When I was just starting high school, a Canadian twenty-something named Kyle MacDonald launched a blog he called One Red Paperclip. He used the site to post updates about his experiment exchanging one red paperclip (sometimes you don’t need to overthink your titles) for a series of marginally more valuable items. The affair culminated in MacDonald taking possession of a $50,000 house in southeastern Saskatchewan after one year and fourteen swaps. As befits a story of incremental change, the blog became a book and the house became a bakery. Today, the One Red Paperclip project stands for the proposition that with enough charisma and timing, you can leverage a modest asset into material stability.

I one-red-paperclipped my way through graduate school. I certainly did not plan to do this—I am an American historian, after all, not a Canadian blogger. In retrospect, however, I think the comparison is useful. I may not have traded one red paperclip for a fish pen, or an afternoon with Alice Cooper for a motorized KISS snow-globe, but I did manage to turn a chance encounter at a Rochester, New York, intersection into three months of research time in downtown Philadelphia. One red paperclip.

Only a few weeks after beginning my graduate training in Washington, DC, my advisor suggested that I get myself to New York City for a symposium on antislavery politics, and so I boarded a train. Although I had participated in undergraduate history conferences in college, this was my first time attending a professional academic conference. I tried to make myself small as I took a seat in the back of a wood-paneled Midtown auditorium. One speaker’s work, in particular, excited me, but I was too nervous to approach her in person. Instead, I returned to DC and worked up the courage to send an email. To my great joy, she not only responded but sent me a copy of her dissertation, which was not yet public. A few years later, she agreed to be on my dissertation committee. One Amtrak ticket for an outside reader.

The following semester, one of my professors informed me that the annual meeting of an organization in my field was coming to DC. I studied the program and saw a few panels that piqued my interest. Since I had already crossed state lines to attend a conference, what was a few bus stops? This time, I had the confidence to introduce myself to a speaker whose research overlapped with my own. Once again, to my great joy, she was not only responsive to my queries, but invited me to lunch at a nearby grill. A few years later, she agreed to participate in my first conference proposal. One cheeseburger for a co-panelist.

I had completed my coursework by the time I had the chance encounter in Rochester mentioned above. The occasion was dispiriting. A pair of white college students had vandalized a recently installed Frederick Douglass statue (although their subsequent actions suggest they were drunker than they were racist). I was home for the holidays and decided to attend a re-installation and re-dedication ceremony. As I listened to activists, artists, and officials reflect on the meaning of our gathering, I noticed an established scholar of slavery was also in the audience. I introduced myself after the event, and he offered to continue our conversation at a local café. A few weeks later, he agreed to write me a recommendation letter for a short-term fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia. One cup of coffee for three months of research time in downtown Philadelphia.

A bronze statue of an older, bearded Frederick Douglass. He stands tall, his coat green with verdigris, against a grey winter sky. The artwork was installed in December 2018 at the intersection of Tracy and Alexander Streets in Rochester, New York, after a pair of vandals destroyed the original. Image courtesy of the author.

As historians, we narrate with the benefit of hindsight. I am aware that my framing of graduate school as a series of profitable exchanges works only because they culminated in my securing a permanent job. Nobody would remember the One Red Paperclip Project if Kyle MacDonald had not gotten that house. Then there is the uncomfortable fact that the language of exchange, leverage, and trade reifies the increasingly untenable idea that there is an academic job market rather than an academic job lottery. Perhaps graduate school is not like the One Red Paperclip Project at all, but rather like an arcade where early career scholars compete in games of chance in the hopes of collecting enough tickets to go home with a prize.

Yet I still believe we can wring wisdom from the humble paperclip by recalibrating our sense of what is valuable. People did not trade with Kyle MacDonald because they could not live without the particular item he was peddling that week. One Red Paperclip was not about the fish pen or the motorized KISS snow-globe, per se, but rather about their support for MacDonald’s project. People wanted him to succeed; they traded to become part of his story. In the same vein, my Amtrak ticket, cheeseburger, and cup of coffee were valuable only because generous colleagues supported my doctoral research and made them so.

During my time at the Library Company, I started attending Friday afternoon seminars across the Schuylkill River at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Friends whose work I respected had spent time writing there, and I was curious about the community. After receiving one of their dissertation fellowships, it felt, for the first time in my graduate school career, like I had made an exchange on purpose. Three months near the Delaware River for twelve months near the Schuylkill. When I learned a few years later that I had been awarded a dissertation prize, I began to see the chain of exchanges extending backward in time all the way to my Amtrak ticket—my one red paperclip. It was the only way I could make sense of my circumstances.

The City of Philadelphia as seen from the window of a northbound Amtrak train. The sky is pale blue and fluffy white clouds dance around the skyscrapers. Railroad tracks, brown with rust, cross the foreground on a diagonal. Image courtesy of the author.

So, go to that nearby conference. Send that scary email. Introduce yourself to scholars and neighbors. Submit that second application. Believe in your project. If this advice sounds trite, know that it feels trite under my fingers, too. It is, however, an honest attempt to disaggregate some of the choices I made as a graduate student from historical forces beyond my control.

And maybe, just for good measure, you should keep one red paperclip on your desk. You might need it someday.