Graduate Mouthpieces

     Do you think graduate students have a responsibility to the people in their lives to bridge the gap between their own academic interests and the current popular trends of knowledge in their field?

    My question of the day stems from a kind of dilemma I have been enduring during the last several years as an English Literature PHD student developing my dissertation. People in my life associate my line of work with reading books, and thereby the said people in my life expect me to know and be up on all the great new novels and biographies and poetry collections as they are published and released.  I always feel terribly guilty and ineffectual when I have not yet read the book that they want to discuss. 

    The despairing truth is, though, that it is very difficult to read anything at this time in my life except my dissertation materials. I can barely get through journals in my field let alone check out the latest American novel from my local library. My friends and family look at me with shades of disappointment, skepticism, and even disdain when I say, “No I haven’t gotten around to The Marriage Plot,” and “No, I haven’t read the new Abraham Lincoln biography,” and “No, actually I can not intelligently comment on the Pulitzer Prize board’s decision to not award a prize for fiction this year. The sad fact is that I haven’t read any of the nominated books, and I wouldn’t be able to tell you if there were other ones that were better this year anyway.”  Sigh… and the saddest part is, for me, the disdain or disappointment I see when I explain my lack of current literary prowess mirrors my own feelings. It just seems wrong.

    Partly, it’s obviously a problem of time. I just simply have such a limited amount of time in general, and so the first thing that goes out the proverbial window is reading for pleasure. 

    Also, I have come to think of this problem partly as an effect of specialization. As a graduate student gets further and further into her program, she is working to narrow her scope, to focus on a topic, to become a specialist in an era, a topic, a set of authors, a region. It seems parallel to perhaps what would happen if you asked the attorney in your family to look over your new employment contract only to be told that her specialization is bankruptcy and so no, sorry, she can not really help.

    I wonder if students across other disciplines in the GSAS have the same problem – do biology students who are studying the ecology of the wood turtle in the Delaware Water Gap feel badly when they can’t provide informed answers to Grandpa’s questions about the flesh-eating bacteria cases cropping up in Georgia? Do psychology students studying the psychological adjustment in pregnant orthodox Jewish women have to find ways to explain away their lack of intimacy about the various treatments for autism that their Aunt Sally keeps emailing them about?

    I’ve found a small way to cram in some popular literature into my life—on my commute, I listen to audio book recordings that I’ve checked out of the town library. I love a good story, but part of the reason I am doing it is to try to stay in the conversation surrounding popular literature. It feels like a good use of my time as a scholar – since I can’t exactly study or research in my car, at least I can do something to contribute to my perceived role as a mouthpiece for the literary world.

    And so, with real no solution in sight, I want to circle back to my first question – is it a responsibility of mine as a literature scholar to stay current with the works of literature that my friends, family, New Yorkers, Americans, etc, are talking about today? As graduate students, is it not only our responsibility but also part of our jobs to serve as interlocutors between our subjects and society at large? Do you face similar issues? How do you view these problems, and how do you view our role in society at large? 

Commencement Weekend Gems: "Get whacked, and bounce back!"

    Congratulations to all GSAS students for having completed another semester of graduate school! But I’m extending an extra-special congratulations to all those who graduated on Saturday. What a gorgeous day for a commencement ceremony!

    I myself partook in two undergraduate graduation celebrations this weekend.  One was for my youngest sister, graduating from NYC’s Parson’s School of Design at The New School, and the other was for my future sister-in-law, who graduated from my undergrad alma mater, Lafayette College. So proud of both of these young women! It was strange , however, going back for commencement to good old Lafayette, ten years having passed since my own! I was long overdue due for a refresher in Commencement-Speech Appreciation 101.

    For all three commencements, the speakers’ messages seemed to harmonize with each other beautifully. The speaker for the ceremony at The New School was Robert Hammond, one of the critical forces behind the creation and launch of the Manhattan High Line; he reflected on rejection as a stepping stone to creation: "Rejection can be a good teacher, and sometimes you almost need to seek it out to be freed from it," said Hammond. "When you see the High Line, I hope it reminds you that crazy dreams can come true."

photo by Chris Taggert. 

    At Fordham’s ceremony, the current deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism and homeland security, Fordham alumni John Brennan, ’77, gave the commencement address. Discussing concepts such as integrity and justice, he also made a point about determination similar to Hammond’s: "There is no free lunch," he said. "You will need to work hard and overcome obstacles, probably more times than you think you should." 

