Summer school and grad cliques

Summer classes are always a little odd. They're lovely because you can eat your lunch outside or even study outside, but then you're studying outside. You also feel incredibly lazy because you're both sick of schoolwork and you want to be out in the sun. Also, if you're in a university town, it will be incredibly, eerily quiet and you will feel a little like you're on a deserted island.
Grad school is as dull as ever. My summer prof also has the habit of saying that he'll finish up in the next five minutes and then going on for another hour - horrible. I don't feel like I'm in school mode any more. I'm not really up for discussions and I'm not sure what to write for my seminar. The benefit of a summer course, though, are that you don't have three other grad courses plus a TA job to do at the exact same time.

I'm tired of grad school. Nothing new there. I'll miss the town and the campus as well as some of the people, but I'm looking forward to getting out of grad school and not having to complete finicky overblown articles for class and research. Academic articles have got to be the most inflated pieces of writing on the planet (and discussions in grad seminar classes seem to be the verbal equivalent). No, I still don't care how many times an author uses a word spelled in a particular way. Yes, your evidence is flimsy. Yes, your writing is pedantic. Ugh. But on to something different . . .



Grad school seems to have cliquey people. Granted, people in my grad school seem to be a lot more respectful and supportive than undergrad students in class, but the moment you get people outside of class . . . well, they're just people. And they talk about other people. And their talk gets back to those people sometimes, because we are a small department/grad class. In some ways the passing around of information is interesting and helpful, and in other ways it's hurtful and somewhat suffocating.

A significant portion of my grad class, for instance, seems to be suffering from problems with depression. Individual people have told me about their difficulties, while the network of talk has told me about others. Depression seems to have been the factor for one person who dropped out, while the departmental atmosphere and depression really seems to have gotten to one of my friends, especially since her closest friends are all MAs who are graduating (hopefully). Many students are insecure, including the ones that seem the most aggressive or talkative - just about everyone to whom I've talked has admitted to insecurity. The knowledge that others are experiencing the same problems is tremendously helpful.

I also wonder just how much the insecurity and depression feeds into the atmosphere of the department and the sense that you can't really break out of the ideas that the others have established about you. There certainly seems to be a difficulty in including others in conversation outside of class time, especially when it comes to people in friendship groups - all well and good in larger social settings, like workplaces with hundreds of people, but particularly brutal when the friendship group includes 95% of the class and everyone in the class knows everyone else, if not always well.

I once read a piece that suggested that people with peer support are less likely to drop out of grad school, and I wonder if that is so precisely because grad school can be cliquey - if you're not in the clique, you can feel incredibly isolated. The other students will discuss you behind your back and some of their discussion will get back to you. You will feel ignored. When general invitations are broadcast (after the first month, that is), you won't actually be included, and if you actually show up, then the point will be driven home to you. Luckily, I haven't had the experience, but I know others that have shown up, have been ignored, and then have been assessed behind their backs (and heard about it). People can be incredibly kind to you - and some of those same people can turn around and gossip about you. It can be a little bit sickening, especially if you do try to interact with others in the program and repeatedly get ignored and then gossiped about.

In some ways I'm lucky. I attend grad school at the same school where I attended undergrad and graduated a year ahead of my friends, meaning that my best friends from undergrad were still around. Maybe this was a disadvantage, since if I had attended more social events at the start of the year I probably would have made more in-department friends - but then, I'm not sure that the other people in the department would have made very good friends. I have a few in-department friends as well who have been absolutely invaluable as a source of support and friendship as well as a way of learning about different cultures. I've had precisely the experiences I've had because I haven't invested in departmental life and as a consequence I know more about the world outside my home country. I've had close, loyal, kind friends who have looked out for me every step of the way and I'm certainly not complaining about it.

I'm also a disgusted by some of the behaviour that I see from other students, professors and the academic bureaucracy. I'd never seen so much inflated rhetoric, pedantic bickering and exclusionary groupings before grad school and academia. There are a lot of rumours and power struggles, even among the students. The professors and the academic system can both be incredibly hypocritical, asserting that it is possible to do x,y, and z when you can't even get past a. Coursework seems to be a kind of initiation ritual. Students routinely turn into nervous wrecks for perfectly legitimate reasons - like having your ability to stay on in grad school dependent on winning a single prestigious scholarship or being unable to complete schoolwork due to personal health problems, injuries or sick family members. Illness has been a factor in dropping out. One of my friends may not complete the program on time thanks to her mother's declining health. Sometimes you can get accommodation, while in other cases - such as being or becoming a parent - you are simply advised to drop out. Several students have either come close to breaking down in tears or actually done it in front of professors because of the intense workload and various personal crises.

