The Academy’s Bench Warmer

I’ve mentioned before that I’m becoming obsessed with figuring out how to write.  There’s a ton of material on “how to write” (oh, the irony of so much to read when you’re trying to write), and I’ve recently come across a series of articles by Peg Boyle Single on Inside Higher Ed.  She’s in the middle of her series, but here’s what I’ve culled so far:

• If full-time graduate student, regular writing routine 5-6 days/week; if working full-time, 4 days/week.  That means weekend work.
• At least 45-minutes to keep momentum going and minimize warm-up time for weekend writing sessions.
• Start with 20-minute sessions, then increase by 20-minute sessions up to no more than 4 hours of focused writing/day.
• Why it’s important: “something happens when you engage in a regular writing routine — more than linearly building skills and investing time in writing. Along the way, you develop habits that allow you to see patterns in your writing, patterns where you focus on the meaning and the intent rather than on word recall and word order.”
• Write while doing research–don’t compartmentalize.
• During revision, focus on “global problems” re: meaning and intent rather than “local problems” re: sentence structure.
• Stuck on a word?  Just stop.  With pen, answer “What am I trying to say here?” focusing on meaning.  Type answer into document and move on.
• Turn off your internal critic.
• Stop and prepare for next session.  Leave notes for yourself on where you’re going.

Outside of that, some of my tactics:

• Use a full-screen word processor like WriteRoom.  No clocks, widgets, etc.–just you and the text.
• Don’t stop at the end of a section; stop in the middle of something.  That will get you going the next day.

My spouse and I are staring down the barrel of an ugly budget situation.  I’m teaching now, but come 2010, I got nothin’, and that’s putting us through a bit of stress.   There’s about a $500/month gap between our current expenses and our 2010 monthly income, and I’m entirely sure how we’re going to close that gap.  I’m not freaking out…yet.

This is part of being a graduate student, of course.  I remember a former adviser warning me that  graduate school is an exercise in well-read pauperism, or something to that effect.  It hasn’t been that bad for me, mostly because my spouse has been pulling the load.  But I’ve also had pretty steady work as a TA and now as an adjunct, so I’ve been chipping in to the family budget.  That stops in January.  Originally, the idea was that we would save up while I did the adjunct thing, and then I’d stop teaching and dissertate full-time.  That didn’t go quite according to plan, so now I find myself in a position very similar to that of other graduate students, I imagine.  I’m firing away fellowship applications, hoping that they come in so that I can pay for research and life expenses.  I’m hoping that  promised summer and fall teaching jobs come together, so we’ll have that income.  And I’m toying around with getting a proper job, at least enough to cover the expense/income gap.

For the next couple of years, this will probably be my life.  There will be times when the cash is flush (while I’m teaching or when a fellowship comes in), and there will be times when we’re leaning pretty hard on my spouse’s salary.  It’s not a condition unique to graduate students–migrant workers, seasonal labor, or start-up/slow-down factory workers all have to deal with this shit.  And hell, that’s real work, so I really shouldn’t be complaining.  I just wish I had learned this particular lesson earlier.

I’ve been doing my level best* to confine my teaching–including prep work, etc.–to Tuesdays and Thursdays, leaving M/W/F for dissertation.  But I keep falling behind, and this week I had to stay up late on Monday and get up early on Tuesday to grade and prep lectures.  Predictably, classes yesterday went poorly.  Fine; we’re allowed bad days, I say.  I’m more concerned that I was a truly grumpy and unpleasant bastard from Monday night through Tuesday.  The students, fortunately, didn’t bear the brunt of it.  My spouse, unfortunately, did.  Turns out I’ve developed an impossible need for absolute silence when I work, and it becomes even more exacerbated when I’m under the gun.  My spouse having the audacity to breathe or offer me a glass of water–well, that was simply unacceptable, and I delivered a few sharp and extremely ill-advised remarks.  Ugh.  Apologies galore, and my spouse forgave and understood, proving once again that I am the junior partner in the relationship.

Lessons learned?  Get my shit done during the day, especially if it’s due tomorrow.  If I’m going to work in the evening, choose stuff that’s not time-sensitive–reading a book for my dissertation is fine, but grading papers that need to be returned tomorrow is not.  And if that means that I need to do teaching prep during part of a dissertation day, so be it.

* I love that phrase.  It ranks right up there with “I don’t give a flying fuck.”  Which, of course, I shouldn’t say.  Dirty, dirty words.

The brilliant, insightful, and eminently likable kungfuramone is on the job market, and it’s freaking him out a little bit.  To which I have three thoughts:

1) Don’t Panic, because there’s nothing to be done about the history job market.  It probably sucks.  It’s always sucked.  The only thing you can do is work your ass off–write a good dissertation, do some teaching, maybe get an article published–and cross your fingers.  If you’ve got connections or favors, call them in.  But try not think about the state of the job market; doing so only wastes time that you might spend getting something else done.

