The Good Stuff

So, after the past couple of posts about the transition from undergrad to grad school, I feel like I should do a post that is more... positive. I also feel like I should note that I'm NOT saying that the way things are (however that is, and it does vary widely by institution and part of the country) is the way that things should always remain, and that I'm NOT saying that my experience with stuff will apply to every single person who attends grad school or who reads this blog. These posts originated out of the ways that I'm seeing my own student's experience replicating my experience. Part of that is because, like me, this student took no time off between undergrad and grad school. [Aside: one reason why students from institutions like my current one don't take time off is because they can't afford to go into repayment on loans or because they fear that family pressure will mean they'll never go back. Taking a "year off" is a luxury that only a certain type of student can afford, or that only a certain type of student thinks that they can afford.] Part of this is because, like me, this student made a major leap in terms of quality of program between undergrad and grad. So will the experience be different if one has made or makes different choices? Most likely. But I suppose that my impetus to write about my experience in the way that I do is because those were the things that I never heard when I was making my decisions about graduate school or when I was suffering through graduate school myself. And I feel like hearing those things would have made me feel better or at least would have helped me to understand my position in ways that were helpful to me. So am I trying to advocate for grad school being a harsh and horrifying place? No. Am I trying to dissuade people from pursuing graduate education? Well, no, except that the last thing the world needs is more unemployable PhDs, so I'm not encouraging people either. I'm just trying to talk about (and to think through) certain aspects of how one's identity as an academic is formed, and I'm trying to flesh out for myself how those things that have formed my academic identity have affected who I am now. That's it.

But was graduate school a "bad" experience for me? Hell no it wasn't! Was it hard? Sure. Was it emotionally draining and confusing and complicated? Yep. But it wasn't "bad." How can I say this?

• Graduate school gave me the tools to think and speak in ways that I never would have learned had I not attended.
• Graduate school was a luxury. I was able to read widely and deeply, to think long and hard, to focus on things that made me see the world in a new way.
  
• Some of my deepest and most lasting and most important friendships originated in grad school.
  
• Graduate school taught me that I am capable of original and insightful thought and that I am capable of meeting goals that were impossible for me to imagine at 17, when I had to work my ass off to explain to my mother that it was even possible for me to attend a 4-year university rather than "taking a few classes at community college" and living at home.
• Graduate school made my world bigger. It meant leaving my hometown, moving to two different and bigger cities, and making a new life for myself in each of those, without the safety net of family and people I knew for years.
• Graduate school taught me who my friends were and it taught me who I could count on in the life that I had before. People who couldn't hang with me becoming hyper-educated were quickly weeded out. That was a good thing.
• Graduate school meant that I had the option of becoming a college professor - without it, I would not have the life I have now, and I like the life I have now. I like having some control over my day-to-day schedule. I like having autonomy. I like teaching, but I also like that I get to have a life of the mind, too. I like that some of the hardest work I do can be accomplished in pajamas.
• Graduate school, and specifically my years in my PhD program, were not only times of study and stress but also times of Big Fun and Partying and Dating and Dancing and Craziness.
  

So if you need a positive spin from Dr. Crazy, there it is. It doesn't erase the other stuff I've written about recently, nor do I think it's particularly helpful to anybody, but I don't want to come off like some Debbie Downer who only sees only Doom and Gloom in this process or who is aggressively, at one and the same time, reinforcing the status quo about how grad students are treated and discouraging people's dreams or something. I'm not saying that my version of this experience, whether positive or negative, will be everybody's version. It's just Dr. Crazy's version. And the more versions we get, the better off we all are. I really do believe that.

More on Becoming an Academic

I wanted to follow up to my post from yesterday morning in response to the conversation that's cropped up in comments and perhaps to clarify my position a bit.

But before I get on with the clarifying and the responding, let me just say that I'm really glad that people have found something that resonated for them in that post - or really in any of the posts that I do on this here blog. It's funny: I never thought when I started blogging that I'd be at it 3 years later, and I certainly didn't think that I'd have anything to say that people thought was insightful or even just worth reading. I don't edit much in this space, and I certainly don't draft posts and return to them later to polish them. And, as a friend of mine recently said of Dr. Crazy, "you're one long-winded bitch," and so I'm often amazed that people slog through some of what I write here. But so anyway, thanks for reading. And thanks for thinking about the stuff that I write. It really does mean a lot to me.

Ok, so now with that out of the way, let's get back to this whole becoming an academic thing. First of all, I want to clarify that I do not think that professors at grad institutions are maniacally plotting the destruction of grad students' identities. I think that perhaps it came across that way, and I really don't think that's true at all. I think that if this process is one of degrading and rebuilding that it's not because there's some diabolical master plan at work to fuck people up. I think that even though people do get fucked up as part of the process, that the process itself isn't designed to fuck people up. If that makes any sense.

See, here's the thing. How does one become the sort of person who decides that graduate education is for them? Well, by and large, a person has to have been the sort of person who was a good student. Now, being a good student includes many characteristics, some of which I will list: wanting to please one's instructors, being good at following directions, being good at understanding expectations and meeting them according to a recognizable set of rules. Now, the problem, as I see it, is that these characteristics aren't necessarily ones that serve graduate students well. At least in my PhD program, what instructors wanted was not for pleasing them to be at the top of my list of priorities, to follow precise directions, and to do my work in response to the recognizable set of rules. Rather, what they wanted of me was for me to stop being the good girl and to become a thinker. They wanted me to have my own ideas - not just ideas that would please them - and they wanted me to make a case for those ideas under my own steam. They wanted me to push myself. They didn't want the perfectly crafted, perfectly appropriate response to the material - they wanted originality and nuance, even if I missed the mark a little bit. Now, we say we want that of undergraduates, but the reality is that if an undergraduate follows all of the directions and does all of the work and maybe has an insight or two, that produces an A. Especially because there are a lot more bites at the grading apple, just being more than a little bit competent and being very organized and excited about school can get a good student far. Not so, in graduate school. Yes, you still need to be competent and organized and excited, but when your entire grade comes from one long paper and a presentation, the fact of the matter is, you need to be sort of brilliant, too. And when you've spent all your life hitting markers that have been clearly laid out in front of you, that demand is confusing. How can I brilliantly respond to the assignment "write a seminar paper about something in this course" when there is no assignment sheet? No prompt? When I don't know how to even think about how to go about proposing an idea of my own? I've always been a good student, so now I don't know who I am!

