Walking...Scratch That...Texting in a Winter Wonderland

Happy Winter Break, everyone!

We actually made it. I think I was in shock for the first couple of days, but Winter Break is actually here to stay…at least for a couple of weeks. Time to catch up on sleep, see family, and…oh yea, start studying for comps./write those papers you wanted to submit to a conference or journal/start your research for that big project you're planning on presenting/etc. etc.

Ah, the life of a grad. student. The work just never ends, does it?

Usually, though, what I find most exhausting over Winter Break is also what I find most enjoyable: catching up with all my friends. You know, those friends that you left behind at home (or, in my case, hid from in my hobbit/hermit hole) for 3 months or so? Trying to see everyone in 3 weeks and still be productive is pretty difficult, and actually succeeding means going back to work and school just as exhausted as you left it.

And, just as exhausting in some ways, is getting in touch with all those friends you’ve missed in the first place.

Do you call them? Do you Facebook them? Do you text them? So many ways to communicate before you can see them in person makes it hard to choose! What’s best? What’s most efficient? After all, we only have a few weeks!

By now, I have a general way of communicating with most people in my life. I know my former teachers who I want to do lunch with mostly prefer phone calls or emails. I know my old college friends usually do texts or Facebook. But, despite this knowledge, it always seems to be harder for me to call my old teachers than the people my age. Why? I feel like I’m more likely to interrupt something important with the teachers (since, unlike you and me, they’re in the real world and all that jazz).

Apparently, this is a more common feeling than I realized. During a recent lecture at Fordham (which no doubt happened while I was buried under a pile or two of books), Professor Deborah Tannen, a linguistics scholar, spoke about the generation gaps that emerge in uses of social media. Of course, everyone knows that, in general, young people text more than older people do. And, when my mother asks me why I’m taking the trouble to type out a question on my tiny phone instead of just calling my friend I have explained that it's “because I don’t want to bug my friend.” But I guess I just never looked at it any deeper than that.

But, when I read the article summarizing her lecture, Professor Tannen’s explanation made complete sense to me. “Young people take a different attitude toward the use of text messages than older generations do,” she explained.‘“My [Prof. Tannen’s] peers tend to view texting with alarm, disapproval and contempt. If we’re talking to a kid and they start texting somebody, it’s uniformly clear to us that that’s rude. [But] Young people consider telephone calls rude. It’s rude and intrusive to call people on the phone. The polite thing to do is to text them.’”

Unfortunately, this explanation does not help me with my internal dilemma. Knowing that millions of others my age feel the way I feel does not help me conquer those feelings; it does not help me feel more comfortable about making that phone call even when calling may be more efficient, and even when I only have a couple of weeks to see everyone I want to see (and, don’t forget, accomplish all the reading I want/need to do).

Luckily, I’m not so set in my ways about this kind of thing that it spills over from my personal life into my professional life. I know my own social media preferences probably don’t work in an office setting. But I’d like to hear more about what Prof. Tannen has to say about this. Is my generation generally able to conquer these preferences when they involve people with other preferences from other generations? Does this answer depend on each person’s level of anxiety or shyness? Have these social media preferences affected the general extrovert/introvert ratio for my generation (and I mean this as a different question than the typical “is social media bringing people closer or flinging them apart?” conundrum)?

I’m sure more research will be done on this kind of thing in the future. For now, for this Winter Break, I guess we’ll all have to figure out how to catch up with our old friends on our own.

Hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season and, if you’re in NYC, that you’re enjoying the snow!

Alex

The Inevitable End

The end of the semester…it’s really here. And yet the light of the end of the tunnel still seems so dim. Even when most people can say, whether they have been taking tests or writing papers, “two down and one to go,” the end seems both too close and too far…impossible to finish in the short time, impossible to last through the hours and hours that yet remain until break.

