Category: School Page 4 of 10

Three things to remember to make grad school enjoyable*:

1. School is for learning.

Therefore, if I learn something I didn’t know before, I am ahead. I have succeeded. I have fulfilled a goal. This means that my success in grad school is measured based on the difference between the amount I know at the end of grad school and the amount I knew when I started, NOT on how many new insights I came up with. If I were going to be a professor whose job depended on publishing new insights every several months, then I would place more importance on that. But I’m not. So I won’t. If I write a paper that is nothing more than a synthesis of everything I found out about a topic, stated clearly, succinctly, and interestingly, I am going to claim that paper as valid and valuable to me, whether or not it presents grand new ideas.

2. I am not in competition with the other grad students.

My papers don’t have to be better than theirs, I don’t have to come up with more insights than them, I don’t have to say more things in class than them. They may be competing with each other eventually, for jobs and fellowships and I don’t know what all, but I won’t. Even so, I think competing with other people can sometimes be helpful when it pushes us to excel, but there’s also a point where thinking of life as a competition only increases stress, distrust, and enmity. And that’s true whether the competition is real or imagined. In either case, I’m eschewing it, in favor of the next perspective.

3. My scholastic efforts are participatory, not performative.

This is an alternative perspective to the competition one, really, and one I think is healthier. When I do a presentation on William Cowper, it’s not performative. That is, I’m not doing it to perform and “show off” how well I can do presentations. I’m doing it to share what I’ve learned, for the greater knowledge of the whole class. If I write a paper about Langston Hughes, the purpose is not to show what an awesome paper-writer I am, but to provide an opportunity for discussion. In other words, I used to think of paper-writing as a place to show off. And it can be that, but I think it’s better seen as a participatory act meant not as self-aggrandizement, but as a catalyst for conversation and discussion. Performative acts are focused on the performer(s) and separate performer from audience. Participatory acts are focused on the community and blur the distinction between performer and audience. If academia is about increasing knowledge, then perhaps everything it does should be participatory rather than performative.

*these things apply more strongly to people who are not really set on becoming professors at the end of grad school; like, you know, me.

Well, my European Romanticism professor decided to perpetuate my bad study habits by giving me an A- on the paper I turned in last Monday, after writing it on Sunday night. He said overall it was the best group of papers he’s ever graded–no lower than a B+ from anyone in the class, so we all did awesome. Awesome, I tell you. There’s still nothing new in my paper, I don’t think, but apparently my talent for succinctly and clearly explaining things came in handy–I really think that’s where my gift is. Not in coming up with new insights or theories, but in communicating existing theories clearly to a non-specialist audience.

So, the paper is here. How did I do? The prompt was to discuss an aspect of the Romantic aesthetic as it appeared in at least three European countries (i.e., to what extent did the three chosen countries agree in their concept of the aesthetic and to what extent did they differ). I covered the idea of the sublime, using England, Germany, and France. Oh, and we had to do it all in roughly 2000 words; this runs 2100 or so.