For me, this is the primary crisis that graduate education causes. And it's not a process of "hazing" at all - it's not really about "oh, only the great and the good and the lucky get to become part of this elite club" but rather it's about something more fundamental to what true scholarship is: it's about requiring people to move beyond being "good students" and toward being actual intellectual subjects. The problem is, nobody actually explains that this is what is happening. And when faculty suggest to students that they might think about graduate school, they fail to mention that being a "good student" will no longer get them where they want to go. In fact, they tell students that because they are such good students that they should go to graduate school. THIS is where the process of fucking up the professoriate begins.

And the fact of the matter is that even if every requirement was presented with a strong rationale, and every seminar gave explicit instructions to graduate students about the exact expectations for student performance, I'm not sure that it would help much to ease that transition from being an acolyte into being a master. Because, that, really, is what we're talking about. Moving from being the submissive to being the dominant. And graduate school is the liminal space between those two categories, and that is going to fuck with anybody's head.

The other thing that I wanted to talk about is more personal to me, I guess, though I suspect some of you will share this experience, too. I think the second major thing that made grad school such a breaking down of who I was before has to do with the fact that I did not attend an elite undergraduate institution and that I do not come from an educated family. Most of the people I went to high school with (a public high school, in a border suburb) did go to college, but they went to college for degrees that easily translated into jobs that took them right back to our hometown. Even those who sought further education tended to go to law school, and so they went right back to our hometown, they live five minutes from their parents, and everybody got married by 30. Some people got married and divorced and married again by 30. But the point here is that what graduate school meant in a very real way for me is that I can never go home again. That's not to say that I am not close with my family or that I don't maintain friendships with people from high school or college, but graduate school meant that my life was going to be very different from the life that I was expected to have. And so if my identity upon entering graduate school was effaced and replaced with something else, there really wasn't another option. In order to survive not as the smartest girl in the mediocre state university classroom but as the rough-around-the-edges-waiting-list-admit to very good PhD program at Fancy Research University, I needed to learn how to "pass" with all of the children of academics and doctors and lawyers and politicians, the best and the brightest, who were my peers. And in learning how to pass, I also had to bury parts of myself that didn't fit in with that crowd. Again, there was no way for me to avoid doing this. If I had resisted, the strain would have been too much and I would have had to drop out. In taking the path of least resistance, I had to become a completely different person, at least for a time.

Now, one of the great things about the job that I have is that it has allowed me to get things back that I had to bury during graduate school. Whereas my working class background was vaguely shameful in graduate school (parents who make politically incorrect jokes, a mother who says things like "it don't work" and "ain't" on a regular basis, extended family members on welfare, etc.), it's now an asset, because my students come from those kinds of backgrounds, too. And my colleagues really value me, too, in large part because of this hybrid identity that I now have. Yes, I'm an intellectual, but I'm no longer passing. Well, most of the time. Sometimes one still has to pass, like at MLA :) But this job helped me to figure out who I am again, and really, I'm not interested in losing that, which may mean that even if I make another run at the market that I won't be any more successful than I was this time around. Ultimately, having this job means that I don't need to be whoever "they" want me to be. And I think that's something I value about having gone through that process last year - I value learning that I'm not interested in leaving this job at all costs. Some prices are just too high to pay - and definitely too high to pay twice.

But that's the thing. In saying all of this I'm not advocating the way that graduate school tends to fuck up people's lives as a necessary evil, but I also don't know that there is any solution to that problem. I don't know that one can arrive at a formula for valuing people's personal lives in balance with the intellectual demands that the profession makes. I don't know that a person should leave the kind of intensive training that graduate school offers without being changed in some deep and crucial way.

The question then becomes, for me, how to negotiate the new identity that one attains through that education. Graduate school may strip a person down in ways that are painful, but one can't go on with one's life moaning about that forever. One can't even go on with one's life in graduate school if one can't get over that fact. So how does one get over it? Well, for me, it's meant coming to some kind of acceptance and reconciliation of these two halves of my life - the professor part and the "this is where I come from" part. It's meant trying to take the good from both, rather than being all about trying to reject the things about both that are stifling or bad or whatever. It's meant forging friendships with people who "get it" so that this new identity is not ultimately isolating but rather something that actually brings good things into my life. And, I suppose, it's meant working pretty hard to think about all this stuff so that I don't become one of those professors who tells my "good students" that they should really think about graduate school without trying to advise them about the seriousness of the decision, not only financially and intellectually, but also personally and emotionally.

So are academics fucked up? Yeah. Does part of that trace back to experiences in graduate school? Yeah. But it also has to do with having nearly complete autonomy over one's time, going through intense periods where there are too many people and too much face time and then intense periods of isolation when one is writing and one doesn't see enough people in order to be healthy and normal, having to move to Egypt-land for the elusive tenure-track job and so you only know people you work with, and any number of other things. These things fuck a person up. Are people from some backgrounds more fucked up than others by these things? Yes, I think they are. Are people who are single more fucked up by these things than people who are married and have kids? Yes, I think they are. But it all doesn't come down to graduate school, why the professoriate is fucked up. It comes down to a whole host of factors that have to do with choosing this life. Is it worth it? Again, I'm going to say that most of the time I think it is, because at the end of the day, I really believe that it's important to explore ideas and to open up new ways of seeing things and relating to the world and to spend time and energy really thinking about things that matter. It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.

Remembrance of Things Past: Becoming an Academic

God, how pretentious I am to allude to Proust in a blog post title. But whatever, it came to mind, and it really does work as a headline for what I want to write about, even though what I want to write about has absolutely nothing to do with Proust.

But so anyway, the two... things (I know, awesome word choice) that inspire this post:

1. I have been back in touch with a former student who is finishing up her first year of an MA program. She's wigging. Like seriously wigging. You know the drill, oh people who've been through the first year of an MA program: What does it all mean? Why am I doing this to myself? Why did they accept me? How am I supposed to please these people? Who am I? (And for those of you in English) Why do people even study literature anyway? Poetry makes nothing happen! The whole fucked up drill. Clearly, they're doing their number on her - by the time she's done she should have a raging case of impostor syndrome (if she doesn't already) as well as to feel like somebody beat the shit out of her. I warned her, but those warnings, oh, they go unheeded. But so anyway, I've tried to give her some uplifting advice, and also to ease her fears about a seminar paper she's writing.