Facebook has gotten out of control. SNL videos are being posted right and left, and their humor (or lack thereof) subsequently debated. Threads discussing the similarities between comic book heroes and novel protagonists reach 20 comments or more. In between paper-writing spurts, when I hit a wall on Friday night, I debated the merits of Battlestar Galactica’s Laura Roslin’s (*fictional*) presidential decisions with a classmate…before I realized that said classmate was a lawyer and I was just going to think my ability to form an argument had disappeared if I kept trying. For those of you swamped in numbers, I’m guessing that going to CVS and trying to calculate how much money you would have saved if you had remembered to bring your rewards card seems more appealing than studying right now. Basically, at this point, any sort of work seems more appealing than that dreaded last thing you have to get through before break. But when you realize how eerily similar your chosen avoidance tactic is to the work you’re supposed to be doing…you panic a bit before you go back to work.

But break is almost here. I just keep trying to tell myself that. I am currently projecting myself into a relaxed and un-nauseated future. And, as I try to get through this last paper, I just think to myself: “This is the last time you will have to write three crazy papers at the end of a semester. Next semester at this time, you will have only one paper to write. You can do this! *PUUUUUUSH*!” Then, of course, I ask my subconscious why it sounds like a midwife and remember that until March I’ll be studying my butt off for comps but, hey, don’t question your internal motivation tactics, right?

Something that has helped me a little in my panicked state is thinking how much worse the professors have it than we do. Yes, you can say that they assigned all the work in the first place, but that’s the nature of the system that we were all deluded enough to sign up for. After we hand in those final papers and take those final tests, they still have to grade all of them. And then they have to wait for and face their own test results, the course evaluations. Then they have to prepare for next semester’s classes over break. And that’s on top of all the other stuff (which I discussed somewhat in one of my previous posts) that keeps them constantly working.

I don’t think this is a “misery loves company” strategy. That’s what Facebook is. That’s what you do with your peers. I think this is a case of “if they can do it, I can do it.”  It’s inspirational! Or at least I’d like to think so.

Next time I “see” you all, it will be Winter Break! And we will all be much happier. Good luck finishing up the semester, everyone! See you on the other side.

Alex

“We’re all in the same (sinking) boat.” Or, in other words, “Get on the Panic Train! Toot toot!”

 

The above title is taken directly from recent Facebook posts in threads I have participated in, and refer to GSAS finals season. For every minute I spend writing my papers (and I suspect the same could be said for those of you studying for exams), I spend an equal or greater amount of time on Facebook. “How can you function that way? How can you concentrate?” my dad asked me last night when I went home for a change of scenery (I was going stir crazy sitting in one room writing for 3 days straight).

“Well...It lets me know I’m not alone.”

And I don’t think I’m the only one who feels this way. Usually, around 1 or 2am, about 27 of my friends are on Facebook chat. This means about 30 other people I know are definitely awake and either Facebook stalking or working like I am. As the hours go on, the numbers dwindle. I often go to bed late. I seem to work better when everyone else in my house is asleep. For some reason, I am a nocturnal being. I see the numbers dwindle to about 6 people by 4am.

Not so during finals time. Last night, at about 2am, 70 of my friends were on Facebook chat. 70! I’m not sure I even know that many people at Fordham. This group of 70 obviously included some of my friends who are still at college, and currently going through the same terror of finals. So it’s still obvious that the number peaked because of the time of year. And, what makes this even more obvious, and something I think is much more prominent for grad. students than undergrads., is the constant back and forth and commiserating on statuses and wall posts that flourishes at this time in the semester. Maybe it’s more common for grad. students because we have more work. Or maybe it’s simply that, within each program, there’s so much overlap between people taking the same classes that little virtual support groups form more easily. I’m not sure. But I’m sure I never see this much Facebook activity except during finals time, and I’m sure I see much more of it in grad. school than I did in undergrad.