    Bronx native movie director Garry Marshall was the speaker at Lafayette’s commencement exercises – and what a refreshingly down to earth speaker he was!  His refrain, in accordance with both Hammond’s and Brennan’s addresses, was about resilience: “Get whacked, and bounce back,” he quipped, repetitiously for rhetorical effect. Marshall’s charmingly humble anecdotes reminded graduating students – and perhaps a certain graduate student in the audience – that success comes after many setbacks, many failures, and many, many revised drafts.

    Overall, it seemed to be an inspiring, lovely weekend to begin our summers and, for the members of the graduating class, to begin the next phase of their lives. 

    My question for readers: Can you recall a commencement speech from your life that has stayed with you? Who spoke? Where? What did it mean to you? What about graduation horror stories? Share your thoughts here!!

   Have a wonderful commencement to your week! -- Liza

Top Ten Reasons That NY Rangers Play-Off Hockey Is (Only Slightly) Different Than Dissertation Writing

Hi All! Hope you are all having a great playoff hockey season in New York City as you are wrapping up your semester teaching duties and meeting seminar paper/ dissertation chapter deadlines! This year, we have two area hockey franchises going head-to-head in the NHL Eastern Conference Finals  -- all eyes on hockey across the Hudson! In the spirit, here are my top ten reasons that New York Rangers Play-Off Hockey is (only slightly) different than dissertation writing: 

10. NY Rangers Playoff Hockey takes place in a huge arena containing thousands of people who are wearing blue, drinking beer, and waving (actual) white towels in the air, in the spirit of victory; dissertation writing takes place in a small, closed space, containing only one person who is feeling blue, thinking about drinking beer, and thinking about waving a (metaphorical) white flag in the air, on the brink of defeat.

9. NY Rangers Playoff Hockey is fast-paced and energetic, with players pain-stakingly whipping up and down the ice at top speeds; dissertation writing is slow and tedious, with writers pain-stakingly trudging through material and drafts at life-halting speeds.

8. In a playoff hockey game, there’s “a lot of dump, a lot of chase, a lot of hysteria,”; in dissertation writing, there’s a lot of cut, a lot of paste, and a lot of hysteria.

7. NY Rangers Playoff Hockey has a defense that the other team dreads facing; dissertation writing has a defense that the writer dreads facing.

6. During playoff hockey, you second-guess the refs; during dissertation writing, you second-guess yourself.

5. While watching a NY Rangers Playoff Hockey game, you may give a high-five to someone every-so-often. While writing a dissertation, you may need to borrow five dollars from someone every-so-often.

4. During the playoffs, NYR hockey players hope for lots of goals and opportunities; during dissertation writing, students have just one goal, and not too many opportunities.

3. NYR playoff hockey will keep you awake until midnight in agony because of triple overtime; dissertation writing will keep you awake well past midnight in agony because of the triple lattes you drank three days in a row.

2. In NYR playoff hockey, your first draft pick is a rising star. In dissertation writing, your first draft is a pile of trash.

1. NYR playoff hockey will be over at some point, but hopefully not until mid-June!! Dissertation Writing will be over at some point, but definitely NOT by mid-June….. 

Happy Hockey, everyone!!! -- Liza

Ghosts of Semesters Past

Hello Fordham Grad Students and Beyond!

Since it is the week of May that is the traditional last week of the term, today I’ve been thinking about my final papers from previous semesters. I was actually backing up my files yesterday and came across these digital documents. A while ago, I had organized all my files into separate folders for each course I had taken in graduate school, but I’d also created a file called “Final Seminar Papers,” in which I put the final draft, and even some copies that were graded and commented on digitally, of final seminar papers into their own folder. As I was backing up, I read a bit of some of them.  It was a trip down seminar-memory lane!

For me, now in my dissertation stage, most of these papers are not directly related to my dissertation, because I did not conjure my diss topic until after my comps,.  I actually haven’t looked at these or thought about these papers in a long time.

For others, their seminar papers and end of term projects may be feeding directly into their dissertations. This kind of focus seems rare, but in hindsight, I wonder if I should have been thinking long term earlier, trying to tailor my seminar topics towards some kind of overall goal – head start on my dissertation!

My thoughts about these final seminar papers now that I am dissertation stage?

PUBLISHING: I’m wondering if I can somehow, one day after this dissertation project is put to bed, use one or more of these capstone papers as a jumping off point for a new project or article. Of course, this revision and conversion might take a few months, but the seminar work already done might be a good kickstart to launch myself into something different once my dissertation has passed and I need a break from the material.

