitarian and are sustainable uses of our ecology.
He's like It says it's about prehistoric archeology. Well, yeah, that too. But it's also about the other thing.
LJR: And I think, Luke, you're kind of putting your finger on something I've been thinking about, which is there's the content and the process, and that's with history. That's with any narrative, that's with any life, frankly. And you have lessons in both that you are now in a position to be handing down to your three children. You have three kids?
LB: Yes. I have three kids.
LJR: And so you kind of had what you've termed to me as kind of a failure in navigating the graduate program?
LB: Yes.
LJR: But you ultimately have come out, you've had a career and you have space and time in your life to be thinking about the big whys and both process and content. So I'm wondering if you put it in those perspectives, like the tools of your trade that you have been trained in, what comes up for you when I frame things that way?
LB: Well, you know, I think you're going for the, well, what is it that you're telling your kids? And this is actually a little on the difficult side for me and what I tell my kids that touches on this aspect of my biography is, you know, things about reaching out to people and asking for help. I regard that period of my life, the end of graduate school, and before I got into a, at least ultimately economically sustainable employment as a failure, as a extremely painful failure and as a largely inexplicable failure. And that’s really problematic because, you know, when I look at new challenges I have in the back of my head a failure narrative and you can probably put together how that sort of thing works. And so what I try to get for my kids is so that they won't build this narrative in the first place. And a lot of the ways in which I got myself into these situations are mysterious to me, but a lot of them you can see would have been easier if I had asked for more help or taken more help or just looked somewhere else.
So like I talked about how when I realized I had left graduate school, I believed I didn't have anybody I could turn for help. That's almost certainly not true.
LJR: Yeah.
LB: Now I don't know enough to know, oh, I should have done exactly this or that. And to a certain extent, you know, 20 some years ago might not matter. But it does matter in terms of, you know, what can I tell Thomas, who I just took to college a couple of weeks ago, you know, he is a freshman at RPI now. What can I tell Alex who will graduate high school in two years? What can I tell Eliza, who's in elementary school? And I can tell them, you know, the basic things about not trying to do everything alone and no matter how big a problem it is, you can always come to me and these sorts of things. But I think I can also say to them and to others that I know sometimes that's actually not good enough. I heard all of these things growing up. We told each other these things and when push came to shove, I didn't believe them. And I don't really know why that is. There's also actually a fairly good chance that one of those kinds of help I should have looked for many decades ago, might have had to be actually medical treatment for anxiety. It's very difficult to say about something that is 20 or more years old, and I know my memory's playing tricks on me with some aspects of this.
LJR: Right.
LB: But that's a form of help that really wasn't on my radar. And in many ways I am still processing this because I kind of need to get it out of my self-perception. I need to get that failure narrative to not color my existing challenges. It needs to not come up when I'm running a project at work, and yet it is quite present to me. So…
LJR: Yeah. And I mean, the failure, in a word, like really comes from not meeting expectations and whether those are externally constructed or our own and so much of our collective past in college or even the ensuing years, really, it's have we measured up—right?—to whatever goal it was that we had in our mind, or as you said earlier, identity that we had placed on ourselves consciously or unconsciously. And I mean, it kind of hearkens back to that chemistry grade, right? Like you thought you had failed.
LB: Yes.
LJR: And you, in your mind, you had.
LB: Yes.
LJR: It wasn't up to a standard that you assumed someone had for you or for the work itself intrinsically, like it should just be perfect because there's a right answer.
LB: Well, when you get right down to it, a standard that would not have applied anyway. That much I remember about that. But I have appreciated so much the examples of the podcast I have heard so far, in part because I have heard about other people coming up with things against expectations that they couldn't meet or weren't theirs or decided they didn't want anymore. And, you know, a lot of these narratives go, you know, oh my God, what am I doing with my life? Or Why the heck do I want to do this with my life? And, you know, a lot of these people have, from my perspective, a completed narrative arc where they can present having learned these lessons. And I think I am still learning these lessons. I think I'm still working on that, but I also know I'm not alone in this respect. I was talking to someone at the reunion who told me that he is just now, after 11 years of working on it, beginning to come to terms with not having the professional life he wanted. I said something to him that I hope came across as I know how you feel, and then immediately said, And that's why you won't hear me on Roads Taken anytime soon.
LJR: Well, you haven't heard me be interviewed and a number of people have asked me. I think we are all on, you know, the path. And some get there faster than others, and some were entrenched in those expectations, however unreasonable. They might have been more than others, and so it's gonna take us a little bit more time.
LB: Yeah, no, it's it's something I'm working on. It's actually in some ways, very much akin to a grieving process because I lost a self identity and in some ways I haven't really built it back up properly. There’s this part of me that thinks, Yeah, okay, this is a job and I don't have the thing in my head that held that place when my job was going to be my dream job. You know, you've heard before people who say, you know, passion is just not going to get you your job and no, I don't turn out to get to do what I love. This is not entirely fair. I play with SQL for a living and it has some really fun aspects, but partially I thought it might be useful to somebody to hear not only, you know, did I come up against these expectations—You, you, you've heard a lot of people who had a crisis somewhere in their twenties or their thirties—but not only did I hit that, but I'm still working on it.
LJR: Yeah, and I think you're right. You're so right about identity being so hard to get rid of and that it's almost a grieving process and that it's nearly impossible to let go of an identity until you start building a new one, a different one. And if you're, if one is hesitant to say, I know what that looks like and I'm gonna pursue it, or I'm just gonna build, you know, layer by layer and figure out who the identity is, it's a really tricky process. That does take time and will take time. And I do think that there are those of us out here who are probably in the same boat and are very happy, Luke, that you can be out there as the other classmate that you met this summer are saying, Yeah, this stuff takes time some time, and I hope you feel as though, you know, you can take a little solace knowing that there are others out there, and give yourself the grace to say, Okay, well this is just an extended period. And I think you do know that there will be another side of it. I hope you do know that and I just, I really appreciate your sharing it with us.
LB: Well, thank you for the opportunity because I came to think that this might be a very useful thing for me to try, and I appreciate you giving me the space to try it.
LJR: That was Luke Brown, who continues to hone an eclectic set of interests and currently lends talents to help organizations use technology to operate more effectively. While he's continuing to figure out who he'll be when he grows up, he's working on putting his three kids on paths of their own. He lives with them and his wife in Minneapolis.
We're so appreciative for our guests who have come on the show to tell their stories thus far. and for those of you who keep listening. Thank you for following and subscribing, rating and reviewing, and letting others know about the wisdom that can be heard in these moments of reflection each week. Don't forget, you can find the full archive and a handy contact us form at roadstakeshow.com and be sure to come back next week to hear from another great guest and me, Leslie Jennings Rowley, on the next episode of Roads Taken.