2) Then again, if KFR is worried, what hope is there for me?  KFR is fucking brilliant and really nice.  If KFR can’t get a job, that either (a) proves that it’s all just a crap shot or (b) bodes ill for the less skilled, like me.  Which brings me to…

3) Back-up plans.  In this area, I think people who have worked outside the academy have an advantage: we know that regular work isn’t the end of the world.  Serve coffee?  Okay.  Computer support?  I guess so.  Sales?  I’d rather not, but it’s a job.  I’ve done shitty work in the past, and I’ll do it again if I have to.  So will KFR; that kid hasn’t been locked in the tower all his life.  But the Straight-Throughs (k-12 -> undergrad -> grad) seem unable to conceptualize doing regular work.  Maybe that’s why I notice younger grad students clutching their pearls more than older grad students.  Except for occasional lapses like KFR’s.

And mine, right now.

Yesterday, my adviser called me and told me to do two things.  First: don’t cock up the conference paper I’ll be giving in March at the American Society for Environmental History; apparently, my panel’s chair/commenter does not tolerate shit work.  Okay, my adviser didn’t say that exactly, but that’s the gist of it.  Second: make a dissertation schedule and work diary.  This is fantastic for at least three reasons:

1) My adviser seems to have a pretty good feel for what I need in the way of direction.  Just the other day I was musing about how to proceed as ABD, and then BAM!, a phone call telling me what to do.  I suppose there’s an off-chance that my adviser reads this blog, but I’d rather think that my adviser (a) knows me well enough to give me a push when one is needed and (b) has seen enough ABDs treading water to know that an adviser’s intervention can be very important at this stage.  In short: my adviser’s advising, which is excellent.

2) Turns out that maybe I do matter to my adviser.  Nice to get the attention.

3) I get to make lists and schedules and calendars!  I have a perverse affection for to-do lists and the like, and my adviser has basically given me license to schedule to my heart’s content.  In addition to creating a calendar for finishing the dissertation and making a schedule that builds in dissertation time every day, my adviser also wants me to write a work diary, to keep track of what I do (and don’t accomplish) each day.  At first I thought to put that on this here blog, but (a) how mind-numbingly boring would that be! and (b) I’ve come to see this blog serving a different function for my academic development, extra-dissertation-wise.  Plus, it means I get to buy a cool notebook.  Bonus.

Sorry for the long absence.  As previously noted, I passed my qualifying exams, thereby moving past the stage of general knowledge and into the rarified air of shit-nobody-but-me-cares-about.  More in a future post about my dissertation topic (I’m taking ideas…), but for now, quick reflections on the qualifying exam process:

• Though I pumped out 10 pages in a mock exam, I was only able to generate 5 pages for the real deal.  I still don’t know why, exactly.  It wasn’t the questions–they were pretty much what I expected.  Nerves, maybe?  The flourescent lights in the exam room?  Whatever it was, I just about threw my computer across the room when I got done.
• Yes, I got to use my own computer.  What the hell is that about?  Shouldn’t they have given me a sterilized, non-networked, WordPerfect 5.1-only computer to do this thing on?  Instead, I had access to all of my notes plus the Internet.  What a tease.  Naturally, I was scared to death to use those resources (cheating on qualifying exams goes under the “really bad idea” category).  But seriously, what torture.
• The oral component was kind of fun.  I say “kind-of” because there’s still the pressure of having to perform for a highly educated audience, including my adviser and his colleagues, so I was trying to both impress my adviser and not embarrass him in front of the rest of the committee.   And I muffed that pretty good: apparently I made a ridiculous error regarding the Navigation Acts of 1651.  But I still don’t know what that mistake was.  Nor, if I may be so bold to say, do I give a rat’s fart.
• Final word on qualifying exams: All you have to do is pass.  In fact, that’s as much as you can do–nobody really impresses their exam committee.  Because, hey, these people have been doing this for years.  They know this stuff backwards and forwards in a way that a grad student just can’t at this early stage in her career.  So sit back and try not to fuck it up too bad.

Today, I gave a truly great lecture on the first half of the Civil War.  At least, I thought it was pretty great.  But judging from the students’ faces (oh,  how I wish I could have a camera catching each look of confusion!), the lecture wasn’t anything special.  Same sighs of boredom, same crossed-arms-instead-of-note-taking (what the hell is that about?  Do you know this already?  Am I boring you?  Then get the fuck out!), same packing up early (seriously: there’s nothing that pisses me off more).  Grr.

