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Nothing annoyed me more than those off-handed, subtly insulting remarks I used to get, and still occasionally get, from friends and family about being a full-time student.

“You’re going to have to get a real job sooner or later,” one friend told me. Am I not “really” working? Am I not writing assignments, preparing presentations, or reviewing literature? What makes a job “real”? Maybe it’s regular pay, or regular hours or business attire. Another friend referred to me as being on a “perpetual vacation.” Who goes on vacation with 150 student essays to mark and 25-page chapters due monthly? My father-in-law called me a “professional student.” Don’t professionals get paid handsomely?

As it happens, my scholarly research explores questions related to work. So I recognize that embedded in these comments are assumptions about what gets recognized as work and what types of work get valued in our society. While I am certain that my family and friends meant no disrespect, nonetheless their comments imply that as a graduate student, I am not as “productive” as Joe who serves coffee or Sally who sells books.

Since, for the most part, I enjoy the conceptual challenges of researching and writing, I really shouldn’t care less about such comparisons -- except that this is a society where working means having a job, and where being employed in a good job confers one’s status as rightful, deserving citizen. Given the meaning of work, or more specifically, of paid employment in North American society, no wonder I feel slighted.

Perhaps what is even more confusing is that people’s acceptance of scholarly endeavors and graduate studentship as a privileged type of work often occurs at the same time that they disparage the actual associated academic activities. The papers, the arguments, the analysis that is at the core of the intellectual work are frequently challenged and even dismissed by “productive” workers as too abstract, too theoretical; and thus, of little practical use.

On another level, the comments suggest that the intellectual work of academics and graduate students does not fit with other types of work, such as physical, manual, skilled trades, professional, service, care, and/or domestic labor. Perhaps people are just not familiar with scholarly work of graduate students and academics. Perhaps I need to explain what is it that I do between the figurative hours of 9 to 5. Some aspects of my work are more obvious than others. People generally accept that graduate students take courses, research articles, or teach, which involves developing courses, preparing materials/lectures, grading assignments, and/or academic counseling of students.

However, most of my time is spent thinking, reading and writing. There is less vocabulary for describing what I actually do when I think, read and write. How do I target what to read, which databases to search, which email lists and professional associations to subscribe to? How do I decide which conferences or lectures to attend, whom to network with, and which journals to submit my articles to? In addition, there is academic grunt work, for example, coffee making for conferences, data processing, transcription and assorted clerical tasks, babysitting professor’s children, or attending academic and community events and meetings to build future research alliances.

All too often, people overlook the fact that most graduate students are not just students, but also daughters/sons and mothers/fathers who juggle intellectual work with care work and responsibilities for family, young children, and aging parents. While some of these activities, like teaching, fall under paid work, many others do not. Yet, all these activities take time and energy and are part of what I do as a doctoral student, and how I strategize as aspiring academic.

In my dissertation research on young women’s work, I use the idea of "provisioning" to encompass a wider range of work activities than paid employment. Feminist economists developed and defined provisioning as the work of securing resources and providing the necessities of life to those for whom one has relationships of responsibility. Provisioning is introduced to make observable a wide range of work and work-related activities that reflect how young marginalized women are creatively surviving by juggling pressures and responsibilities of school, work, and family, while planning careers in an uncertain labor market. In a similar way, provisioning reveals the tasks and details of what I do as a doctoral student.

You might say, it sounds like all activities fall under provisioning, so how is this helpful for understanding work? It is not so such what provisioning is, so much as how it provides a lens through which we can make sense of why we do what we do in our working lives in a way that does not reinforce an artificial division between paid and unpaid work, or intellectual and other types of work.

In terms of provisioning, there are reasons why I can’t just get a “real job” even though I might need the money because having a real job would take time away from my “job” of provisioning as a student. I need time and space to think, read and write. If I get a so-called real job, I am more likely to get trapped in the lala-land of All-But-Dissertation. With incomplete credentials, I’d be underqualified for academic positions, and overqualified for most others.

With no real job, I still need a real income to provide for myself. Thank goodness, my university has a commitment to funding eligible doctoral-stream students for five years. The problem is that on average, according to Statistics Canada, in 2003-2004, doctoral graduates from Canadian universities in humanities and social sciences took 6 years and 8 months to complete their programs. So how do I eat and pay the mortgage after year 5?

Similarly, the young single mothers I interviewed for my research lacked adequate resources to support their families while they pursued post-secondary education. Welfare or student loans just aren’t enough. Note to policy makers -- provide adequate income support that recognizes the wide range of activities, including care labor, that constitute the work of students, and develop social policies based on understanding how they facilitate or hinder provisioning for different groups of students.

Perhaps most importantly, talking in terms of provisioning gives value to the details of our day-to-day work lives. Expanding the notion of work in this way does not separate what we do and where we do it. You see that as an aspiring academic, I have responsibilities not only to produce intellectual and conceptual work, but also to provide for myself, and my family. A comprehensive view of this work takes us outside the walls of the ivory tower into spaces of community, work places and homes where work is also accomplished.

Speaking about provisioning as a doctoral student demystifies intellectual work in a way that allows people like my friends and family to see similarities as well as differences between various types of work, whether or not that work is packaged as a job. For those of us who strive to see our ideas and theories circulate beyond own disciplines and beyond the academy, it becomes essential to do away with the separation of those who philosophize in the abstract, and those who toil in the concrete.