And, honestly, I don’t know how I’d get through all this work without Facebook. Without being distracted from my own miserable paper-writing existence by reaching out and supporting others who are in the same position. Without trying (and failing) to say something wittier and funnier than my impossibly brilliant friends. The humor is so necessary, I think, and the way I get that release is through Facebook. I know, that’s kind of sad. How dependent can you get? But, living off campus as most grad. students do, I can’t commiserate by just walking down the hallway and complaining to someone that my eyes feel like they’re going to explode. We have to connect on Facebook. And the more stressful the semester, the more I need the (again, virtual) company. You get solidarity in psychosis.

As we all slowly reach our breaking points, I’m sure we’ll all also reach the peak of entertaining Facebook statuses. So I say: Thank God for Facebook. It’s the medium by which we all save each other.

Alex

PS Feel free to save each other via this Blog post too!

“How Shall I Put This?”: The Dangers of Acadamese

ac•a•de•mese: æk ə dəˈmiz,-ˈmis,əˌkæd ə [ak-uh-duh-meez, -mees, uh-kad-uh-] –noun. pedantic, pretentious, and often confusing academic jargon: a presumably scholarly article written in incomprehensible academese.
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December has arrived (internal screaming may begin here). So, now that we must confront this monstrosity, let’s talk about how we can get through this successfully…shall we?

I’m not sure about all of you, but as an English major I don’t have any final exams. I have what, to many (including those suffering under the specific burden), seems worse: papers. Upon papers. Upon papers. And papers are exactly where the Acadamese Monster (see above...and yes, that is a chocobo) is most likely to attack.

I’d guess that almost everyone who goes to grad. school, and even most undergrads, have heard the term “acadamese.” In case you don’t know though, and in case the above definition doesn’t help: remember when you were assigned your first critical work in college (mine was in an Anthropology class) and you had no idea what the author was saying? You probably thought you were stupid. You probably thought to yourself “Oh my God, maybe I’m really stupid and don’t deserve to be at this school.” But you were wrong. This is definitely a clear case of “it’s not me, it’s you.” That scholar was writing in acadamese. It’s not your fault it was unintelligible! In fact, he may have only been published because nobody could understand him but they were all too embarrassed to admit it. Or maybe they thought a lack of clarity  meant he must be brilliant. Who knows? In any case, totally not your fault.

What would be your fault would be slipping into this form of writing yourself. And, sadly, many people do. If you don’t stay on your guard, you’ll turn into that guy you didn’t understand your freshman year in college. And it’s not because you got smarter…it’s because you got bitten by the Acadamese Monster. I used to see this when I worked in the Writing Center with undergrads all the time. I’d read a completely convoluted sentence from the paper we were working on out loud, ask the tutee what she meant, and she would then proceed to explain the same concept to me in completely clear and normal language. “Why didn’t you just say that?” I’d ask.

“Because I didn’t think it sounded smart enough,” was the inevitable reply.

Now, this writer in the Chronicle who was complaining about acadamese recently is a little extreme, in my opinion. She thinks signing emails using “Cheers” counts as acadamese, as does using “shall.” I don’t quite agree with her there. But she does, at one point, give the best and most concise advice I’ve ever heard on how to avoid this trap. Instead of simply saying “write it down like you would say it,” or something to that effect, she says: “Make it correct and precise for your field, but think a little about sounding like yourself—the best version of yourself.”

Of course, nobody sounds exactly like themselves when they write. Writing is automatically more formal—you have to think more about it, so it tends to be a bit more eloquent than your everyday speech would be. But you should sound like a “version” of yourself. If you’ve erased yourself entirely, then you’re probably sounding like that crazy scholar that nobody understands (remember him?). The best writing, even academic writing, maintains something of the writer’s personality. That’s what makes it interesting to read!

By thinking about this I’ve realized something: writing this blog is probably a great exercise for me. I can write my papers this month (OMGONLYTWOMOREWEEKSTOWRITEEVERYTHING *breathe*) worrying about one less thing. I have a defense against the Acadamese Monster. I’ve been practicing writing with a voice all semester long!