NETWORKING/ CONFERENCE CONNECTIONS: Maybe check out the CFP’s for upcoming regional and national conferences and see if any relate to my old seminar paper topics…. Maybe I revise one of them for a conference, and test out the argument in a panel discussion.

TEACHING: Or, perhaps they will be useful for creating lectures and class assignments for future courses I may design or teach.  You never know a text or a topic as well as you do after you’ve written about it, so why not consider yourself a growing “expert” on the topic and include it on your future syllabi?

It is interesting to me to look back and remember my trains of thought at the time, and to think about how I interpreted sources and texts years ago, and to compare and contrast how I might analyze those same texts now.

Of course, some are more relevant to my field than others – but some were connected to my most recent research interests in ways I hadn’t realized or remembered. For example, although I am concentrating on early American lit now, my Modern American Fiction class yielded a paper on The Pawnbroker which dealt with some of the very images I am looking at now in early American fiction – the contexts are different, of course, but there are parallel insights about the way fiction functioned culturally – parallels which I find to be stimulating and motivating to my current project, at least in some kind of intanglible energizing way.

I’m curious – what has become of your seminar papers and end of term projects and research? Are they still close to your current work? Have you strayed far? In terms of relevancy of seminar work to the disseration, how do the different disciplines compare and contrast? How do you organize your papers from your courses once they are finished?

For those of you still in coursework, are you thinking about building bridges from one seminar to another, within and across semesters? Should grad students design their seminar papers around a central theme to get ahead on their dissertation? Or, are our “coursework” years supposed to be about breadth more than depth?

Share your thoughts!!! 

Graduate Personalities

  

    I often identify my first year of graduate school as the year in which I began to understand that I was more of an introvert than an extrovert. This narrative of the development of my self-knowledge has often comforted me in times when I need to understand some of the big-picture ways that going to graduate school has benefited me personally, as a soul moving through the universe, maturing and growing.

    So, considering that this topic of introversion vs extroversion has been something I’ve been thinking about for several years now in relation to myself, it was a pleasant surprise to see an article about introverts and extroverts in the April 20^th edition of The Chronicle.

    In the article, entitled "Screening out the Introverts," William Pannapacker reflects on the cultural bias towards the qualities of extroversion.  He discusses the way that introversion is looked down upon and even pathologized in our culture, and wonders whether graduate school programs do enough to resist these kinds of biases, and to accommodate and even celebrate the qualities of an introverted personality.

    To set up his reflection, Pannapacker points out that academia might seem to be a haven for an introverted type of personality: “Many people are drawn to academic life because they expect it will provide a refuge from the social demands of other careers: They believe one can be valued as a studious introvert, as many undergraduates are.” But then he also points out that a career as an academic is very different from life as a student; it requires a person to be comfortable both with solitary tasks as well as with very public engagements. As an academic, he points out, “Long periods of social isolation – research and writing – are punctuated by brief periods of intense social engagements: job interviews, teaching, conferences, and meetings.”

    Reading this article made me revisit my own narrative of how I came to know myself as more introverted than extroverted, and how that story relates to my growth as a graduate student. All my life, while I was in school from basically kindergarten through most of my undergraduate years, I considered myself a “people person.” Also, I loved being on stage, performing and acting and singing.  So, growing up, everyone, including myself, would consistently describe me as an outgoing, sociable, and friendly. I would say I “loved people.”

    There was, of course, another side to me as well. I loved to get absorbed in a good book, a new CD, a great movie, or my own writing, and I loved the mental retreat of a beautiful view of the ocean, a distant city skyline, a mountain, or a valley. I liked having one or two special best friends who knew everything about me. I liked meaningful, long, one-on-one conversations.

    When I first took the Myer’s Briggs test as a college freshmen, I came out an as extrovert. I now believe that my “extrovert” result was at least partly because of the very stigmas about introversion that Pannapacker points out. He says, “Given that introversion is frowned upon almost everywhere in the US culture, the test might as well have asked, “Would you prefer to be cool, popular and successful or weird, isolated, and a failure?” I do believe that our cultural biases probably skewed the test results, at least in my case. Plus, I thought because I “loved people” and loved being on stage that it didn’t make sense to identify myself as introverted.

