budding scholar

How many hours a day do you read? How many hours do you spend on writing? What is an ideal or productive amount of time to spend each day for a 3rd-year graduate student?

It’s easy to forget with this kind of work that you get out what you put in. The work is so isolating at times, just me myself and I reading and writing alone. Yet it’s true, we get out what we put in. Whether in contacts with people, reading, or writing, time invested yields rewards, though they may take a long time to arrive.

My wedding is less than two months away, and more and more it feels like I need to focus on crossing things off that to-do list, but the semester is not yet over and final papers loom large. Can’t help wishing for a normal job where you are forced to go to work in the morning, and leave it all behind at the end of the day. In theory I have more time to work on wedding stuff, but it feels like time stolen from school gets increasingly stressful as the end of the semester nears, yet there are things that need to be done before the semester ends in the middle of May.

It’s stressful just seeing my own writing! How did Sarah do it last year–in our first year no less?

The opportunity to work on research projects during the Ph.D. program is an important way of learning about how research works, how academic research works, etc. It is also a way of learning up close about methods for doing research tasks, like making sense of interviews using codes. Overall, I’ve been very lucky in the work opportunities I’ve had at school while at Berkeley. They have given me research and teaching experience, exposed me to interesting projects, and taught me a lot about managing (and failing to manage) my own time.

What kind of work opportunities have you had in school? Have they been satisfying? Why or why not? How has it been for you to independently manage your time doing research, if you’ve had that?

One of my dream jobs is to work for the Stanford in Madrid program, which is starting up for the first time this year. Coordinate cultural activities, guide undergraduates through language and cross-cultural experiences, and teach. When the announcement went out to one of the Stanford lists earlier this year looking for a director, I thought, “this is my job in 5 years!”, and saved it on my desktop to follow up and see if I could begin contributing in some way now. Haven’t followed up yet, but was excited to see they’re starting it this year, and am already thinking about what connections I might be able to offer them (internships for students? talks at Stanford to promote the program?).

Between the China trip earlier in the summer (interesting posts about the schools I saw there another time!), and taking a vacation in Mexico, the settling-into-home-and-having-more-time part of summer didn’t happen until July. Then a relaxing month, where having *only* a full-time job felt like a vacation. But it also felt like a chance to let the year percolate in my mind, let the new ideas learned settle. Now I am beginning to feel ready to take on my intellectual work wholeheartedly again.

Like plants or trees, this graduate school intellectual growth continues to happen even when unattended. I feel ready to go back to the cultivating, pulling weeds again, grappling with where I want to end up, and weathering the storms of work and school combined.