So, new advice for December: If you need to procrastinate, do it productively. Start a blog! :)

 Alex

Dreading December: From Mash-Up to Crash-Down

The Inside of my Brain on Graduate School December

December is looming.

Only for graduate students is December such an ominous month. Or, at least that’s how I feel as a graduate student. While everyone else gets to go gift shopping for the holidays, I have to lock myself inside and write all those final papers. I find can’t listen to Christmas music until my papers are done or I’ll become bitter and make everyone around me miserable, including myself. This year, I’ve decided to try something new: I bought a candle at Bath & Body Works that smells like Balsam. The “Christmas Tree smell” is, so far, making me happy and not sad. We’ll see how long it lasts.

The other problem with this time of year for grad. students, whether you celebrate Chrismahanukwanzika or not, is that whole overwhelming amount of work thing. (Remember when I said that I have to lock myself inside to write papers? Not joking. Literally survive on mac and cheese and Facebook stalking for about two weeks.) This semester, December is intruding on November too. The nutter-factor is getting worse already, and Thanksgiving just passed! So, for your entertainment, I will explain to you the symptoms of my particular brand of information overload.

Before we get into it though, I have a small prelude: As a recent Chronicle article I read explains very thoroughly, information overload is not simply a symptom of our own time. You cannot convince me that if I would just get off the computer I would not have a problem (as if that were possible anyway). By my examples further on, you’ll see why. But I really do agree with the author of this article when she says that “It's important to remember that information overload is not unique to our time, lest we fall into doomsaying.” You can get overloaded with stimuli in general…even if it’s just words on paper  (as in my first example, below).

So, without further ado, I give you…

THREE FATAL SYMPTOMS OF IMPENDING DECEMBER MADNESS:

1.       I have starting creating mash-ups of books I’m reading from different classes. The doctors from Middlemarch and The Hidden Hand are getting confused in my brain. Who was it who saved an old man in France from dying of a fever again? Did both of them do it? *gulp*

2.       It’s not just books I’m mashing up anymore. I’ve starting mashing up people. My roommates and I have started doing Battlestar Galactica nights on Wednesday, where we watch the show (don’t tell me what happens!!! I’m only on season 4.0!) and eat foods that begin with the letter B. It’s been really great…a good way for me to set aside both time to wind-down from my anxiety-ridden schedule and to bond with my roommates. But things have started creeping into my dreams. Most nerds dream about school at least sometimes, right? Well…I recently had a dream that one of my professors was best friends with Laura Roslin from BSG. I was super jealous. Then I woke up. And I was super embarrassed.

3.       I’m crashing earlier. Generally I can stay up until 4am, sometimes even 5am, and remain completely lucid. I’m a night owl. But either I’m getting old (which is a strange thing for a 23-year-old to suggest) or the end-of-semester-burn-out has come sooner than expected, because I’m starting to crash earlier and earlier. The early nightfall doesn’t help either. And neither do my mild panic-attacks when I think of all the work I have left to do (ok…those kind of help in the sense that they wake me up. But they can’t be healthy. Even if they’re not really panic-attacks).

December is looming. And so is insanity.

Alex

WARNING: If you are experiencing any of the above symptoms, seek psychological support from your peers immediately. Commiserating is the best medicine in these times of terror.

An Impossible (?) Balancing Act

A woman’s curse…no, it’s not what you’re thinking. I’m talking about the infamous “second shift” and how it plays out in academia.

This past summer, I saw some seemingly contradictory findings regarding working women. In The Atlantic’s much-talked-about article “The End of Men,” I discovered that, in the year 2010, “women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same.” About a month later, I read another interesting article, this time in The Washington Post.  This author reviewed a recent study about the perils of being a working mother in academia, a topic that isn’t studied all that often.