But the real conundrum is this: I really enjoyed prepping the lecture.  I made a potentially fateful decision: I put lecture prep before “my work” (reading for prelims, finishing minor field, etc.).  Usually, I try to spend my morning hours working on PhD stuff, then save class prep for the evening, when my brain is admittedly a little fuzzier and when I’m more likely to phone it in.  But not this time.  I had just read McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom and decided that I wanted to do that.  So I threw myself into the lecture, spending at least 6 hours on the damn thing.  And I thought it was cracking good: battle stories, broad historical themes, portraits of leaders, the full meal deal.

And what’s the payoff?  Glass eyes and expressionless faces.  I’m not sure what I was expecting: applause?  Students literally on the edge of their seats?  Stupid.  Of course, I now know way more about the Civil War than before I wrote the lecture, and that’s not nothing.  But it’s an important lesson, I suppose: students in a lecture course might not be the best source for gratification for a scholar’s hard work.

I’ve done it, finally: I’ve joined Facebook.  So friend me or whatever it is (shouldn’t it be “befriend”?  Perhaps not, since we’re already, presumably, “friends”).  Anyway, I took the plunge for two reasons:

1) I had three “friend requests” sitting in my e-mail in-box, and I’ll do just about anything to clean out my inbox.  Go ahead, blackmail me.

2) A friend (and brilliant historian) suggested on his blog that Facebook was a good academic networking tool.

Okay, I’ll bite: how is Facebook good for academic network building, exactly?  Right now, I’m just trying to avoid friend requests from high school classmates and avoid embarrassing photos.  Am I supposed to be posting my latest book reviews?  Or should I try to “friend” hot-shot academics?  “Dear Professor Wilentz, will you be my friend?”  (He’d probably decline the offer).

Bring me into the early 21st century, people.

Over at PhDinHistory, Sterling recently put up a post about the trials and tribulations of getting an assistant professor gig.  It’s a great post with lots of wonderful graphs and charts; I suggest you read it.  Sterling concludes with some advice for grad students, including this tip:

The majority of newly-minted history PhDs need to have back-up plans for the first half decade or so after graduation. Nearly half of the assistant professors who were hired between 1999 and 2003 had earned their PhD in history five to nine years previous.

He’s right, of course, and I’ve heard this advice before.  Unfortunately, I’m not exactly sure what my back-up plan should be.  The funny thing–funny-depressing, not funny-haha–is that grad school doesn’t really give you the chance to come up with a back-up plan.  If you stick to the 4-6 year PhD plan, there’s no time to pick up another skill or gain some experience in a different job/field–you’ve got to spend your every waking hour reading, writing, and teaching.  At least that’s how it works for me.

Fortunately, I’m blessed to have a wonderful, generous, patient, and extremely talented spouse whose income should be able to support us if necessary. But I’m not sure what my comrades in grad school will do should they not find a job when they get done.  Or, for that matter, what I’ll do while my spouse is supporting my lazy-ass.  I suppose I could get a job in computers; I used to do IT support.  They still use DOS, righ?

I got my ass handed to me in seminar yesterday.  Just a regular trouncing.  I said one thing, then contradicted myself 30 minutes later, and the prof called me on it.  Damn, that hurt…especially because I didn’t even mean to contradict myself.  It was an honest-to-God I-think-I-get-it-oh-wait-what-the-hell-just-happened moment.  And for the rest of the day, I–once again–questioned whether I have any business in this business.

But this time I had to turn around and run two sections.  I had to shift from I’m-an-idiot to I-know-what-I’m-talking about mode within hours.  And it was rough; those were probably some of the worst sections I’ve ever led.  For whatever reason, the seminar ass-handing left me in doubt not only of my ability as an intellectual, but also as a teacher (which, of course, are not always one and the same).  This isn’t to say that I usually give off the impression that I’m an expert source of wisdom in seminar; indeed, I usually start off the term by explaining that I have as much to learn as the students do.  But there is a certain degree of confidence, of I-don’t-know-the-answer-but-I-do-know-we-can-find-out, that is necessary to running a section well.  Otherwise, the students will (a) run all over you and (b) give up believing, if they ever did, that the section is worth their time.  And though I didn’t get run over today–I’m something of a hard-ass–I certainly felt like I wasted their time.  And that stinks.

I wonder if this isn’t something that grad student development could take into consideration: the constant oscillation between knowing-that-you-don’t-know and having enough confidence to proceed.  Surely professors must deal with this; it might be nice to hear how they handle it.  But the more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that professors are, like most everyone, extremely insecure and quite unwilling to show a chink in their armor.

Also: sorry about the use of these-sorts-of-hyphen-connected-phrases.  I’ll stop doing that.