2. Inspiring thing #2 is that I'm hard at work on my own paper, a paper for a conference that happens every year but that I've not attended in 8 years. This conference was my first conference (when I was but a babe of 21), and this conference generated my first publication (thank you, undergraduate thesis adviser who edited that collection), and it was really my first entrance into the profession. And I went to this conference year after year, and then I bailed. Because I had to. Now I'm making my grand return (a return that will only be grand to me, but whatever). I should also proudly note that I've got a solid page and a half of said conference paper written, and pages of notes, so this bastard should be done in the next day or two.

[Aside: The Run DMC song "Tricky" just came on the iPod shuffle. Wow, is that an awesome song.]

But so anyway, both of the above have had me thinking a lot about this process of becoming an academic - my process, the process of my student - and about how one wakes up one day and suddenly those things that once seemed so HUGE - a seminar paper, a conference paper - now feel... small. How did I get to this point? Am I glad that I'm at this point?

I've long believed that the thing that graduate school does, really, is to break you down and to turn you into a completely different person. That this, and not what you read and not the ideas that you have, is the point. Sure, you pick up some skills along the way, but really, my experience was typified by the total abasement of who I thought I was in favor of this person, "the academic," that being admitted to graduate school meant I was supposed to become. Perhaps that's overstating it, but that's how it felt. I am not the same person that I was upon being admitted into my MA program. In large part, that's because if I would have stayed that person, I would not have survived.

As I watch my student progress through this process, I see how it is working on her, in ways both good and bad. When one thinks, "I'll go to graduate school," one really doesn't realize the physical, mental, and emotional toll that graduate school will take. One thinks of it as an extension of undergrad. Except that most undergraduate education is typified by a model for education that is about fostering the development of students, about bringing out the best qualities in them, showing students how to find those things within themselves that make them great and to hone those great things and to praise students for their accomplishments. It's a model of celebration, not a model of degradation. Graduate school? In my experience, well, graduate education is more about degradation. Graduate school was not about becoming the best me but about throwing all of that out the window and becoming somebody else. In fact, I was supposed to learn that Undergraduate Me was unsophisticated and reductive and a little bit stupid, and so really, I should be embarrassed to have been her. Undergraduate Me had to take a long walk off a short pier and Graduate Student Me had to replace her.

So the first thing you "learn" is that you suck. Or that maybe you had some raw material that was interesting, but that ultimately, the raw material on its own wouldn't get you very far. So then you "learn" to talk the talk. You have the same crappy ideas, but you learn how to use words like "deploy" and "bifurcate" and "performativity" and "liminality" and "always-already" and you throw some of those in for good measure, and they dress up your crappy ideas enough to get you through. But you still feel like you suck. But then you read more, and all of a sudden you're not dressing up your crappy ideas with those words but you're actually thinking in those words, and your ideas become more complex and you begin to become secure that you're not only talking the talk but also that you can walk the walk. And then you make fun of those dumb first-years who are SOOOO pedestrian. And you learn to talk yourself down in order to really make yourself look more productive and intimidatingly smart. And you only make jokes that include the wittiest of references, and yes, it's all very tedious, but that's how you survive.

And then, if you're me, you finish with this phase, and you begin to remember who "you" are again. And while you throw off some of that pretentious bullshit, you can't fully be the person you were before. You come into a new being, that is both you and not you - not you, and not-not you. (See what I mean about learning how to talk the talk?) And you wake up one day, and you're writing a conference paper for a conference that you first attended 11 years ago, when you were a lass of 21 and when you'd only just graduated from undergrad and had only just been accepted into an MA program. And you remember how that first time you were so NERVOUS and how you had no idea how to write a conference paper (or, in that case, to edit down some crap from your thesis into a conference paper), and you were afraid of all the Important People who might be in the audience and who might Rip You to Shreds? And then you realize who you are now, that you're a person who is no longer freaked out. The only angst you have comes from the fact that you have an idea that's too big for a 15 minute conference paper, and so you've got to write "tight" and that's irritating. And sure, Important People might come to see you speak, but you know those people now, and you know that they don't generally Rip People to Shreds. And even if they did, you were already Ripped to Shreds in graduate school, and so you know how to put the kibosh on that sort of thing either by making the haters feel small or by disarming them with charm and humor. And so really, writing a conference paper now isn't some Huge Mountain to climb but rather a vaguely interesting and also vaguely irritating chore.
And then you think about your former student, and the seminar paper she's writing, and you talk to your BFF about it and you both come up with about 4 different approaches that would have the potential to be totally interesting, all of which you're fairly certain that your former student won't take, but you also know that she's got to do it her way, that she's got to move through it to the point where, as a person who has become "an academic" she can sit laughing with her "academic" BFF that they would totally rock out an A on that seminar paper in a student's MA program if it were their assignment. Guffaw! Chuckle!

See, that's the thing. All these hoops you jump through - at the time they seem tiny and ringed in fire. And then, as you leap through them, and look back at them, those hoops seem wide and danger-free, like easy targets. But the problem is, when you're looking forward to those hoops, you can't see them from that future perfect vantage point. You don't realize that when you will have jumped through them, that jumping through the hoops, meeting those seemingly arbitrary goals, hitting those markers, will give you confidence. And after you do those things, you're no longer the bright-eyed undergraduate who thought, "Oh, I'd really like to go to graduate school. I really love books." And in some ways you miss being that bright-eyed undergraduate, but you can't get her back. You know too much.

And so what is my hope for my former student? I don't know. I hope that it doesn't change her in ways that do an irrevocable violence to her. I hope that she can come out feeling like she knows who she is, or like she's equipped to find out who she is again. I hope that she doesn't get beaten down to the point that she can't pick herself back up again. I hope that at some point she realizes that all of this is part of it, and that the feelings of insecurity or inadequacy that she feels are not because she is inadequate or because she is not up to the task but rather because that's what graduate school makes you feel. I hope she learns how to demand the help that she needs from the faculty in that department without feeling ashamed or embarrassed. I hope that she comes through it basically in one piece.

