This week's impossible tasks: Stop obsessing about
1. my upcoming prelim oral exam,
2. the upcoming NCFR conference,
3. next week's elections (VOTE!),
4. my submitted conference abstract proposal,
5. my (unheeded) dissertation proposal timeline
6. my first journal rejection of a single-authored article
Sorry for yet another graduate school-sports analogy (see October 17th's "Enjoying the Ride"), but I had this thought while watching football yesterday with my husband. What we graduate students need are play-by-play announcers.
The day before NFL football Sunday I had been going through some folders with notes, assignments, and readings from my classes over the years. (Prelim oral prep.) I was amazed at how coherent many of my scholarly ideas and interests have been--and how little I seemed to consciously retain sense of this coherence. True, my graduate student history is longer than some folks', but this time spanse can't be the whole reason for my continuing reinvention and rediscovery of "a-ha" moments, deep insights, connections between the academy and popular culture, and concepts across topic areas.
Instead, a more likely explanation is that I do not have someone providing an ongoing commentary, someone who is an expert about the broad scholarly terrain in my discipline as well as my own personal path through it, someone enthusiastic--even un-naturally, uncomfortably so--about how gradstudenting specifically and scholarship more generally is done in my field. And someone who comments, at regular intervals about my goings-on.
Some play-by-play I could use this week as I approach tasks related to the above obsessions:
"She's well into the closing stages of preparing for her prelim exam. It'll be interesting to see how see incorporates her previous academic careers in child development and early childhood education with her current focus on adoption, genetics, and policy...And there's an excellent move! She's now going back over her self evaluations from three years of departmental annual progress reports...The question still is, will she go even further, back to her application essay to the doctoral program? If you recall back in 1999 when she wrote that..."
"The big conference is only a few weeks away, how would you rate her preparation?" "Well, it'll be interesting to see how she handles this year compared to last year when she was a presenter." "Yes, but of course she's planning on interviewing--" "Interviewing, yes, but will she be able to bring that confidence and momentum from her positive presentation sessions last year into this year's interviews?" "You're ab-so-lutely right: The name of this game is 'What have you done for the scholarly field lately.' She'll definitely have to bring her A-game if she wants to make a lasting impression..."
"This rejection is major, folks. Of course she had one earlier this year, but that was as a co-author. Do you see this rejection as impacting the rest of her activities this semester?" "Well, yes and no. She'll have to get past it, take a look at the film on this one, and learn from it to go forward. She's done that in the past and she can do it again. But that rejection left an injury, and for a while every time she steps out on the field she's going to be walking a little gingerly on that injury and--" "What's the hold up here? Do we--" "Yes, it appears we have a challenge on the field...Yes, we have confirmation: She's challenging that last rejection!" "Exactly what I've been talkin about! Just when you think she's down for the count she gets back on the horse to bat again!!!"
Posted by perry032 at October 25, 2004 04:59 PM | TrackBack