It’s no coincidence that the Western university traces its roots to medieval monastic and cathedral schools. Today’s scholars are still, when it comes down to it, monks. And the academic calendar is just a thinly veiled liturgical year, complete with feasts (lectures with free food), fasts (caffeine-powered finals weeks), and times of penitence (admissions season).

One of these regular academic rituals is what I call Gradvent.

Like Advent, Gradvent is about waiting. But instead of a people waiting for a messiah, you’re a grad student waiting for scholarly deliverance: an acceptance letter, a research breakthrough, an email from a mysteriously MIA professor, a paragraph that finally makes some freaking  sense. You have to have faith that these things will come (they’ve been promised from on high) even when all evidence suggests otherwise.

Like Advent, Gradvent is best celebrated with elaborate rituals of light and darkness. To light a Gradvent wreath, try burning a different draft of your dissertation proposal every week. Or watch the last bit of sunlight fade from the library skylight before you open the dreaded document, lest too cheerful an atmosphere scare the thoughts out of your brain. Maybe you eschew lightbulbs—those incandescent intrusions of the twentieth century—and light your workspace with candles in order to feel more like a Romantic poet. Perhaps then your recommendation letter will arrive via carrier pigeon. 

Like Advent, the best way to get through Gradvent is a disciplined structure of delayed gratification. You can build a kind of Gradvent calendar in your mind: 500 words today, another 600 tomorrow, then I’ll send a follow-up to that email. (Ope! Can’t use another tone-softening exclamation point until next week!) But after a few weeks you “accidentally” knock the whole thing over, eat all the chocolate, and go back to a vibes-based approach.

Like Advent, there is Gradvent wisdom to be found in earlier generations of the faithful. Those medieval saints really knew how to revel in God’s tarrying, and those sevent(eent)h-year PhD students know exactly who and what is going to keep you waiting. Ignore their advice at your peril. (Well, some of their advice.)

Like Advent, Gradvent forces you to ponder what exactly you’re waiting for. Advent question: Who will the messiah be, a political deliverer or a spiritual savior? Gradvent question: What is an academic job, a cushy gig where they pay you to read or an underpaid life of endless emails? Advent question: What exactly did that angel just say was going to happen to me?? Gradvent question: Is “you’re going to be a great liberal arts professor” a compliment or a curse???

Like Advent, Gradvent can end in celebration, in choral bursts of praise for your hard work. But also like Advent, it sometimes fizzles out into delayed plans, awkward conversations with family members, and afternoons spent binging Netflix. The only thing you know for sure is that once it’s done, it will come again.

And like Advent, Gradvent makes room for frustration, exhaustion, and bewilderment in a world that demands our cheerful conformity or grindset productivity. Gradvent lets us say that we have no idea what’s going on or what the hell we’re doing, but we still want to be here.

What Gradvent doesn’t have—and this is where I need your help, dear readers—is any equivalent to Advent’s no-skip playlist of liturgical bangers. So, in closing, I’m asking for your Gradvent carol pitches. “Of the Scholar’s Brain Forgotten”? “Lo, How My Prose ‘Ere Reviewing?” “O Come, O Come, Email From Hell?” Whatcha got?

Josh Parks

Josh Parks graduated from Calvin in 2018 with majors in English and music, and he is currently a PhD student in religious studies at the University of Virginia. When not writing, he can be found learning the alto recorder, watching obscure Disney movies, and making excruciating puns.