***
Addendum:
I wrote the bulk of this post last night, and I was interrupted by a friend who called up late - a friend who is also a professor, but who already has tenure - who's going through a bit of an existential crisis related to all of the "what's the point in being an academic?" "nothing matters anyway, so why even bother?" "why do I care about teaching people who don't want to learn?" etc. So the shit that goes with the decision to become an academic, it doesn't end. No, the choice to become an academic affects one for a good long while, in ways that can really fuck a person up. And as much as I feel like I'm pretty well adjusted given everything, I don't want to come off like I'm not all fucked up, too. Because I am. This career fucked up romantic relationships I had in my 20s and into my 30s. It means that I have friends scattered all over the country and the world and yet I have like only one real, true friend where I live, and really, a person needs friends and support where they live. It means that my family will never really understand what I do for a living and I will always feel guilty for living far away, for not having a husband and a kid (not that I'll never have those -hope springs eternal- but that I haven't figured that shit out already, like a "normal" person, at the wizened old age of 32), whatever. That's not to say it's all bad, but it is fucked up nonetheless.

But would I trade what I've chosen in order not to be fucked up in those ways? No, I wouldn't. And maybe that means that they really did a number on me, that I was naive enough to believe the lie. But what I'd like to believe is that it is ultimately worth something, to have become this person. And most of the time, I do.

In the Network

On the first day of MLA, after I'd gotten settled in my hotel room, I wandered over to the convention to get a plastic holder for my nametag and to see whether I saw anybody I knew wandering around. I ran into a friend from grad school who is currently in a VAP and who before that was in another contract job. He's basically been on the market in some fashion for about five years, if I figure it rightly. He has basically had no chance to develop courses in his field of specialty until this year. This year he had one interview. That interview was on the second day of MLA, and as soon as it was done, this friend was leaving the convention.

On the third day of MLA, I was supposed to try to meet up with another grad school friend. This friend is also not in a tenure-track position, and this friend has been on the market pretty solidly for what is now four or five years. I never ended up being able to meet up with the friend, as he was staying outside the city and not at the convention and I'm a social butterfly who made plans with about 47,000 people and so this friend slipped through the cracks, but we did talk on the phone that night when I returned back to my hotel. He also had one interview this year.

Now, I don't bring up these examples to be uncool to these people whom I know from grad school, but I suppose both - in conjunction with a conversation I had with Bitch, Ph.D. in which she talked about the difference between her previous MLA conventions and this one where she was in kind of an "in crowd" - got me thinking about insiders and outsiders at MLA and how the social aspects of the profession play into the material and, well, professional aspects of it.

People talk a lot about "networking" and its importance in the World of Business, and people do mention it in an academic context, too, but I think that the idea that networking is crucial to one's ability to make a success of oneself in the profession is a dirty little secret. We're all supposed to be brilliant, right? Academia is a meritocracy, right? It's not playing fair to use connections to get ahead, right? I think that is what many would say, as if this profession is somehow above such things. I also think that all of those sorts of responses are multiplied because many academics can be somewhat introverted people and they make a ready alibi for those who feel uncomfortable with networking - they can say that they just choose not to sully themselves by networking, when really the thought of it makes them miserable.

I think it's a mistake to look at networking as some sort of optional activity in this profession. I think it is crucial to be "in the network" instead of on the fringes (at MLA, at other conferences, etc.) in this profession. And the only way that I know how to talk about that is to talk about my own experiences in this regard.

I was lucky. I had an undergraduate thesis adviser who threw me into the network before I even knew what the network was. I was 21, it was my first ever conference (a small one, to which my adviser had encouraged me to send an abstract), and somehow I found myself (because I was following my adviser around like a puppy) inside an "in-crowd." I surely didn't belong in this crowd, but somehow I did become lasting acquaintances with a handful of generous people who also just so happen to be pretty important contacts in this tiny little subfield within my field of specialization. So how did I do it? Again, part of it is luck. I was in the right place (a Holiday Inn bar) at the right time (the last night of the conference). But the other part of it is capitalizing on opportunities, which is not luck but rather something that one has to learn to do and something that one gets better at the more that one does it. I was so naive and wide-eyed at this first conference of mine that when people asked me what I was working on or what I was interested in, I told them. I didn't worry about how I appeared because I felt so out of my league already that I figured I could say anything and it wouldn't matter. Because that was my first experience, and because it worked out so well, I pretty much continued in that fashion, and that is where you see me at the present day. So luck, yes, and my own personality, yes, but also the willingness to use situations for professional gain, which may sound crass, but it's what we're all trying to do at the end of the day, so let's just call it what it is and be done with it.

I don't think that this is the experience for most people who enter graduate school and attend their first conferences. I think what happens to most graduate students is that they hang around with other graduate students, which, to put it bluntly, isn't going to get you anywhere. Now, at my first conference, none of the graduate students would talk to me because I was not yet a grad student myself, and so I ended up talking to all of the "important" people. Once I became a grad student, I did end up in the "grad student group" at a number of conferences, and while I did make some friends out of that experience, I've got to tell you: kvetching with other grad students is not going to get you publications, it's not going to get you a job, it's not going to get you, well, anything other than some pals that you kvetch with for a few days, and you probably won't even keep in touch with the great majority of them afterward. Hanging out exclusively with grad students from your grad program (or grad school friends if you're out)? The dumbest thing that you possibly could do.

Sure, it's more comfortable. It's really anxiety-producing to talk to strangers (yes, even for Dr. Crazy, depending on the situation), but if you don't, then you have no engagement with your profession. It matters if you know somebody who knows somebody else. It matters that you don't waste your time at conferences like they're summer camp or a vacation - they are a professional activity, and what you do at them (and which ones you choose to attend) can make a huge difference in your reputation in your field.

(Aside: I do have friends in my peer group within my field - I'm not totally careerist in developing relationships with people - but I'm trying to drive home the point that as a junior person, one has to be aware that any time one spends with other junior people may mean that you're not having a conversation with a senior person who can help you right now with your career.)

I feel like a pompous ass for writing this post, but the people I cited at the beginning clearly didn't get the memo about this stuff. I'm astonished by the fact that I got the memo, but I think I did because I was always more confident in my ability to chat people up than in my ability to wow strangers with the brilliance of my mind. Also, I'm an academic whore and I have no problem with the idea that the quality of my ideas isn't necessarily the only thing that's going to get me where I want to go in the profession. What that means now is that I'm an officer in one professional society and active in two more. I've organized and/or chaired panels for conferences including MLA. I've been invited to publish things.