Just let me pass this last class so that I can leave this place. Please.

Yes! A Break!

I've actually finished all of my own coursework for this semester, for better or for worse - though the damn school e-mail server went down, so even though I sent the essay several hours before the outage, I still don't know if the prof received it. Oh, well. I will not think about this now, when I can do nothing about it! Instead, I want to say that I appear to have found the rarest of treasures in grad school - two and a half days when there is absolutely nothing that I need to do or even can do for school. As I said, I've finished up the coursework. I've even finished up the marking for my TAship for now, with the next batch of marking coming in on the 27th. The list of textbooks hasn't been posted yet for the summer course.

There is actually no unfinished or I-should-preemptively-get-this-done work to torment me.

Today I . . .

returned library books.

went grocery shopping.

spent the night hanging out with my roommate, listening to music and playing board games.

Hell, I even did the dishes.

I don't even care that I did nothing particularly exciting - having a day off to specifically do nothing exciting feels absolutely amazing.

Amazing!

Plagiarism Rant

Seriously? After you went to the trouble of documenting every single other source that you used, you didn't cite the SparksNotes*? How many times did the prof tell you that you could read SparksNotes, but for the love of [deity] cite them properly? How many times was the message "DO NOT PLAGIARIZE" almost stamped on your forehead by not only this prof, but probably every single other prof that you've had so far - not to mention your high school English teacher?  Why, for the love of all things holy, did you do it??

It's not like I wanted to catch you plagiarizing. I just wanted to get my marking done. And I was actually moving along quite cheerfully, pleased with the quality of this batch of essays, when there it was. The sentences that were CLEARLY not in your voice. Seriously, it would have been more subtle to have smacked me in the side of the head with a shovel. Then I googled the phrase and bam! there it was.

I felt horrible for you. Clearly, you had been rushed and stressed and frantically trying to put together an essay. I sympathized. After all, I do have this shitty Medieval lit paper to somehow put together while still trying to mark not one, but two undergrad assignments.

And then, bam! Another sentence CLEARLY not in your voice -- from the same SparksNotes page. And looking at the page, it was obvious that you had plagiarized not only the sentences, but the ideas. Several of them.

I was pissed.

Do you know how much time I've spent marking assignments this year? How long it takes to figure out how to mark to the prof's standards? How difficult it is to get marking done while trying to juggle your own assignments at the busiest times of the year? Do you realize that to get this marking done, I'm going to have to read two dozen articles and write a coherent sixteen page paper for a class in which the prof did no useful teaching whatsoever in three days?

You plagiarized.

That means that all of those assignments that I marked for you may as well have been chucked in the garbage, because it's entirely possible that you may fail the course. You'll certainly fail this assignment, making it a waste of my time to read it. All of the time and effort that you spent preparing those other, original assignments may well have been undone by a grand total of one and a half sentences.

One and a half sentences! So not worth it!

Maybe I'm pissed. Still, I feel sorry for you, because you won't even know about the process that's already being set in motion until immediately after your final exam, when you come to me or the prof to collect your paper, and one of us will have to say, "I'm sorry, I can't discuss it with you." You'll know that you've been caught plagiarizing and you'll agonize about it because you didn't have time, you had to get it done, you panicked, you hadn't read the book, you were stuck . . . and can I ever sympathize with that! You're not a bad egg. You were stressed.

But I'll walk away from marking and be able to forget the plagiarism. You won't.

I hope all goes well with you. I don't want you to fail any more than you want to fail - but it's entirely out of my hands. I don't have anything against you and I'm not trying to make your life any harder than it is. I can imagine how difficult it could be for you, realizing that a stupid mistake might end your time at this university, dealing with pissed off parents, berating yourself for choosing not to cite.

And it really isn't the end of the world, even if you are harshly penalized. After all, one stupid decision does not ruin your life (unless it's jumping from a skyscraper because someone dared you). In the end, it's a sentence and a half.

You'll find your way.




___________

*(It wasn't actually SparksNotes, but an online, less well-known equivalent . . . yet accessible through Google. Google!)

Just Another Rant . . .

