1. Re-new my membership for my disciplinary professional organization
2. Make my hotel reservations for the first evening of that organization's November conference
3. Contact people from institutions across the country who will be presenting/attending to request informal meetings during the conference
4. Update my postdoc and fellowship information binder
5. Learn how to design a cool, but professional web site to use as a self-marketing tool
6. Stop worrying about getting a future job and concentrate on completing more immediate tasks
It does not seem possible for me to effectively manage both the long term and the short term PhD-related tasks at the same time. Unfortunately, I think this ability is one of the keys to being both a successful graduate student and a successful college/university faculty member. Note that this skill is different from the popular cliche "multitasking"--Instead, this is an ability to switch between tasks and between points/moments in the space-time continuum. Where can I learn to do that?
I wish there were a virtual-reality experience that would accurately simulate an environment requiring such a skill--something like an amusement park ride.
(I probably have amusement parks on the brain recently because my conference will be in Orlando this year.) There could be one ride for those thinking of going to graduate school, and an advanced ride for graduate students desiring to be college and university faculty members.
The future-faculty ride could be modeled on the one in the Michael Vick Experience TV ad (on the Nike gridiron site click "watch the commercial"). At the entrance of the ride (a grand, ivy-covered marble arch with an impressive crest and undecipherable Latin phrase inscribed on it) the prospective academic would be strapped into the foampadded harness, and the one-person car would move forward towards a trap door (decorated with "PhD" in ornate letters and a painting of a cap and hood).
Once through the door, the grad student would not be on a brightly-lit football field like in the Vick commercial, but on the figurative disciplinary field of whatever academic area the grad student is thinking of going into. And instead of getting a football thrust into her hands, the student would be thrown an appropriate metaphorical and/or practical object of the discipline: the Norton Anthology of Poetry for a creative writing MFA student; a chemistry student would get...I don't know, a Bunsen burner, or something; in my case I might get tossed the publication manual for the American Psychological Association.
Then off she'd go: leaping over syllabus submission forms and being tackled by journal "reject" and "revise and resubmit" letters and just narrowly escaping denied Research on Human Subjects applications. Then finally, if she made all the right moves, the student would reach the successful end of the ride: shaken and stirred and bowed, but unbroken.
Actually, there could be several phases of the ride. Like a video game, you could "level up" following the completion of various move sequences: Level 1= campus interview, Level 2 = tenure-track position, Level 3 = tenure, Level 4 = promotion to associate prof, and so on...
Isn't graduate school supposed to be such a "ride"? Isn't this experience supposed to, not only provide us with the tools we will need to become a faculty member, but also give us a view behind the trap door to life on the disciplinary field of play?
Sometimes, yes. Too many times, no.
The problem is that much of graduate education (at least as it seems to be conducted in most places I am aware of here in the U.S.A.) involves riding on the graduate student ride, instead of on the faculty ride. At the end of this ride--at the end of it--many of us are really prepared to be really excellent graduate students. Some of us are lucky (and I consider myself in this category) in that we have opportunities to get off this gradstudent ride long enough and frequently enough to take some spins on the faculty ride.
But more graduate students should get that opportunity, sooner in their graduate school careers, more often, and for longer periods of time.
Part of me can't even believe I am saying this. As a preschool teacher some years back I used to hate all the talk about "readiness"--Everything we were doing for and with 2, 3, and 4 year olds was aimed at getting them "ready" to be kindergartners, or "ready" to be lifelong readers or "ready" to be numerate. Why can't a 4-year-old just enjoy being a great 4-year-old? So alternately, why does graduate school have to "prepare" students to be faculty (or administrators, or academic entrepreneurs...)?
I think the answer has to do with a sort of "truth in advertising." How would you like it if you waited in line for three hours to ride The College Faculty Experience, only to discover at the end of the ride that you were in The Graduate Student Experience line the whole time? And then--even if that ride was fun and exciting--you get to The College Faculty Experience line only to find out you are too inches too short to ride this ride?
Posted by perry032 at October 17, 2004 09:37 PM