Those things all matter in this profession, and they mattered on my CV when it came to the job market this time around. Who knows whether I'll get further in the job search process, but I'll tell you what: I had more interviews, having sent out far fewer applications, than a lot of the people to whom I spoke who finished their Ph.D.s around the same time as me. I've got to think that being Miss Congeniality and networking to my advantage has played some role in that success.

So what did my MLA look like?

Wednesday:

• Arrived in Philadelphia, met a colleague on the shuttle and planned to have lunch on Friday
• Ran into friend from Grad School and hung out with him for about an hour
• Prepped for interviews
• Attended a panel
• Prepped for interviews

Thursday:

• Interviewing
• Blogging panel
• Lunch with stranger, who it turns out submitted an article at a journal whose editor I know, so I took her card so I could pass along a good word
• Went shopping for wine and cheese for one of my societies
• Went to grad school party
• Went to society party #1
• Went to society party #2
• Thought I was going to stay in, but ended up at Blogger Meet-up #1 late-night

Friday:

• Slept in (as I was very hung over and tired)
• Lunch with colleague from Wednesday
• Popped in at the end of a panel to say hello to professor from grad school who is no longer at grad school; also to get directions to society party #3
• Went to society party #3
• Went for a drink with friend from society party #3
• Met up with many bloggers and had dinner

Saturday

• Went to a meeting for MLA allied societies
• Went to blogger panel
• Went for coffee with bloggers
• Went to airport and collapsed from exhaustion

Now, people, that's what a strong networking MLA looks like. It doesn't look like attending a ton of panels (although sometimes attending a panel can be good networking, but my point is that many times it's not and it really depends on the panel), and it doesn't look like yucking it up only with people you knew from grad school. And yes, meeting up with bloggers totally counts as networking. It's not that one needs to be mercenary about making connections, but being alert to the fact that it's a good thing to do never hurt anybody. And you don't need to be a nametag gazer to get this done - because I'm really quite an oblivious person and I never end up meeting people because I've scoped them out and so I fail miserably at the nametag gazing thing - you just need to be active in your specialization, and particularly in the tiny subspecializations within that broader field. If you show up enough, you're bound to get sucked into the network, you know?

You won't, however, get sucked into the network if you don't belong to any societies, if you don't go to any parties, and if you don't talk to random people at lunch or on the airport shuttle or whatever. If you don't hang out alone. That's the way it goes. And being in the network matters, I've got to think, in terms of one's ability to get jobs. Most of us just aren't brilliant enough to manage that on smarts alone.

Again, I apologize for being so absolute and arrogant sounding in this post. I think part of that comes out of frustration. I hate looking at my friends who've been slogging away at this year after year, who've been utterly beaten down by this profession, and feeling like I want to shake them because they're not doing some things that I think might help them. I also hate feeling like my friends resent me because of the successes that I've had - I got a job my first year on the market, ABD, so yes, it can happen - like they think I'm a fraud and have succeeded as I have only because I'm such a social butterfly, rather than realizing that one has nothing to do with the other. I may or may not be a fraud, but the social butterfly stuff helps even those who are not frauds, if that makes sense. I don't know. I just wish that this networking stuff wasn't so mystified, that in smaller professional organizations there was more of an effort to bring junior people and grad students into the network (and there is in some - but notably not in others), and that there was more emphasis on this part of things as part of grad student training. Sure, your "ideas" matter, but there are so many parts of this profession that have nothing to do with the quality of one's ideas.

Ok, I think I've run out of steam. Maybe people can comment about their own experiences with networking and about their experiences with making professional connections? Or about why they opt out of being in the network? I feel like this would be a good discussion to have, and might be of use to grad student readers especially.

"Following Your Bliss"

It's that time of year. The time of year that students - some promising, some less so - start wanting to talk in earnest about going to graduate school. Now, I'd never suggest that a student should make this decision based on the "bliss" that he or she feels in the study of literature. Others would disagree with me on this. But once again I find myself thinking about how I do approach this issue - in part because I did the radical thing of actually suggesting the idea of grad school to a student (something that I normally would never do) and in part because I've heard from a student of mine who began grad school in English this fall. Also, I attended an event that a colleague puts together every fall to talk about going to grad school with majors in our department. So once again I'm thinking about the ethics of encouraging students to pursue graduate degrees in English (given the glutted market, the years lost to graduate education, the havoc that grad school can wreak on one's personal life), and I'm thinking about my own position on such things, and whether I'm really doing it any better than those that I would criticize.

Now, my general position includes the following tenets:

1) I think that professors need to be very careful about suggesting to any student that he or she should consider graduate school. We have a lot of influence, and to make that suggestion to a student who isn't otherwise thinking about it is a very big deal. We've got to take that seriously.
2) If a student is considering graduate school, it is our responsibility to try to educate them about the realities of the profession and graduate education generally - including the negative aspects.
3) If after getting all of the information a student remains interested in pursuing the grad school path, and if we feel that this student has promise, I do think that it is important that we give the student strong support and good advice toward making the best decisions in this process possible.

As a professor at my current institution, I believe that these things take on even greater significance because of the student population that I teach. Many of my students are in the first generation of their families to go to college. If they choose graduate school they will not necessarily have the understanding and support of their families, and they will face a significant learning curve when it comes to being acculturated into academic discourse and culture. My students tend to think that going to grad school is a "safe" choice - one that will guarantee them stable employment. They also tend to think that the higher the degree that one attains the more money that one will make. They also tend to think that grad school will just be an extension of undergrad, and this is somewhat problematic, especially given their undergraduate experience at my current institution.* Part of the reason that I am sensitive to these issues is because when I started on the path toward this profession as an undergraduate, I suffered similar delusions.

I'd also say, though, that I think that it's important that students from this kind of background do have support in entering the academy if they have the ability and want to do so. One reason that I think that this is important is because students need mentors who understand where they're coming from - if all professors come from professor-families, moneyed backgrounds, etc., then undergraduates can have difficulty finding role models for exceeding the expectations of their families and social circles. I also think that it's important to bringing new perspectives to the research that is produced in various fields.**

But. The important thing here is that the student can't come second to a desire to bring a certain kind of diversity to the profession. And it's important that we don't do a bait-and-switch with students - emphasizing all of the positive aspects of the profession and/or graduate study for them to get a rude awakening when it's too late. Now, students are still going to delude themselves, no matter how much information we give them, otherwise nobody would ever go to graduate school. And yet I do think that being honest about the realities of the choices that they are making will help them once the scales fall from their eyes a few years down the road. At least that's what I hope.