    But the real point I want to make here is that I actually didn’t even know about my introversion until I entered the workforce in the corporate setting. I had always and forever been a student, and so always was in a social position in which acts of reflection and study were valuable and worthwhile ways to spend my time. But this notion of time well spent changed when I entered the work-force. When I graduated from college, I began working in the corporate world, in a consumer marketing position. No longer was I in a position in which acts of reflection or study were acceptable; now was the time to produce, not study. I believe it was this new social role that caused my discomfort. I missed the feeling that some personal reflection time was a worthwhile way to way my time. I felt drained and exhausted after interacting all day with people I didn’t care about or wouldn’t choose to be with if I wasn’t at work. After work I would crawl into bed, watch TV, and try to gear up for another day.

    I remember when I first began graduate school a year later, a sense of balance was restored to my inner self. I had time built into my life to read, to be in solitude, to write, to study and reflect; I also engaged with people in meaningful ways that made me feel purposeful and connected. By the end of a day’s work in the graduate school life, I felt energized and wanted to socialize with my family and friends rather than crawling in a hole and watching TV.

    With this sharp contrast to the way I had felt after a day of work as a consumer marketing assistant, I finally began to rethink my characterization as an extrovert. I began to realize that the solitude involved in writing and research actually helped recharge me and make me feel alive, and then my relationships with people could thrive and my interpersonal interactions were full of the energy and sociability I had always known throughout my life. I felt sure I had found a kind of job and life that harmonized with my personality.

    Ultimately, I guess the point of this blog post is to continue the important conversation that Pannapacker began in The Chronicle – to think through how personalities can define and shape the system of education, even as the system of education can define and shape personalities. What has been your experience in graduate school in terms of your dominant personality traits? In what ways do you think your personality drew you to your field? Which personality traits do you think are more valued within the system of graduate education? Which traits are frowned upon? How have these biases affected you? Please share your thoughts and reflections! :)

Graduate Education and the Preservation of Conversation

In a recent essay in The New York Times’ "Sunday Review," writer/ professor Sherry Turkle makes observations about our culture’s “flight from conversation.” She laments that, despite our technologically linked world, as we are only a text or chat or status away from sharing something, we “hide from one another, even as we constantly are connected to one another.” Her insights are sharp and valuable, as we should be striving to see how our technological advances have shaped and will shape the social and cultural world around us. Turkle’s hypothesizing offers much provocation about the way our culture’s social values will evolve and shift over time, especially in the spheres of behavior, learning, and education.

One fascinating thing Turkle says is that the “thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention.” Valuing our own control over where we focus our attention will surely have vast social consequences, especially in the area of learning.  If learning at a distance that we ourselves control becomes the norm, what will happen to learning itself? Will we stop being able to leap into someone else’s perspective, in order to understand a problem or see a solution in a better way? Will we stop paying attention to things that we might be drawn to unexpectedly? How will our privileging of the control of our attention change the way we learn, and change the way we think? Turkle's essay opens up this necessary dialogue. 

Another thing Turkle discusses is the way technological connections prevent us from learning how to be alone. “Indeed our new devices have turned being alone into a problem that can be solved,” she writes.  She worries that our habits of being only a click or a text away from sharing our thoughts will deplete our cultural ability to be alone, and as a result, everyone will be lonely, ironically creating a world more disconnected than ever before.  Turkle suggests, “Lacking the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people but don’t experience them as they are. It is as though we use them, need them as spare parts to support our increasingly fragile selves.”

Turkle provokes thought on things like “Siri” which promise a simulation of companionship and compassion; she surmises that with technology we are “cleaning up human relationships” which are “messy and demanding.” But for a price – human relationships have a richness that the simulations, for obvious reasons, don't have. In the end, our flight from conversation represents a loss for humanity that will have ripple effects in all areas of human life.

As I read, it struck me that we often talk about the “academic conversation,” and I wondered how Turkle’s thoughts and ideas about technology’s influence on social conversations could be thought of in the context of academia. Conversations teach us patience, she proffers, while technological connection and exchanges speeds things up, but only by dumbing us down and removing complexity and true understanding. How will this dumbing down of our communication affect the kind of sustained conversations we aim to create and participate in within and across our academic disciplines?

Looked at through the frame of education, the flight from conversation would wound our ability to see and understand different and new perspectives, a cornerstone of true forward thinking and learning. Turkle says, “In conversation we tend to one another.” To unpack this statement, she looks at the etymology of the word, which comes from the verbs that mean “to move, together,” and suggests that having a conversation is kinetic, and generates energy, and asks us to see things from perspectives other than our own. The loss of this sort of mobility in perspective, as well as these changes in social habits of expression that Turkle describes, will surely affect academia and scholarship in more ways than we can predict.

But what I want to suggest here, though, to contribute to these speculations, has to do with the way these changes may affect our perception of graduate school in a positive way.  My provocation here is that perhaps a benefit of these changes may be that the inherent value in a graduate education will become more visible -- will be thrown into sharp relief -- as this social and cultural lack that Turkle identifies persists and intensifies. 

From some advice given in The Chronicle by writers considering the cause and effects of the bleak academic job market for liberal arts and science Phds, it doesn’t always seem that a getting a graduate education from a arts and sciences school is a smart or practical decision. 

Yet, if we insist that graduate liberal arts education is built on meaningful exchanges of ideas between people, then perhaps it will become one of the only spaces in which the skill of sustaining a conversation – and by this I do mean an oral, face to face conversation, complete with eye contact, internalization, reflection, depth, and response – is still fostered, nurtured, and practiced. 

With no irony here or facetiousness here at all, I can see a way to look at graduate school  and graduate education as a location in which an insistence on conversations will continue to exist.  I offer this with all earnesty, and perhaps with a shade too much idealism. But perhaps a graduate school education will be a space in which the value in conversation, solitude, patience, messiness, demanding relationships, and mobility in perspectives will be preserved. And perhaps if we look at it as such, we may begin to understand the terms under which a graduate education in the arts and sciences is inherently worthwhile, despite the kinds of obstacles that exist for grads to becoming employed and earning a living. 

What do you think of the role of graduate education in the preservation of conversation? What do you think about our "Flight from Conversation" in terms of education, higher learning, and academic scholarship? I’d love to hear your sustained, intimate, genuine thoughts – even if it’s just in a post to Facebook or this blog. Perhaps then we can go get some coffee and discuss one on one! ;)

Creating an On-Line Presence for Grad Students

Hello All!
     Hope you are enjoying this summery weather here in New York City! It makes it a bit easier to get out the door, for me, at least, when it's warm and sunny outside, even if most of the day will be spent inside a building teaching and/ or writing and reading.
     Today's topic is E-PORTFOLIOS for graduate students. I had been thinking about this since one of my colleagues in the department asked for some feedback as she was launching her awesome new web-site for professional purposes. The wonderfully informative, functional, and accessible site she had designed got me thinking about having an on-line identity as a graduate student as we work our way through our research and onto the job market. I checked out the topic on The Chronicle, and of course I found a great piece on the topic already, entitled "Should Graduate students create e-portfolios?" by David Brooks. Mr. Brooks talks about "crafting our on-line presence," which is a great way to think about it, since, he points out, much of what we find on-line when we Google ourselves is a mish-mash of random clips and quips from social networking, conference programs, and on-line local newspaper archives. As Mr. Brooks said, "I had no hand in creating how, or where, my work had been displayed online."

     So, of course, the obvious answer to Mr. Brooks' question is, "Yes, we should create e-portfolios!" Digital, web-based, and technologically innovative teaching and research will be the defining characteristics of this generation's academic careers, and we must embrace that at once. Furthermore, creating our own site would give us a space in which to design, control, and craft our professional and scholarly identity in a cohesive presentation. Some ideas to incorporate could be:

• A website for your dissertation project
• An on-line teaching portfolio, which incorporates teaching philosophy, sample lesson plans, and demonstrations of your uses of technology in your classroom
• An on-line CV
• Videos of teaching and/ or research presentations
• Current events in your field
• A professional blog
• Links to favorite professional websites, journals, and associations

      There are several platforms on the web that will allow you to create a site like this. My colleague that I mentioned above used Wordpress.org, and Mr. Brooks mentioned Wix.com. There are also Weebly and Webstarts, to name just a few. Many of these have free options as well a premium upgrades. Another option is to use blog sites such as Wordpress.com (the free blog platform related to Wordpress.org), or Blogger.com. In addition, there are "academic" networking sites such as Academia.edu which allow you to create a professional profile that will link you to a network of other academic professionals and also provide you an on-line space to post a CV, bio, research information, and other links and documents. Finally, you could always take advantage of the more standard online tools such as Linked-In.
      Perhaps even Facebook could be a tool if you tailored a specific page towards your professional profile -- keep your personal page unsearchable and private, and use FB publicly to present your professional academic face to the world.
      I'd love to hear your thoughts, ideas, and experiences! Share links, sites, and comments. :)
-- Liza Z.