By: Carly Compesi, Staff Writer
I had the privilege of speaking with Dr. Michael Chiang, the head of the History Department, about his path after graduating from his undergraduate program. While Dr. Chiang told me that there’s something worth missing about the “ramen and textbook” side of undergraduate life, he also talked about his global adventures as a graduate student.
“I was a history major in college,” Dr. Chiang explained. “I was a history, art history double major to start out with, actually, but after taking classes in college, I learned that I just loved what my history professors were doing.”
Dr. Chiang always planned to enter graduate school following undergrad, having been “inspired” by the teachers, young professors, and TA’s he had. Before fulfilling that goal, he took a two year break that took him down an entirely different path. “The job I got was at a medical device company. It’s pretty funny, right?” Dr. Chiang asked, smiling. “I’m a history major, I have no quantitative or science background, and I end up working at a medical device company in the R&D department, if you can really further believe that. It was actually kind of fun because it was something really new to me. Really new. I wrote all these reports, and I had never written a science lab report before, so it was all fun and interesting. I think, somewhere in the company today, there must be these dozens and dozens of reports that I wrote. It was like a totally different life.”
Shortly after, Dr. Chiang ended up in a Ph.D. program at the University of Michigan. Chiang mentioned his initial opinions of the Midwest as someone who grew up in Southern California, but he quickly discovered those initial prejudices to be false. “There’s lots of stuff going on in places outside where I grew up,” he said.
However, Dr. Chiang didn’t spend all of his extensive—and I mean extensive—time as a Ph.D. student in Michigan. “A history Ph.D. is a long haul, especially if you’re studying something other than U.S. History because you need to know a couple different languages,” he told me. “Just the language training could take a number of years, and that doesn’t include field research. I was in grad school for a total of eight years. Coursework for my Ph.D. program was only three or four years, and the rest—I went to Japan for a year to learn Japanese, I did field research in China and Japan and Taiwan, and then I went back to the University of Michigan to write up my dissertation. That took two or two and a half years to write.”
His dissertation? Bureaucratic Politics in 18th Century China. “I love reading a lot of what people [consider to be] boring things about bureaucratic statues,” he shrugged. “People [from] 250 years ago are the same as we are now. They don’t like each other, they attack each other—it’s kind of fun.”
When asked whether his path was typical of history Ph.D. students, he explained that, “people would study what helps them. In East Asian history, you need to know two foreign languages in addition to English. I decided I wanted to learn Japanese because there’s a lot of scholarship in Japan on Chinese history. I had a friend in grad school who was studying Chinese immigration to Cuba, so her languages were Chinese and Spanish. It could be very different depending on what you want to do. You’re always applying for scholarships, fellowships, funding from your university [to do so]. It’s a lot of traveling in general. You can do the things you want to, but also the things you need to.”
The time in grad school was not without its consequences, but those consequences seem much less important to Dr. Chiang in hindsight.
“It was pretty long and grueling, but I think my friends sort of envied me—the ones who graduated from college and went to work right away—because I was traveling around. I was kind of envious of them because they had jobs and money and cars and houses,” he laughed. “I was working off $12,000 a year in grad school.”
After pursuing what he called the “standard” route for those “long and grueling” years, Dr. Chiang began his career in academia.
“I worked at a couple different schools. Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts—that was a really great experience because being in a place where it’s just women can be really good for a lot of students. Women don’t have to deal with men, and you know how men can be kind of condescending or discouraging. So I thought it was great to be in that environment where women are encouraged to be whatever they want."
“I taught at Drake University in Iowa for a number of years, and then I wanted to move out of Iowa. As much as I love the Midwest and Michigan, I didn’t want to spend all my time in the Midwest. But nothing against Iowa,” he added. “And then six years ago, maybe seven now, I came to Regis. Colorado gets me a little closer to California, it’s in the West, and that’s the story of how I ended up here.”
His advice for the soon to be graduate students planning to live on the no-house-no-car life is, in his words, “very Regis-y.” He explained that, throughout his path, he ignored the money-related realities that came with following his passion. Though he found himself occasionally envious of the friends who earned promotions and bought houses while “all [his] stuff fit into this tiny storage place,” the importance of learning motivated him to continue his path.
“For me, it’s that old hat stereotype of ‘do what you love.’ Especially when you’re just out of college. You can try different things and find out that you don’t like them, or maybe find out that you do. I think, if I really wanted to continue working at a medical device company, I could have...even though I’m not sure how I could do well in something that involves science,” joked Dr. Chiang as he explained how his time at the medical device company contributed to his success and motivation as a graduate student. “I have a cousin who was a French major in undergrad. She’s now a pediatrician. Even if it’s a detour, [you] have the time to try and do what you love. You can fail, but when you’re 23 or 25, it doesn’t really matter.”