All of these essays are Hail Mary throws. Honestly, they're all such bullshit that I'm not even sure that I'll pass with them. I thought writing the first one made me want to pull my hair out? This one is even worse. It's incredibly derivative and says nothing original whatsoever, and it's going to need a massive overhaul (just like the last one) in order to even become worth handing in. I have no idea how to make these points seem remotely original and I am sick to the teeth of the annoying research that lauds one author half to death and ignores the other. I haven't even figured out a coherent reading of these texts because - to be honest - I don't even like them all that much.

This essay is due on Monday.

Why am I even in grad school? I despise the work, I hate the texts, and I want to set all of my research on fire and roast marshmellows over it. I do not care a whit about the feminism of early modern texts at this point. I just want to have my essays over and done with.

(The Professor) On Not Doing a PhD

Conversations in grad school continue to surprise me - not so much the ones in class, but the ones that occur outside class, after class, leaving class. Yesterday I had one of those conversations with my boss (i.e., the professor). I mentioned that I was feeling stressed about all of the end of term work.

Professor: "The MA year is a bit of a trial by fire, but it's fair . . . it's a fair representation of what working in academia is like."

I wasn't sure whether that was in fact true - after all, profs seem to be doing three jobs at once, from where I stand: research, teaching, service. Maybe four, if you count parenthood. I've got research/classes and a job as a TA. Then again, I'm not particularly active in the department, like other students are, or trying to present papers at conferences. The trial by fire part, though, sums it up. The MA year is when you get thrown into the radically different world of grad school and have to try and figure out everything as you go (at a very fast pace). First semester, I was utterly clueless about marking, seminars, participation and readings. Nobody gives you clear directions in grad school, or at least directions that seem clear. You get your real instructions from talking to other students and pestering the profs for feedback - but first you need to figure that out. Nothing anyone said to me, not even the grad students that I talked with over email, that really prepared me for what being in grad school was actually like. The transition was intense.

The professor continued: "It's a very stressful job. The number of professors that are on antidepressants - or alcohol, at least in Britain -" She shook her head. "And even the professors that don't have those problems . . . I'm not on antidepressants or alcohol, and I've got an ulcer. It's hard. You need to be a fanatic."

She went on to talk about how she loved teaching and those moments when the class just seems to click with the concepts. It actually didn't seem trite coming from her, given the fact that I've been watching her teach for two semesters. You can tell from the way that she teaches that she loves the subject, loves discussion and really loves teaching. She's absolutely brilliant at provoking conversation and debate and at getting students to think about texts in new ways. The woman was up for a teaching award, and in my opinion, she should get it. She can be intense and she expects a lot, but she is possibly the best professor - at least in terms of teaching - that I've ever seen. Her classes seem to speed by. And she is a fanatic - in a good way. Maybe in a bad way, too. I think that's she's working herself to the bone for her classes alone, let alone for her research, book and children. She answers emails at three in the morning. She always seems to be running around. She works even when she's sick and often works through weekends and breaks.

OK, that sounds familiar, given that I've done all of those things myself. Maybe her observation about the MA year wasn't so far off.

"You know I had a student a few years ago. Absolutely brilliant. Just brilliant . . ."

I knew this story. She'd told me the same story three months ago, when I met her to discuss a batch of marking that I'd screwed up on (mainly because I was so tired by that point in the year that I couldn't stand to look at them any longer, to be honest). The brilliant student that decided not to do a PhD because she didn't want to live with the stress that she saw the professor living through. A reality check moment - as if to say, this is what you signed up to do. At least, it felt like a reality check moment.

". . . a bit like you, actually. Getting 90s on papers and exams. She said, 'I've watched you all year, Professor, and I couldn't do what you do. I couldn't live with that. I want time to have a family.' She did an MLIS and now she works over at the library . . ."

And it struck me then that she wasn't giving me one of those "tough" reality checks. Not this time, anyway. This time, I could hear the admiration that she felt for the work of her former student and the affection she felt for the student herself. I heard the respect that she had for the student's choice to leave English literature and the lack of judgement regarding the student's choice not to pursue something that she was obviously good at in order to have time for herself and for a personal life. She wasn't framing all of those obstacles in academia as obstacles that weed out the incapable, leaving the fittest to obtain a PhD. Instead, she was acknowledging that some of the fittest students leave because of the working conditions of a profession that can be both sublime and absolutely hellish, a profession that can be incredibly destructive to mental and physical health because of its demands.