Apparently all this progress attributed to working women does not fully apply when it comes to female professors. As the Washington Post article mentions, “The number of women in academia has more than doubled in the past 20 years, and women are fast approaching parity with men on college faculties. But in the top ranks, men still far outnumber women. Sixty-one percent of male professors have tenure, compared with 43 percent of female faculty, according to a 2009-10 AAUP survey.”

So...what's going on here?

What’s going on is that the tenure system seems to be totally incompatible with a woman’s biological clock. As Mona Lisa Vito might say, it’s “TICKIN’ LIKE THIS!” and academia is marching to a completely different rhythm. Essentially, women who want both a productive academic career and a family have a tough decision to make. Either they can give up on one of their dreams, or attempt balancing a career and a life in a feat which, to some, seems impossible. As one interviewed mother-professor said:  “I think this whole myth that you can have a job, have a deep relationship with your children, and have a great relationship with your partner, which they’ve been telling women since the 70s, it’s just bull. It’s just completely not true.” And another: “One of the costs of working full time and parenting is that I don't feel that I do either job as well as I could, or should.”

But why is this any different for professors than other women? And, if it has to do with being a professor, why aren’t male professors complaining?

Sadly, it seems the flexible schedule that makes the job of a professor so attractive is also what makes it so perilous to women. All that free time you think you’ll have when you’re not teaching classes (I mean, come on, how much time can teaching and grading for three classes take!? Or so you might say…) is not actually free time. The teaching may not seem like much (though I’d bet it takes up a lot more time than most people would guess, especially if the professor is good and cares about her classes), but “scholarly demands of the job--writing papers, applying for grants, pursuing research--are unending.”  A professor may be able to alter her schedule to accommodate a doctor’s appointment or her child’s school play pretty easily, but she’ll pay for that “wasted time” later. She’ll have to catch up on all those extras if she actually wants to stay afloat in an academic environment.

And, though male professors have to contend with this craziness too, the parenting/balance issues don’t seem to affect men the same way. In fact, as one of the few other scholars to research this topic, John Curtis has taken note of this discrepancy. “Fathers bear fewer parenting burdens than mothers, and faculty fathers who do sacrifice work for parenting tend to be admired and rewarded, while the mother who makes the same choice is ‘seen as neglecting her job,’ Curtis said.”

Basically, the problem seems to be that being a professor and a mom (and probably also a wife) are careers that entail a lot more than what you might initially think is in the job description. They’re literally full-time jobs. They take up more than 40 hours a week. If you let them, they can take up your entire life. So combining them successfully seems pretty nearly impossible. Unless you’re Hermione Granger and have a time turner, how can you really be expected to do both well?

As if there weren’t enough problems with the tenure system already (e.g. What happens if you have to go to Alaska to teach at Juno Community College!?). As if there isn’t already enough to discourage talented women from pursuing careers in academia. Now we have to add this to list! I think the researchers mentioned in the Washington Post article said it best when they wrote: “If we believe that women who are mothers are a valuable part of the academic system, then we need to rethink the structure of the tenure system in profound ways.” But is a restructuring just another full-time job that won’t fit into a 24-hour day?

Worst of all for us grad. students: These women say that being a professor who’s also a mother feels like being a “perpetual graduate student.” What does that say about our lives!?

Alex

PS Check out this comic for more evidence:

Back to School Night

And…the Chronicle has done it again! The magazine’s writers have made me think. Strange to think I didn't even know about it a year ago.

Though I’m not sure if it’s exactly the direction they intended my brain to go in.

Earlier this month, they published an article on “The Invisible Curriculum.” As the author, an English professor, describes it, the invisible curriculum is comprised of those moments when professors step out of their subject area to give life lessons in the classroom, or times that they forge personal connections with students  in office hours. You know, the parts of school you’ll remember for the rest of your life, even when stuff like the year Rome fell flies out of your head (although some of those crazy things stick too: 476 A.D. *boomboom*!).

