I transferred between philosophy Ph.D. programs after my first year in graduate school. A few weeks into the transfer, I called my long-distance partner and let out a sigh of relief I felt at my core. After a year of questioning whether I had made the right life choices by going to graduate school and making a transfer decision that felt high-risk, I felt ‘at home’ in philosophy again. There were many reasons why the graduate program where I started my Ph.D. wasn’t a great fit for me (even though it’s been an amazing place for some of my friends and peers), and there are many reasons why the graduate program I transferred into fit my personal needs better. But it wasn’t until several months into this past year as a transfer student that I realized the reason that made the biggest difference: Being part of a graduate student community committed to meaningful, department-recognized service work.

Originally, I had thought the biggest difference between my current and former graduate programs was just that the faculty in my current program tend to do work that relates more to my inherent philosophical interests. Settling on this initial hypothesis surprised me. As an undergraduate student, I found feminist and social philosophy to be the most interesting thing, like, ever—it’s what I wrote my independent work on and some of what I’m trying to do as a graduate student. But I firmly believe you can learn a great deal from any kind of philosophy, and I had thought I loved philosophy as a generalist. Almost every class that I took as an undergraduate—even those far outside my wheelhouse—ended up feeling so exciting to me that I couldn’t help but adore being a student. I remember going into Professor Ben Morison’s Plato and Aristotle classes at Princeton, having resolved myself beforehand that I hated both thinkers and just needed to get the damn history requirements done. I left both starry-eyed and teary, wondering whether I’d ever take another course as great again. So, I was disappointed in myself as a first-year Ph.D. student when I realized I felt no passion for the work I was doing, even though I was spending all day every day churning through philosophy coursework. I thought, perhaps, I didn’t have the abilities I had thought I had—I just wasn’t cut out for liking analytic metaphysics or logic or what have you.

In my first transfer semester, I took classes far more in line with my interests, found it easier to talk to faculty about my work since our interests were more in line, and I was infinitely happier. I thought the former two and latter things were closely linked (thus confirming my initial hypothesis). But graduate school coursework tends to be graduate school coursework no matter where you’re at. To fulfill general requirements, the next semester, I found myself in philosophy of science and ancient philosophy classes—both the sort of ‘out of my wheelhouse’ courses I was taking the year prior. Nevertheless, I found that not only did my happiness persist, but I also loved them as I had formerly loved philosophy. I spent hours on the phone talking to a friend about scientific realism debates. I also found I could talk to my instructors for these classes just as easily as I had talked to faculty the prior semester, and my life as a graduate student still felt fulfilling.

At first, this puzzled me deeply. Had I just been having an existential, quarter-life crisis all of the prior year? Could I have remained in my original program and saved myself the arduous cross-country move away from friends and loved ones? Or did I finally just need to escape the greater New Jersey area after five years of enduring the underfunded public transit system?

Maybe it was a little bit of all of those things. I’ve been told that your first year out of undergrad is hard, no matter how perfect the rest of your life is. But as I was thinking about what made my life feel fulfilling after the transfer, I realized there was another huge difference between these two years of graduate school. During my first year of graduate school, I struggled to connect with the community I found myself in. Some students in my program did awesome community engagement work. But much of it was totally unrelated to philosophy or my school, and I found it really hard to figure out how to get involved in initiatives that I cared about. When I transferred, however, things were immediately different. I found myself in a graduate school community wherein many of my friends were doing a great deal of institutionally recognized service work outside of class, and they actively invited me to join them in line. By service work, I don’t mean just cleaning the department common areas or hosting department town halls (though that work can be important). Within weeks of my first class, I was doing service work that extended beyond the confines of my department: Work including, but not limited to, coaching a high school ethics bowl team weekly, regularly attending Organizing Assembly meetings with the local graduate student union, and signing up to mentor a prospective Ph.D. applicant through my program’s iteration of COMPASS—a diversity in philosophy initiative with a particularly strong presence at my university. Though the majority of my time was spent taking classes, my professional life was rich outside of class once again, in the same sort of fulfilling fashion that it had been in undergrad, where I was highly involved in various writing and tutoring groups and programs outside of just being a student. Moreover, my professors and department encouraged me in these pursuits. Service work is something my department takes note of in assessing academic progress; it’s awarded and named in shout-outs and prizes, and professors often volunteer their own time alongside graduate students in community outreach programs.

Going into graduate school initially, I hadn’t considered whether programs had strong, institutional records of graduate students doing service and outreach work. I was under the general impression that I wouldn’t have time for much ‘volunteer’ work outside of class and that if I made the time for it, I’d be taking myself away from valuable time spent on independent research. Indeed, do a quick Google search, and you’ll find that article after article in higher ed publications warns that people with marginalized identities in academia—academics of color, gender minorities—take on the bulk of department service and outreach work in ways that come at a great cost to them professionally. But as I was presented with service opportunities in my current graduate program, I came to remember fears I had as an undergrad in philosophy—fears about entering into a high-brow field that at times can be deeply disconnected from people’s lived realities, fears about becoming an ‘armchair philosopher,’ fears that doing graduate school was an inherently selfish move and that I could do far better things for the world in other fields. Doing service and outreach work reminds me why, despite all that, I’ve always found philosophy itself valuable: Learning philosophy taught me life lessons I couldn’t get elsewhere, and teaching and giving people access to the world of philosophy can indeed change lives. Far from being a waste of my time or necessarily negatively detracting from my independent research, doing at least some service work and community engagement makes me passionate about my more typical work as a philosopher—and a better philosopher overall for it.

The idea that academics with marginalized identities carry unfair, burdensome shares of service and outreach work in their departments isn’t just a wife’s tale or a complaint that can only be found in blog posts made by stressed individuals—extensive research continuously confirms that this is a real, genuine problem. (Here’s an article exploring the implications of this research for women of color in academia that does a great job at synthesizing much of the work done to date in studying this.) But I worry that the response to this research is often to tell those with marginalized identities to ‘do less,’ instead of telling others they must do more (or helping those carrying the bulk of service work to figure out how to at least get financial compensation for some of their labor). Perhaps telling people to ‘do less’ service work would be appropriate if that work was only valuable for, say, the well-being of the occasional academic who performs it. But service work of the kind that I’ve been talking about not only makes individuals, communities, and departments better off in ways that are unrelated to students’ professional development—it also, at least for me, taught me how to be a better teacher, a better member of my university, and a better mentor. All of those skills are what make fabulous faculty members. Having a program wherein graduate students have fewer recognized opportunities to engage in genuinely meaningful service work doesn’t make your program necessarily more equitable, but it does mean your students have less opportunities for the kind of professional development that can make or break them as educators.

All of this to say, well, a few things. One: Fit in graduate school matters, and it goes far beyond the question of whether faculty interests align with your own. Two: If you’re someone who is passionate about service work and having an engaged professional life, you aren’t silly to pursue those things in graduate school. Service work is important, and meaningful service work can be a boon rather than a hindrance to your other educational goals. Three: The answer to the problem of unfair distribution of service work isn’t to decide service work is suddenly not worth pursuing. Rather, it’s about encouraging all members of one’s department community to live balanced professional lives that incorporate service work. And I think if we do that, we’ll end up not only with happier graduate students, but a better field overall.