Summer Grad Life

Hello Readers!
Happy July!
       As I was racing to make headway on a dissertation chapter by June 30th, I took a bit of time off from blogging at the end of June --  but now I am back and will provide the GSAS community with what I hope to be insightful and entertaining blogs about Grad.Life for the rest of the summer! I hope you check in periodically to see what is going on in the GSAS world!
       I was thinking that new graduate students, or family members/friends of graduate students, may wonder what a typical summer is like for a graduate student. It seems like a sort of mysterious segment of time from the perspective of someone who has never experienced it, so I thought I would devote the first blog of July to describing and investigating the "grad-life summer."
      After some thinking back on my summers as a graduate student, I guess the short answer is that there really is no typical summer for a graduate student. Unlike law students or medical students, graduate students don't always have a structured "place they ought to be" for the summer that is designated by their school, department, or program. There is no "best practice" -- like the way law students all get a summer job at a local firm or clerking for a judge. For graduate students, it definitely depends on your unique situation and department. Some departments require students to register for certain classes over the summer; some have the option to take courses; some take no classes at all. Some use the summer to write a thesis or dissertation or an article; and, sometimes there is funding available for these projects, and sometimes there is not. Some students teach the summer session; but courses are limited, so most do not. There is the possibility, but not usually the requirement, of a professional internship; yet, there are some graduate students that work a full time day job and so for the summer take "off" from being a graduate student while still holding down their full time jobs.

Students on an archaeological dig!

      In my experience as a grad student, the summer is time that is less structured than the regular semester periods, but it still needs to be productive in order to succeed in the program and as a scholar. It is a time to set and try to achieve both academic and personal goals. These goals could be oriented towards academic research or work -- trying to get ahead on reading lists for upcoming exams, catching up on reading journal articles published in your field, or committing to a personal project, clinical study, or field work. You may enroll in a class to try to get ahead in your coursework. On the other hand, these goals could also be more personal -- making money to help sustain you for the next semester ahead, or visiting family whom you haven't seen all semester, or catching up on pleasure-reading or a updating a personal blog, or starting or completing a personal writing project, or furthering a practice or enjoying a hobby. Summer for a graduate student can be a time that is really tailored to suit one's own personal needs -- it provides more freedom and choices than the fall and spring semesters.
       While grad students may have the freedom of less structured time in the summer months, the one thing graduate students don't have (usually!) is the freedom of having extra money. But the GSAS has, in recent years, opened up opportunities for Summer Fellowships that may make research in distant libraries, archives, and research sites possible. Information on these summer grants may be found at this link: GSAS Summer Fellowships. The deadlines for these grants are in December and March, depending on your specific department, so if you want to plan ahead for next summer, you can start thinking about your application during the Fall semester!
     Personally, this summer will be about maintaining my "day-job" while making great strides on my dissertation chapters. This will entail long afternoons and early weekend mornings of writing and researching, and some afternoons and evenings in the library.  Note about the library: during the Summer Session at Fordham, the library stays open on Monday-Thursday til 11pm. When classes are not in session ("Intersession"), the library follows a 9 to 5 schedule. This year, the Summer Session goes until August 2.  Here is a link to the Summer Session calendar and homepage!

     Overall, think about summer as a time when productivity may mean very different things to each particular student -- but productivity is a must! But don't forget to plan to enjoy the summer weather, too, and budget time in your schedule for enjoyment and leisure. As a graduate student, you one may feel like you always "could" be doing something to further your progress, and most of us feel guilty when we are not. But be realistic -- you need time for yourself, too. Summer is the perfect time for this;  plus, it's important not to feel cheated out of summer, because overall productivity for the year will suffer! And for the graduate student in your life, make sure you support them through the sunny beach days that make it nearly impossible to be stuck inside a library -- give them the encouragement to keep at it but also to take care of themselves and take advantage of the flexibility that the summer may offer them!
I'll be back with a new post soon, tackling some important issues for grad students that have evolved around the nation in the past few months. Keep reading, and enjoy the holiday week!
Til next time, 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 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! ;)

Life/Scholarship

 The words on either side of that forward slash are more closely linked than you might think. What we study while we're in Walsh has everything to do with who we are outside of it.