So. As I mentioned, I made the radical decision (not without some angst) to present a current student with the idea that he could consider graduate school. This student is currently an English Ed student, but he's not the typical English Ed student. He is the one student in my survey who chose to write on the "literary criticism" topic for the first paper. In class, he's fairly quiet, but every time he comments, he produces insightful and incisive analyses of the texts under discussion. His first paper demonstrated a considerable aptitude for beautiful academic prose (though he's clearly dazzled his professors before me without really revising, and so he does have some work to do with his writing if he does choose to go on). He earned the highest grade I've ever given on a midterm. In fact, it was the midterm that sealed it for me. This is not a student who is just going through the motions. Nor is this a student who appears to be the typical over-achiever who gives the "right" answers but doesn't really care about what answers he's giving and only cares about the grade. No, this is a student who has a spark of something that tells me he'd really shine if he were able to study literature at a more advanced level.

But. I was worried. If I suggest this to this student, who clearly has a plan to teach high school, am I doing harm? What I decided was that I would give it to him straight. I'd tell him that I do think it's an option for him, but also I'd tell him that it's a risk. I'd give it to him straight, and I'd tell him to come and talk to me about his options. Part of the reason that I felt comfortable doing this, honestly, is because he's an English Ed major. I figured that he does have a back-up plan, which is one of the things that I encourage ALL of my students who talk to me about grad school to have. But I still might have done the wrong thing. I don't know.

Anyway, he (shyly) came to talk to me about it yesterday. It's the first real conversation I'd had with him. He's in the first generation of his family to go to college. He's very concerned that his family will not have the resources to help him, and he was most interested at first in just finding out whether it could really be possible for him to even think about doing this thing. He then expressed concern about how his family would take the decision. (I remember this was something that plagued me, too. I was really concerned that my family not think I had "wasted" my education and think of me as a "lifetime student." They thought those things anyway, but I had to come to terms with it before I changed my major to English. I remember a particularly emotional conversation with my mom, and I remember worrying that she'd be disappointed that I wanted to keep going to school.) I talked to him about my own background, and I talked to him about the fact that I did not think anyone should pursue grad school unfunded. I talked to him about the length of time that it would take, and I talked to him about the horrible job market. I directed him to my website, where I have links to things about making the decision to go to grad school. And that's where the conversation ended. So for now, it's up in the air. I wonder what he will do. But I think all in all I'm glad I put the idea in his head. Even if he chooses not to pursue it, I think that it was a nice compliment to pay him, to give him the option. I think that if it were me, I would like that someone had expressed that kind of confidence in me, even if I chose not to pursue the option.

Now today I heard from my Favorite Student Ever, who began a very good MA program this fall. This student has kept in touch since graduating in the Spring, and I have really high hopes for her. That said, it's been interesting seeing her transition into grad school. I don't know a whole lot about what's happening with her, but I do sense that she's going through a bit of culture shock. First, she's young. And she's been thrown right into teaching. (Again, not unlike my own experience.) I heard from her at the beginning of the semester, and she emailed to ask me why people in her teacher-training program "couldn't just spit it out" when they had questions or comments, but rather went on and on using a bunch of jargon. This is something I'd forgotten about: learning the language of performing one's intelligence; demonstrating that one "belongs in the club" by refusing to speak plain English. At other kinds of institutions, students begin to learn this as undergraduates. Not so here. So this has been a challenge for methodical, straight-forward FSE. (Aside: FSE refuses to call me by my first name, even though I tried to explain to her that she's my colleague now :) I wonder if she'll ever do it, though I did tell her that when she gets her Ph.D. if she still persists in calling me Dr. Crazy that I will insist on calling her Dr. FSE.) In her email today, she expressed concern about her comp. class. First of all, she's really been thrown to the dogs. She's got a 7:30 AM class, at least 75% of the students are male, and those students are primarily engineering majors. Oof. They're not coming to class; they're pissed off that she's not using rubrics for papers; basically (though she didn't say this) I sense that they are totally challenging her authority. Nothing prepares you for that. And in some ways it's just something you have to get through. I tried to give her some advice that I thought might help. (Actually, I wondered whether I should reveal my blog to her, as I think she might find it helpful, but I ended up not doing it. Maybe I'll tell her someday? Or just direct her to some other blogs in our little circle?) So it sounds like she's having a bit of a rough entry, but it also sounds like she's doing well. I'm trying to encourage her to go to her first conference this summer. We'll see if she's up for it.

So I don't know. Am I doing the right thing by these students? Should I be more discouraging? More encouraging? It's easy to figure out what to do with students who don't seem like they could make it. What's hardest for me is figuring out what to do with those students who seem like they maybe could.

But in any case, choosing this path is not, as far as I'm concerned, about "following your bliss." It's work. It's hard. It separates you from your origins, and it really can fuck with your sense of yourself. If things go well, yes, you get to pursue ideas that are interesting to you; you get to spend your life doing something that is meaningful to you. That's a pretty big pay-off. But that's if things go well, and we all know that things don't always go well for people who take this path. And so it's hard, as a professor for whom things have gone well, to know how best to help one's students navigate these dangerous waters.






*I do believe that students get a decent education here, but it isn't as rigorous as the education they might receive at other institutions. They don't tend to read as much as students at other institutions; they don't tend to have the experience with research writing or with critical theory. This doesn't mean it's impossible for them to do well in graduate school, but it does mean that it will challenge them in a way that students in other departments may not be as challenged.

** But part of these views may be my own narcissism. I feel like I add something to this profession because of my decidedly outside-the-intelligentsia upbringing, so I'm not sure how much validity my claims here have.

Mentoring

I've been thinking a lot about mentoring lately, in no small part because so many people have been posting about it lately. (I'm sure there are links I'm missing, too, but those are the ones that immediately jump to mind. Edited to add: Here's another link that I think participates in this conversation that seems to be cropping up all around.) Oh, and I also read something about mentoring on the CHE forums in the context of junior faculty needing mentors. (My long-dormant obsession with the forums has been rekindled by the job search. And it's not even that they're that interesting, but still I can't stop myself from reading them. In some cases I'll read the same threads over and over again. It's a sickness.)

But so I want to write about mentoring because I've been thinking so much about it lately.