Not being a professor myself, my brain took me past the advice on how to connect to students in a more meaningful way, and towards an examination of the other side of the experience. I started thinking about my own student-teacher relationships throughout my 21 years of schooling (I was only not in school for two years of my life. Creepy to think about, isn’t it? Don’t know how/if I’ll ever be able to think of “next year” as meaning January instead of September).

I went to a really small middle/high school. And I mean really small. My graduating high school class: 21. Before I entered college, the biggest class I’d been in was in 8^th grade: 40 people (and we had two different homerooms). I went to the kind of tiny school that was overflowing with passionate individuals…but lacking in funds. If there was no classroom space available, we would walk over to the teacher’s house and have class there. Or, if we were in a small enough class and the teacher didn’t live nearby (2-3 person classes aren’t that uncommon at my middle/high school), we might even have class in the teacher’s car. In this kind of environment, everyone knows everyone else’s business. And that, to some extent at least, includes the teachers. And I don’t just mean that the teachers hear student gossip. It works the other way around too. When you go to a school that’s basically like a big extended family, you hear about your teacher’s private lives much more often than you would at a “normal” school.

So, obviously, college professors felt strangely distant to me. “You mean I don’t know whether my professor is married, or has kids, or where they grew up and went to college, or what they do on the weekends!?” It baffled my mind. Ok…maybe it didn’t quite do that. After all, I knew college was not going to be what I was used to. But it did feel a bit, well, unnatural to me that these people who I was learning so much from were also people I knew nothing about in any real personal way. Of course, even in college, if you get close to certain professors you do learn a little more about who they are outside of the classroom. But it was still not anything like what I was used to prior to college.

My solution? Nothing. I just kept on being myself, and thinking it was weird that I didn’t know who my professors’ “selves” were.

My early experiences obviously helped shape not only my educational expectations, but my personality. I’ve been told I’m a lot more open than most people. Fellow students are initially surprised at how much of my personal life I share right off the bat. Since, after I’ve been in class for a couple of weeks, I don’t immediately shut up when a professor walks in the room, I sometimes get odd looks from those who probably think I’m “oversharing.” I was never a “class clown,” but I sometimes crack jokes in class…because I never saw any reason to hide who I was just because I’m in a classroom setting. I don’t think professionalism and personality are mutually exclusive. Despite some initial skepticism, most people understand pretty quickly that I’m just being my quirky self and actually laugh along with me.

But what all this musing led me to eventually was this: is there, and should there be, a difference between professor-student relationships in undergrad. and grad. school? Coming from my very individual/eccentric educational background, it was difficult for me to analyze this question once it popped into my head. I know that, theoretically, we grad. students are treated very differently. Even if we enter straight from college, we’re suddenly seen as adults. Some of us have been out of school for a long time and have lived completely independent lives for many years. And, most importantly, since most of us are expected to go into the fields we’re studying once we enter the professional world, we’re seen as future colleagues. But is the difference really there in practice? Or is it just a concept? If part of the difference is based on our probable future status as colleagues, is there a different relationship between professors and Ph.D. students than between professors and M.A./M.S. students?

Finding answers to these kinds of questions for someone like me is pretty difficult. I’m still in touch with many of my high school teachers, and go out to lunch with them periodically. This probably skews my opinion of things. I think of my professors as teachers. And I have always thought of my teachers as real people. People who are smarter than me who deserve respect...but people nonetheless. So, when a professor finally does drop a personal tidbit in class, I always find it weird when I hear reactions from fellow students along the lines of “Oh my God he has a son!? It’s so weird thinking of him as a dad.”

But the most important question of all has to be this one: Is it ok to friend your graduate school professors on Facebook before you graduate? ;)

Alex

PS Speaking of professor-student relationships, this has been going around the internet for a few weeks now, and I thought I should share it. I’m not sure if it’s funny if you’re not a humanities grad. student, but I know I found it hysterical (and all too true): So You Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities?