Another day, another section of my thesis
Topic: Uni

Oy.  Just sent off a bit of another section of my thesis to my supervisor, despite its half-baked state. just to make sure we've got something to talk about when we meet later this week.  And so that I don't feel too guilty about dropping the thesis for the next few days because I have an essay due on Monday.  I'm not even thinking about the essay due two weeks after that one.  Have I mentioned that I don't like this system of taking classes while attempting a substantial research project?  I don't like having my attention divided like this.  I have enough difficulty prioritizing as it is.  

Some of us were discussing theses before class tonight, and I'm sort of relieved to find out that several other people are feeling like they're in the same situation I'm in.  They've got sections, bits and pieces, and no real idea about how to put them together.  I haven't even drafted a proper chapter yet.  And we're now at 2 months and a bit before they're due.  I'm getting a bit anxious.  

 

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Doodling
Topic: Uni

I'm finding myself deeply unmotivated to write or read at the moment.  I have lots I should be doing, of course - there is, as always, my thesis, and now I have two essays coming up in fairly short order, but I've had a headache for days and think I may be coming down with a cold, and it's a lovely sunny day outside, and my brain is deeply disinterested in focusing on anything academic.  I think I need a program that will allow me to doodle in the margins of the documents I'm working on.  Then I'll at least be looking at something relevant while allowing my brain to check out.  

I went to a brown bag seminar this afternoon, a presentation by two academics working on a project about the culture of memory and how individual memories and public memories interact, specifically with reference to the national stories in countries that have perpetrated severe abuses on a minority population in their borders.  It sounds like a fascinating project, and I was paying attention, but I was also watching my thesis supervisor create an intricate geometric pattern on the graph paper in her notebook.  I once had a graph paper notebook that I used for conferences and large staff meetings for the exact same purpose.  I'm no artist, but it was easy enough to create visually pleasing patterns by following grid lines and filling in squares.  

Watching her work started me thinking about how much I've come to like my supervisor.  I'm still slightly intimidated by her intelligence.  I've been reading more of her work as part of my thesis research, and she has a beautifully clear way of thinking and writing that never fails to impress me.  But she also has a slew of mystery novels and a set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs on a shelf near her desk, and she clearly appreciates that doodling is less a distraction than a necessary brain-clearing exercise.  So though I'm still in awe of the quality of her mind, I don't find her intimidating in the way that I did when we started working together, which is nice.  It takes a bit of the pressure off.

But only a bit.  And I'm meeting with her next week, so I'd best get back to work.  Being scolded for turning up to the meeting empty-handed could result in the sudden return of the intimidation factor.  I'd rather that didn't happen. 

 

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Overdeveloped
Topic: Uni

... women academics seem to have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility in relation to their work, which resonates with the fantasy of the perfect mother ... they [set] out to achieve the impossible in relation to the quantity and quality of their research and their teaching.
- Paula Nicolson, Gender, Power and Organisation: A psychological perspective, p. 83

Way back before the beginning of last semester, when I was just starting to get into my thesis and my reading course, my supervisor lent me her copy of Gender, Power and Organisation.  It wasn't a particularly rich resource for my purposes, but I remember sitting on the tram on the way to uni one summer morning reading it and that sentence hitting me right in the head.  Because while I can't speak for 'women academics', I can speak for myself, and is that ever how I approach my work.

Today, I was anxious all day because I had a meeting with my supervisor, and I was frantically trying to justify the amount of work I'd done for the past two weeks, because I didn't feel like it could've possibly been enough.  I've dreaded nearly every supervisory meeting I've had since February, because I always feel like I'm walking in with nothing to show for the two weeks  between meetings.  I can't ever quite believe it when my supervisor says she thinks things are going well and shaping up nicely.  How can it possibly be?  I'm such a slacker!  I haven't done anywhere near enough work!

And teaching - what with everything I had going on this semester, most of the time it was all I could do to finish the readings before tutorials and listing some questions or issues to highlight.  I always got that much done, but I worried that my students weren't getting the best from me because of my attention being so divided.  I felt like they deserved better.  We got the results of the quality of teaching surveys back recently, and nearly half of my students had positive comments about the tutorials I led, and no one said anything negative.  And my first thought was 'I guess I didn't do that badly after all'.  And my second was 'These poor students must've had some really lousy tutors if they were impressed with me'.

I'm trying not to take this into 'I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me' territory.  But sometimes there is truth in parody.  And there's no point trying to pay attention if you're already setting yourself up not to believe what you're being told. 

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Random recommendation: go have a listen to 'Fidelity'.  

Getting it done
Topic: Uni

I don't expect it to buy me two years, but I did just finish drafting an outline for my thesis.  (Not long now and I'll have to come up with one of these.)  Not a very good outline, but a start, at least.  An accomplishment.  Proof that I have been productively engaged in something over the past few months, which at this point is proof that even I needed.

I've hit that point - an all-too-familiar one from my days of gainful employment - where I had a big project that was going to take awhile and I was enthusiastic at the beginning because I could see how important it was going to be.  Then other things intervened and distracted and played havoc with my plans, and by the time I worked through those things I'd lost sight of not only what I was doing on the original project, but why I was doing it.  My experience is that it's difficult to regain that perspective after I've been derailed.

But I think it may be trickling back, now.  Between the  outline and the combination of embarrassment and envy I felt while talking to one of the PhD students last night about how driven he is by his research, I think I might be starting to get a handle on this project again.    

In record time
Topic: Uni
Marking was a breeze this time. I don't like writing reflective essays and I'm guessing most of my students didn't either - writing an essay that presents both a clear and concise argument and an overview of a subject is really challenging - but they're so much easier to read and mark than research essays. So I'm done, officially. Everything that I absolutely had to do this semester is done. I'm going to enjoy this feeling of relief for at least the rest of the afternoon. I'll worry about the state of my flat and the state of my thesis tomorrow.

Winding up and winding down
Topic: Uni
Classes ended for the semester last week. In my last tutes, I plied my students with large bowls of Tim Tams, talked about American junk food, told them not to get too stressed about their final essays, and thanked them for being so easy to teach.

Wish I could take my own advice regarding essays - I slogged away all weekend to get a draft of my reading course essay done, which my supervisor just reviewed and approved. At about 2:30 this morning it all stopped making sense to me, but apparently I was able to keep the argument going in spite of my own befuddlement. So I get to take tonight off, start back in on that essay tomorrow morning and get it done for Friday. Then it's straight on to the social theory essay, which I fully expect will be a horror show. I don't think I've ever gone in to an essay before with so little idea of what I'm doing. But it'll get done, because it has to.

Then I mark my students' final essays.

Then I take some time to finally clean my flat, which is on the verge of becoming a toxic wasteland, and try to figure out where on earth I am with respect to my thesis.

So if I'm not around for awhile, that's why. Wish me luck!

It's that time of year again
Topic: Uni
Time for the semiannual examination of the far nether regions of my alimentary canal for scholarly ideas, otherwise known as 'drinking too much tea, staying up way too late, and pulling stuff outta my ass'. Exhibit A being this week's projects: the outline for an essay that's due in less than a month, and the presentation I'm supposed to give in class tomorrow. The outline I made up in about 15 minutes and I haven't even finished reading one of the chapters that's supposed to be part of my presentation. And it is now well after 11 p.m.

Damn it. This semester was not supposed to be like this. I had my long-range timeline and my daily schedule all laid out and everything. Granted, I knew better than to expect them to work out perfectly, but I had high hopes that for once in my academic career, I might not end the semester in a frenzy of research and writing.

But you can't really plan for grieving, especially since you don't know what sort of toll it's going to take. I expected the crying fits and general blues and flatness, but I didn't expect to suddenly feel that everything I was doing was meaningless. One of the ways I got through a previous difficult grieving period - the months following my first major breakup and finding out that my grandmother had terminal cancer - was by immersing myself in schoolwork. That avenue was not available to me this time. At least I had tutoring and babysitting - those helped me pull together on a regular basis. But schoolwork? I couldn't have cared less.

So I find myself on familiar terrain: the realm of last-minute panic. Oh well. Been here plenty of times before and I know I'll get through it. I just wish I could pull all-nighters like I used to. The day after wasn't particularly nice at 21, but at 29 it's pretty wretched. So before it gets any later, I'd best get back to work.

Will the marking never end?
Topic: Uni
Bored with my marking yet? You've got nothing on how I feel about it. It's an obsession. Glassy-eyed tutors wander the halls, hunched over stacks of paper, trying to find a free computer at which to type their comments, only stopping to ask each other 'Why can't they spell?' 'Why can't they footnote?' 'Why can't the hypenate?' 'Do they really think I can't use Google and will not find out that they plagiarized from Wikipedia?' 'How many do you have left?' 'How glad will you be when this is all over?' The only more popular topic of conversation is how drunk one plans to get upon the conclusion of the marking season.

I have three to go, not counting a couple late submissions. That should feel like an accomplishment - I'll basically be finished tomorrow. However, the last essay I read I have no idea how to mark. There were no paragraph breaks. I know that the argument is lacking, but I can't figure out how because I can't get past the fact that the lack of paragraph breaks makes the essay very visually uncomfortable to read and difficult to comprehend. IT'S HURTING MY EYES AND MY BRAIN AND I JUST WANT IT TO GO AWAY. Seriously, how does someone get to their third year of undergrad without learning how to put paragraph breaks in an essay? Arrrrrrrrrrrrgh.

siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh
Topic: Uni
As I had anticipated, I am not enjoying marking my students' research essays. Not that they're bad, but I hate the whole concept of grades (possibly because I know my own response to that particular carrot-and-stick system is a bit unbalanced). I'd love to just be able to make lots of comments on their essays and just avoid assigning values to them. And I've got a full day of marking ahead of me tomorrow. Feh. I may need to reward myself with a movie after.

Working from 'home'
Topic: Uni
That would not be me that the title refers to. No, it is far too hot today for me to work from home. One of those days where you wake up in the morning, despite having slept with the fan directly on you and no covers, and you think to yourself, 'Hot'. (Perhaps other people are more articulate in the morning. Myself, I am not.) While those days were common enough not to cause much comment during my East Coast summers, they are not so common here, and that sort of wake-up call heralds a particularly hot day. I packed up and headed to uni to work in the comparative comfort of the department's postgrad computer lab, where the air conditioner, although old and sorely put-upon, does at least provide a grudging draft of cooled air.

And I have not been alone. Others have been in and out over the past few hours, but my constant companion has been a youngish man I don't recall having seen around the department before, who has taken up his station at the computer next to the phone that postgrads are granted access to for in-house and local phone calls. Said gentleman is comfortably ensconced here in his sandals and shorts, with his own personal fax machine hooked up to the phone line. I thought the personal fax was a bit odd, but hey, most of us postgrads are a bit odd in one way or another. So I blithely gave it no further thought until he began making phone calls in which he introduced himself as 'Tom Shortpants, Solicitor'.

Note to self: Self, should you ever find yourself in the position requiring the engagement of a solicitor, pick one who you can confirm works from a fixed location that is not a university computer lab.