First, I should say that I have since college most often been in situations where I've had to seek out mentors as opposed to having people volunteer mentorship. Luckily, I did have the good fortune to get unasked for mentorship in how to seek out mentors (if that makes any sense), and so I wasn't just left to flounder not knowing how to go about doing so. But still, my undergraduate and graduate experiences generally included a great deal of benign neglect. I was never really "the chosen student" whom a teacher took under his/her wing without me asking to be taken under. I think that this has a great deal to do with how I view mentorship now that I'm actually in a position to do some mentoring myself.

So what do I think makes a good mentor?

1. Good mentors push you to do things that you believe you're not capable of doing.

My best example of this relates to the encouragement that I got from my undergrad thesis advisor to submit an abstract for a conference - a "real" conference, not a student one. Yes, it was a small conference, but at the same time, it wasn't just "practice" for when I became a scholar if I got accepted. And I did get accepted. And my thesis advisor also attended the conference, and she introduced me to people, and she made my first conference experience one that was about interacting with professionals as a professional. It was not filled with intense anxiety. This experience was terribly important in my development as a scholar and as a professional, in no small part because it gave me the confidence to put myself out there even if I was afraid of rejection. What I learned from that experience was that even if you think you might not be accepted or that you might not be good enough, there is no way to know that unless you try. And often when you try you will be successful.

2. Good mentors guide you, and while they may critique your work, they do not impose certain kinds of authority over you.

The truth is, my greatest mentors have not been my teachers. As a teacher, one must exert certain kinds of authority. A power differential is built into the teacher-student relationship, which in no small part has to do with grading. I'm not saying that teachers can't be good mentors, but I do think that the mentoring relationship can only happen when your mentor relates to you as a kind of "junior peer," if that makes any sense. My undergrad thesis advisor whom I mentioned above? She never taught me in a traditional course setting. I was directed to her when my undergrad advisor (who would have been the logical choice for a faculty member to direct my thesis) denied my request that she be my director. She just handed me the name and contact info, and sent me on my way. And so I was directed to my thesis advisor, who was not a t-t or tenured faculty member in my department but rather in an admin. position, but I think that perhaps she ended up being able to be such a great mentor in part because I went to her as an adult with a request, and she was interested in what I wanted to do, and so she said yes. From the beginning, the power differential that was omnipresent in my relationship with my faculty advisor had nothing to do with my relationship with my thesis advisor. Similarly, the mentors I've acquired since starting on the t-t are my peers. Yes, they have wisdom to offer me, and yes, they have more experience than I have, but when they help me, it's help freely given and has nothing to do with a service obligation or whatever. I think that's key.

3. Good mentors really respond to your ideas and to your work.

This goes for teaching or service or anything in the profession, really, but I'm going to focus on research here. A good mentoring relationship seems to depend on the ability of the mentee to trust the advice of the mentor, and that can only happen if the mentor offers you real critique while at the same time offering positive feedback to your work. Now, my diss advisor wasn't a particularly... attentive kind of guy in many ways. But you know what? I have never had anyone read my work with the kind of focus with which he read it. And he never sugar-coated his criticisms, and that only made me value his praise more. (And the praise was not frequent - he often began our meetings about chapters with the statement, "I'm not going to tell you what's good about this because that won't help you and that will just waste our time." But even with that statement, there was an indication that anything we didn't discuss was pretty fucking good. And when he offered real praise? It was always very specific. I never doubted that he read every word that I submitted to him. Even all of the crappy words in those two chapters that are not in my dissertation.)

4. Good mentors honor their commitments to you.

They meet when they say that they will meet. If they agree to read something for you, they actually read it by an agreed upon date. If they can't do something that they've said that they'll do, they let you know, and they help you to get what you need, either from them at a later time or from someone else. This is another instance where I think mentoring is to some extent distinct from teaching. I know, I know, good teachers should do these things, too. And I think that for the most part, they (we) try. But how many of you have ever taken more than a week to get a set of papers back? Maybe even lied and said you left them at home but that they wer already graded and you're just scatterbrained? How many of you have had to reschedule a meeting with a student at the last minute because something else came up? How many of you have been unable to help a student and didn't direct them to somebody else who could? I think as teachers that we've all done at least one of these things, and while it's not good to make such actions a habit, when you're dealing with 70 or 80 students in a semester, sometimes these things are going to happen. And the bottom line is that because the teacher has the power of the grade, the teacher has the power to do those sorts of things. If that kind of thing comes into a mentoring relationship, however, it entirely undermines it. The mentee can no longer count on the mentor, trust the mentor, and since the mentoring relationship is informal, why should it even continue at that point?

5. Good mentors are genuinely excited when good things happen for you, and they support your endeavors and positively reinforce those endeavors.

This last one may seem obvious, but from what I've heard from so many people, this is something that many people don't experience from senior people involved in their work. Rather, I've heard a lot of stories about how supposed mentors respond to good news with derision or to a new project with disdain. This is so fucked up. I can't think of anything more to say about this one than that.

***

Looking at that list, it becomes clear to me that I've been very lucky to find mentors who embody most, if not all, of these qualities. Looking at myself, I think that I have been a good mentor to some students, though I am not always as good a mentor as I could be to others (but who is?). I suppose my point in writing this post, though, is that I really don't think that those who need mentorship are passive in the mentor-mentee relationship. Yes, good mentoring has certain characteristics. But I also think that it is up to those who need mentorship to seek out the kind of mentoring that they need. The characteristics of what you need in a mentor for the relationship to work may change over time, and those characteristics are not the same for all people. Or we may need different kinds of mentors in different contexts. For example, in terms of my research, I tend to work best with people whom others might find a bit harsh in the way that they respond to my work, but when it comes to mentoring at my job, I would rather have more smiley, positive, happy mentors. And maybe that will change if I get a new job, or as I am in the profession longer. But the point here is that whatever the differences are, all of the people whom I count as mentors respect me and I respect them.

I think that when we try to impose certain edicts about how faculty are supposed to mentor students or how senior faculty are supposed to mentor junior faculty or whatever, that we're kind of missing the point. The thing that has been so valuable to me about the mentoring relationships that I've had is that there weren't any rules. Those who've agreed to mentor me do it because they want to, because they think that I'm worth mentoring. And I have chosen them because I want their input, because I think they have things to say that are worth listening to. I play a role in defining the relationship. I'm not saying that we shouldn't talk about mentoring, or that it's not important to shine a light on bad mentoring practices. But I also think that if we try to regulate it too much, it ultimately infantilizes the mentee and takes away the mentee's power.

