Now with 30% more soul
Sometimes it’s easy to envision the world of academia as somewhat soul-sucking. You take something you’re passionate about, spend all your time writing, revising and distilling so you can get published or get tenure or get admitted to a really awesome PhD program, and at the end of a day of writing/teaching/TAing/workshopping/meeting-ing, you just feel exhausted and unable to think like a normal human being. And by you, I of course mean me. And by “think like a normal human being”, I of course mean “fight off the urge to just become a Borg and be done with it”. What’s so bad about being controlled by a collective robotic conscious, anyway?
… Which is all I guess my way of saying that school has been exhausting, vaguely soul-sucking, but someone had one of those exceptional moments of kindness and brought me flowers for some silly committee work I’m on. And it made things seem just a little bit nicer.
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The criticisms of my students would serve as a good warning to visitors of Seeworthy: she talks too fast, she's too hard on us, she assigns too much work, and you have to be a dyke to get a good grade.
In other words, I'm a big, fat, queer, feminist meanie, and I am totally out to get you. Graaagh!
I just finished up a hellish quarter, myself. I took some graduate classes part-time last year, but this quarter I started full-time with two 6-credit seminars. Oh, and did I mention I also work full-time, with a tendency to work overtime? Yeah, the two don’t mix. I may have been able to do it while I was an ungrad - work and go to school both full-time - but I can’t possibly do it in graduate school. I have a month off and then I go back part-time to school next quarter.
What’s even more frustrating for me is that my focus is interdisciplinary, yet the university I attend doesn’t offer an interdisciplinary program. This school isn’t even my first pick - I applied because it was the only local option available. I did complete my undergraduate work there, so I know it’s a good school, but I feel very limited by the discipline I chose, which is history. If I even want to study anything remotely associated with what my thesis is on, I have to do independent studies, and finding a prof to mentor those is difficult, since the college doesn’t pay them extra for it.
It’s frustrating and demoralizing, but in the end, I know it’s worth it. Still, flowers would be nice