It would be suicide in the American academy to show too early an interest beyond your doctoral specialization: charges of everything from charlatanry to ambition would be levied and tenure denied. I've seen this first-hand.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Today, if I could get a job, with face tattoos, being a professor, I would do that. I don't know what university would hire me, but that's my passion.
I certainly never intended for myself an academic career and, were the academy to suffer, I'd just go do something else. I don't have a commitment to it or to really, frankly, almost any institution that assumes that it has to be stable forever.
I would absolutely characterize myself as ambitious.
When I was in college, I had only one ambition that one day I would like to be a director.
I'd been going to college for nine years, and before I completed my dissertation, I quit.
I willed myself through a junior college to a university and, ultimately, a Ph.D.
If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
By that time I was hooked on a career in academic research instead of one in the pharmaceutical industry that I had originally considered in deciding to get a PhD.
I have had this longstanding interest in going back to school to get a Ph.D. in art history. I was especially interested in exploring this idea of the ecstatic impulse in an artist.
In college, I would just drop out of all my classes, and I would just be left with my acting classes.
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