It struck me that, in her own weird way, she was telling me that there was absolutely no shame in wanting to leave and that leaving didn't imply anything negative about me. I'm not sure why she was trying to tell me; it seemed as if in some strange way she was trying to encourage me to get through the work while at the same time acknowledging that the work could be discouraging. She can be a bit of an odd duck, to be honest.

But I appreciated it anyways.

Me: "I kind of figured out that it was stressful. And I'm not doing a PhD . . . it's not for me."

Good luck, Professor. I hope your academic life is a good one, because you deserve it.

Reality Check

It is incredibly easy to get so absorbed in grad school that you forget that there is a world outside it. All of these very annoying but often insignificant or relatively insignificant problems seem to fill your mind, especially if most of your interactions are with other grad students, who are awesome but also need to rant and let off steam about grad school. Yes, conflict is a significant problem, mental illness is a significant problem, and isolation is a significant problem. I don't mean to belittle the unhappiness that grad school can cause, only to acknowledge that when it comes down to it, problems like cliquey behaviour, unfair quizzes and excessive readings, while symptoms of larger problems, are in themselves insignificant. I think perhaps I have had a better grasp on that idea this semester - while I've been bored to tears and annoyed by various grad school occurrences, I haven't reached the point of depression. We'll see how the essay writing goes over the next few weeks, but on the whole, thinking about all of the crappy things about grad school, I also find myself thinking that it would be stupid to get depressed about this crap - to ruminate about it until I'm desperately unhappy, at least, given that I'm not sure that I have total control over getting depressed. Unfair quizzes? Yes, it could screw up my grades and I could lose my scholarship - but really, what happens then? I get to leave the place that has been driving me insane over the past few months. If I pass the quizzes and the course, then I'm that much closer to getting to leave this place with a degree. Either way I get to leave. I win.

I usually get annoyed with people who want to tell me to have perspective, mainly because they've tended to do it when I'm in the middle of a depressive episode and am trying to have perspective, only to have it beaten down by patterns of destructive thought and physical symptoms. Only after not being depressed do you realize just how difficult it is to keep perspective while depressed. I always knew that there were people who had it worse than me, who had no place to live or no food to eat or no access to education. I would remind myself about those things - and then I would hate myself because no matter how many times I reminded myself, I would still be stuck in depression. So here's to the first reality check - you can't criticize someone who's depressed for not having perspective. Certainly when you're depressed you do need perspective. Unfortunately, that perspective will not come from receiving criticism; in fact, criticism actually makes it less likely for a depressed person to gain perspective.

On the other hand, I'm not currently depressed, and I have had one of those lovely reality checks that just make all of these grad school problems seem completely stupid and not worth agonizing about. It turns out that my grandmother's health has taken a turn for the worse in the four months (!) since I last saw her and in the two months since I last spoke to her. She was a bit confused the last time that we were talking; she was saying that she had heard a train wreck the night before, but no train wreck had occurred in her area. In the months since then, she seems to have finally had a doctor's appointment, and my aunt received the doctor's report. In short, my grandmother has dementia, congestive heart failure and kidney failure. She is definitely much more confused. Previously, she had seemed to dream that one of us was visiting her; apparently one of her frequent dreams/hallucinations featured me sitting in the armchair. Now she's eating dinner even though my aunt tells her they're going out for dinner, she's accusing people of taking jewellry, and she also was telling my aunt that my grandfather (who has been dead for over a year) was cheating on her with his ex-wife, and his ex-wife had left some sexy underwear in her drawer. Even more bizarrely, she produced a pair of sexy underwear as proof - how on earth did she end up with it? She has also changed her will for no apparent reason and left money to my fairly useless uncle (at least when it comes to actually helping my grandmother) and  made my overworked father sole executor, pissing off my aunt, who has also been working her ass off to help my grandmother. Her behaviour is making less sense than it did even a few months ago. She's also lost a significant amount of weight, apparently. Basically, my aunt thinks that my grandmother's mental state is deteriorating rapidly and doesn't know how much longer she will be able to recognize reality.

That's what is absolutely agonizing - the fact that I've spent the past few months in grad school, sucked into its tiny little world and hectic schedule, while my grandmother's health has been deteriorating. It isn't as though I didn't know that her mental capacity was declining, but it's shocking just how quickly it seems to be happening. Instead of agonizing over essays like a good little grad student, I'm worried about my grandmother, and I'm worried that by the next time that I get to see her - especially if that next time is after all the grad classes have ended in July - she won't recognize me. I can't wait that long to visit her, but the first reasonable time is still next month. I don't want to sacrifice the remaining time in which she can still recognize others to grad school. I just won't do it. Maybe that's the upshot if I end up failing my courses from an inability to care - I get to go home and see my grandmother.

