Jill Lepore: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yes. It was really shocking. Really, really shocking to me. Maybe it was before then or after then, but I also worked at Radcliffe at the Bunting Institute. I had seen academic life in other ways, and it’s not the same thing. Academic life in a college is like maybe a mom-and-pop grocery store on the corner, and academic life at a business school is, I don’t know, it’s like being the CEO of Whole Foods or something. It’s just a completely different scale of endeavor. So I was pretty shocked by it. I really did feel I’d spent enough time doing this. I needed to make some kind of a move. And I still couldn’t figure out how to become a writer. I’d written all of these stories, and I wrote a novel [laughs], and so I decided to apply to graduate school. It was the only thing I could really think of doing. I figured if I went to graduate school to get a PhD, I’d be able to write a book and somewhere along the line in graduate school, I would learn how you would publish a book. This was my incredibly lame . . . [laughs]…

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