Teaching As a Job - What I Wish I'd Learned in Grad School

Well, George just sent out the call for us to dust off our posting-about-teaching fingers, as summer vacation is coming to an end, and the Teaching Carnival schedule for Fall is all lined up, and so I thought, since I'm procrastinating, that I'd do a post related to one of the suggested topics that George mentioned.

George asks:
"What kind of preparation for teaching did you get in grad school? Was it adequate? What should have been done differently? How are you preparing the next generation of grad students for the classroom? How does the way you were taught affect the way you teach?"

These are all interesting questions, and ones that I've thought about a great deal since landing in a tenure-track job at a regional comprehensive university right out of graduate school at a prestigious sort of research university. Well, not the part about "preparing" the next generation of graduate students, as I don't have any to prepare. But the rest of it? Yes. So here it goes.

What kind of preparation for teaching did you get in grad school?
Well, I actually got quite a bit of preparation. First, in my MA program, I took a course (worth actual graduate credit toward the degree and required of all who wanted to teach in the program) that was all about teaching college writing. It was both theoretical and practical; it included doing things like constructing assignment sequences and syllabi as well as reading about theories behind why we teach writing in particular ways. It also required that we tutor in the writing center at the university, and that we "shadow" another instructor for much of the semester, and that instructor (also a grad student who'd been through the course) would allow us to run certain section meetings, would xerox the papers that students submitted so we could practice grading and get feedback on it, etc. This was a really, really excellent experience for me and an excellent introduction to teaching in the composition classroom.

In my PhD program, we were required to take a course (for which we got no credit, and which only lasted like half a semester or something) that was supposed to do the same thing that the course I took in my MA did. It was much more heavily theoretical, and I felt like it wasn't particularly enlightening.

Then, in my PhD program, we also TA'd. This was the only "training" in teaching literature that we received, and experiences varied widely depending upon what professor one TA'd for. In some cases, one was pretty much there to grade and to take attendance and to show movies that were scheduled outside of class time. In other cases, there was more "training" in things like leading discussion, lecturing, developing assignments, etc. It really just depended. Oh, and there was no guarantee that you would actually get the chance to TA in your field of specialization. None of my three TA-ships were in my specialty. Oh, and there was no opportunity for grad students to teach literature classes at my PhD-granting university. And according to our contracts, we weren't to teach outside of the program - or even work outside of the program - so most people did not adjunct elsewhere during the term of their funding (4-5 years).

Was it adequate? What should have been done differently?
Well, see, this is where it gets sticky. Was it adequate? Well, I left graduate school with teaching experience. I wasn't entirely clueless about how to run a classroom. I had a "teaching philosophy." I had a commitment to good teaching and to developing as a teacher. I'm not entirely sure whether one can expect to come out with anything more than that, really.

But. Being a "teacher" at my current institution bears little resemblance to much of what I learned about "teaching" in graduate school. Why?

1. It is a very different thing to teach one or two classes in a semester, with no other obligations, really, other than a couple of classes and/or one's own research, than to teach four classes in a semester, with many other obligations in addition to one's own research (ha!). I did not learn in graduate school how to manage my time as a teacher. I did not learn how to budget my time in order to use it where it would be most effective.
2. The practice of having TA's give one lecture a semester, as if this will "prepare" graduate students for what it is to get up EVERY SINGLE DAY in class, is just silly. And this is what they did in my grad program. I'm not sure what else can be done, really, if one doesn't allow grad students to teach lit classes, and commit to evaluating how they do in those lit classes, but the reality is that I pretty much lecture in each course only one or two days in the course of an entire semester. I don't teach huge classes (because the rooms at my institution are too small, so class sizes are small as well) and lecturing feels ridiculous when you're in a tiny, crummy room with only 25 people.
   
3. No one really taught me in graduate school how to combine my teaching obligations with my research interests. I guess this goes along with the time management thing. This was something I had to figure out how to do once I got here, and luckily I did. If all of one's mentors view research as "their own work" that is entirely distinct from teaching, it gives a person who ends up in a place with a less than fabulous teaching load very little preparation for how to squeeze in one's "own work" without dying.
   
4. I have no idea what my "teaching philosophy" was in my job applications a few years ago (though I will need to dust that document off) but my real life teaching philosophy now (and not what is in The Notebook, thank you very much) is something along the lines of That Which Does Not Kill You Makes You Stronger combined with Sometimes It's Ok to Half-Ass It. In other words, I'm just trying to get by a lot of the time, and I've had to learn how to put things like eating a decent meal and having some down time for myself ahead of any fancy philosophical notions that I had about teaching in grad school. That isn't to say that I don't care about my teaching. I do. But to care about it in the way that I learned to care about it in grad school would pretty much kill me if I tried it now.
5. I don't think I realized how much PR was involved in teaching as a grad student. Now I've got to advertise my courses, send my students subliminal messages so as to get good evaluations, etc. I think that perhaps a bit of training in that area would be a good thing, as it is the reality at many institutions. I realize that's not technically "teaching," but it is related to the teaching part of the job.

How does the way you were taught affect the way you teach?
You may think that the way I was taught doesn't affect the way that I teach, from what I've written above. But I actually see the influence of the teachers I've admired all over my teaching. The difficulty of the texts that I assign, the level of responsibility I expect of my students for their work, the kinds of tests and assignments that I design - all of this goes back to the way that I was taught. And then there is the way that I respond to students who are off the wall and just plain wrong, which apparently I inherited directly from my dissertation director. But you'll notice that these influences are mostly models for teaching - not actual teaching about teaching. And I wonder whether it really can be much different from that. Yes, it's helpful to have someone walk you through your first syllabus, through your first exam that you design. It's helpful to get feedback. But honestly the most feedback I got was in the "shadow-teacher" experience as an MA student. I didn't really learn how to teach from my teachers as a grad student. Oh, sure, I attended some retreat things. Peter Elbow was at one of them. It was awesome, I guess. I suppose that at the end of the day I'd say the biggest problem with the way that graduate schools train English Literature PhDs to teach is that they don't train them to do the jobs that they will be hired to do. They train them to do the work that the PhD-granting institution needs them to do. That's not about training the next generation of professors - that's about training the current generation of exploited and contingent labor.