Topic of the Day: The 5-Year Plan

Hello Readers!
   I hope this Tuesday finds you well! I am actually blogging today from an airplane -- whoohoo! I love in-flight wifi!!
   Since I have recently been thinking a lot about my personal future and about how amazing and crazy life's twists and turns can be, I thought today would be a good day to broach the topic of how graduate school fits into one's life as a whole -- in other words, how it fits into, or doesn't fit into, your grand plan for life. If you are not familiar with graduate school life, or maybe if you are just starting out as a degree candidate, you should know that life does not stop for graduate school. Despite enrollment, courses, classes, papers, dissertations, comps, exams, and tuition, life, indeed, keeps occurring. I have known colleagues who have fallen in love, gotten married, bought houses, had children, gotten divorced, traveled, climbed mountains, ice-skated in national competitions, played in rock and roll bands, and achieved other typical and non-typical life milestones all while working towards their degrees. Life rolls on around us, and most of us treat graduate school just as if we would treat a regular job -- we work, we play, and we live our lives. The only thing that is different than being in the non-academic working world is that there is an ending to grad school. And even then, life doesn't really change that much.
   Immediately when I decided to write about this topic, I thought of Dr. Karen's 5 Year Plan. For those of you who don't know Dr. Karen, allow me to introduce you to her website, The Professor Is In. A colleague of mine had passed her site along to me a while back, and it provides a gold-mine of  information and anecdotes and advice that will give interesting and candid perspectives about the academic world. Dr. Karen's perspective on the 5 year plan is basically that while you can't expect to control everything in life, you can however take charge of your career and make choices based on your own personal goals. She writes, "I don’t think anybody should ever be in graduate school, or on the tenure-track, without a five-year plan," and continues:

"Some of my clients are masters of the five-year plan, and even have things like getting pregnant in there. I admire that, even while I know that 'the best laid plans…' You can’t plan for everything (or, you can, but your plans may not work out). But the core point of planning is this: that you’re taking control of your process into your own hands, and not leaving it out there somewhere, in the hands of your advisor, your department, or 'fate.' You decide when you’ll write, when you’ll defend, when you’ll publish, and so on. These are all your decisions to make."

   What Dr. Karen is sure to point out, though, is that a plan in and of itself is not going to get you anywhere. You have to stick to the plan. In other words, you have to meet deadlines. In a follow-up post, Dr. Karen asserts:

"Staying on top of deadlines is exactly what allows a person to achieve  huge life goals. Yes, I’m quoting Thomas Edison:  ”success is 10% inspiration, and 90% perspiration.”  The people who succeed in getting into the national conference are, first and foremost, the ones who actually remember to submit the proposal to the national conference, by the deadline, properly formatted. One of the most important outcomes of the 5-year plan is that you never miss a submission deadline for a conference or a funding opportunity.  As you learn of new conferences and funding opportunities, you simply add them in, without losing track of the other deadlines. You also plan out a publication schedule, and put your own deadlines for submission to journals there in the plan.  And money racks up, and publications rack up, and networks rack up, and voila, the cumulative effect 5 years later is—an epic CV that gets you an epic job offer, or tenure."

    Ok, well, yes, but never miss a deadline? "Simply" add them in? It sounds great in theory, but I think the biggest problem most graduate students have is that meeting deadlines is not at all simple. Life sometimes tears you away, even if your academic work is your number one priority. It is not always so black and white.

    So what are your thoughts on the 5 year plan? Though I may have some theoretical questions about how the 5 Year Plan works, most of my questions about creating a 5 Year Plan are entirely logistical -- meaning, what does the plan actually LOOK like? By this I mean literally how does it look? What format does it take? Is in in calendar form? List form? Do you try for a month-by-month set of goals, or set up it up year by year? Or something in between? Do you work on multitple goals at a time, or try to nail one thing down before moving onto the next? I'm sure different solutions work for different people, but I am wondering what would work for me, and what has worked for you? I'm curious to hear your thoughts!
    And another thought I always have when I revisit the 5 year plan post: how do you know if your goals are realistic? Is there such a thing as shooting too high? Should your goals be based on practical things such as making money and attaining a job with benefits, or should the goals be focused on advancing the scholarly conversation? How do you set yourself up for success with the 5 Year Plan?
   Please share your thoughts about how grad life fits into your big picture!
Until next time, Liza

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?