Fordham professor and novelist Christina Baker Kline has a fabulous blog on creative process and craft called Writing/Life. She taught a class at Fordham by the same name about the lines between memoir and fiction. As writing students in her class, we investigated the relationship between life experience and the narrative decisions we make about our work in fiction and creative nonfiction.

I'm fascinated by the way life experience -- from the big moments to the seemingly insignificant ones -- define so many of our choices as writers and scholars. I wonder why my peers in graduate school as well as my professors and mentors have chosen their fields. What about our pasts draws us to a particular field of study?

For example, why does one become a Virginia Woolf scholar? A mathematician? A classicist? Why does one choose to dedicate her life to the study of black feminist poetics?

To say that we study what we study because we love it is true, but a bit opaque and incomplete. "I love Mrs Dalloway," and "Math is the universal language," are straightforward answers. "I've always been good at Latin," and "I believe in the power of black feminist expressive culture," might be honest answers too, but they do not get at the deep personal roots of scholarly passion. I would contend that even if we do not fully understand why we have chosen to work in our fields, we are not grad students merely because of our proficiency in a field or a coincidental interest in a text. Our motivations are profound and intimate. Why else would we devote our lives to scholarship, research, and writing?

I decided to pursue writing for many reasons. The more surface reasons are because I loved it and it was fun.  I enjoyed the process of discovery in writing. I feel a rush when I imagine a whole world and whole people. I am exhilarated when I'm writing and I feel my initial plan begin to shift. The story takes me somewhere unexpected, or to a place I had expected to go but by an entirely different route. This rush and exhilaration is part of why I write.

I was an avid reader as a child, and I became obsessed with words and the meaning they could convey. This childhood love persists and has grown to include my love of editing. Re-envisioning an image, reordering sentences, and cutting extraneous words are puzzles and brainteasers that fully absorb my attention. When I make strides in a revision, I feel a satisfaction that is so visceral it could be described as "a tingly feeling."

But these reasons explain why I like writing and why I am good at writing -- not why I am drawn to it, why I have chosen to pursue it in grad school and beyond, or why I must keep at it. This reason is deeply rooted in my own personal experience of my family and my community, and my own place in both.

As a girl, I adored hearing stories. I learned so much about the world and life from listening to women in my family speak. Sometimes they spoke to me, and sometimes to each other. Sometimes they were intentionally telling stories, and other times they were doing it without noticing how much they were disclosing. I loved the way I could fall into their experiences and their way of seeing the world. Their words transported me to specific moments in time and to regions of the Dominican Republic, where they were raised, that I had never been. I felt their loss and ecstasy and reality although I had never lived them.

As a shy child, writing and storytelling became a way for me to connect to others. I not only accessed the memories and consciousness of other people with pen, paper, and my imagination, but I learned to express my own inmost hopes and ideas, which I found difficult to do aloud. (Being shy ain't easy.) I knew firsthand how telling a story, or hearing one, could change a person. This power made me want to spend my life sharing other people's stories and my own.

I imagine the same is true for the poet interested in the sacred in Gloria Anzaldúa's work, or the scholar interested in Anglo-Norman saints' lives. We want to contribute to our fields because we have seen and known their power intimately. We choose to do what we do because of who we have been and who we hope to be.

As we move forward in our fields, our personal lives and our scholarly lives may seem to diverge. Life might be partners and parties and travel and bills, maybe children and families. Scholarship might be what we publish, the universities where we teach, our paid work. But I believe there will always be synergy between scholarship and life, an inextricable relationship between who we are and what we pursue.

What about you? What experience in your personal life has inspired your course of study? Was it a particular event or a series of moments? In short, why do you do what you do?