There has to be an endpoint, a point beyond which you simply will not sacrifice any more for a grad degree. That's the second reality check.

This is my endpoint.

On Just Not Caring Anymore

My reason for not posting for a month? It's not because I have nothing to say about grad school, because I've become its biggest fan or because I haven't been pissed off by it. The reason is - I find myself just not caring anymore. I'm apathetic about all of my classes. I'm tired of discussing esoteric ideas, theoretical articles and utterly obscure authors. I'm tired of the theory + book essay structure, the quizzes on obscure languages that no longer have any practical value, the endless weekly responses that require me to say something marginally useful about a text that I really don't have much interest in discussing. I've stopped trying to participate because I really can't even muster up enough enthusiasm to meet the challenge (that I've already proved that I can meet anyways). Really, I'm just trying to get through the work so I can get the degree for which I've gone through so much misery already. Basically, I want to have something to show for the work that I've done.

It's odd because I was in such agony over classes last semester - I was incredibly insecure and possibly having an identity crisis. After all, if you love books and enjoy learning about them, it's incredibly unsettling when you start hating both books and school with a passion. This semester I came in knowing that I was capable of doing the work, able to participate, prepared for the idea of presentations, and committed to actually having a bit of a social life. And the beginning of the semester was actually quite stellar. As usual, energy levels went down mid-semester and I've just been trudging along. What feels odd is the fact that I can actually express dislike of grad school without feeling incredibly guilty.

Things I've actually been able to admit this semester:

1. Classes can be (and often are) incredibly, mind-numbingly boring. Sometimes I can barely stay awake. Particularly, I hate my class in Middle English. It's boring, the lectures are useless, and the quizzes are diabolical. It's also far too early in the morning.

2. I hate readings. Not all readings, to be honest, but I hate having to read books without, well, reading them. The objective is to read them as quickly as possible while gleaning enough detail to make a minimal contribution in class. Reading is a means to an end while doing readings, and I miss regular old reading.

3. Class participation is incredibly cookie-cutter. Is statement A political, even though it doesn't seem political? Religion is politically radical. Gender is subordinate to class. Can we trust what author B is saying? Again and again and again and again . . . and again . . .

4. This program is cliquey. Yes, civility reigns in class. Yes, everyone was incredibly supportive during first semester. Basically, though, if you don't attend certain social events, you're out. If you are a mature student, you are out. If you are an international student, you are out. If you can't stand the program, you are out. There's an acceptable level of program weariness and skepticism, and if you exceed it, you are out. At this point I'm finally perceiving the cliquey atmosphere that the international students were telling me about earlier in the year.

5. I hate this place.

I came home last week after a particularly dull and prolonged stretch of classes, tired and mildly ill (it was that kind of week). The lecture had been useless, the discussion repetitive, the readings dull and the people cliquey. I put down my bag and shed my jacket, then just stood in the middle of the room for a moment, silent. I hate this place. None of the excuses, the platitudes, the encouragements or the self-castigation came to mind. I just stood there, hating grad school. Finally it struck me as odd, just standing there hating grad school, so I decided to say it aloud: "I hate this place."

It felt good. It felt so good, I actually started laughing: "I hate this place!"

I do. I hate this place. I may love the campus, the town, the people that I am friends with, my TA job and my independence, but I hate grad school. The classes, the readings, the time-consuming schedule, the discussions, the cliques, the lectures. I'm looking forward to graduating - if I can muster enough endurance to pass - and getting the hell away from grad school in Literature. There's something liberating about realizing that you don't care about something anymore and actually admitting it to yourself. Over the course of the past few months I've been untangling my identity from perfectionism, appearing intelligent, doing well in school and never making mistakes. Even though I've always known that doing well or poorly in school doesn't necessarily correspond to intelligence, I've come to know that emotionally as well. I've grown to value the practical, the process of learning something new, and the ability to make mistakes - and come back from them. I know now that I want so much more from life and that my goals aren't compatible with a life in academia. I'm OK with going into a field completely different from the field that I trained in and I'm OK with retraining in something more practical, and I won't let anyone shame me for making that choice. Grad school is not for me. A PhD is not for me. And I'm OK with that.