budding scholar

Or, the final chapter of this blog.

I decided over the summer to change course and start a new blog that was focused on more than my life as a “budding scholar”. There’s an awkwardness to becoming an academic, to finding your voice and ideas. This blog has been a place to grapple with that awkardness, and then some. I don’t think I’ve found my way out of the moments of discomfort that come along with my work; they still show up. But I decided I wanted to find a blogging voice that included not only who I am as a researcher and writer about education policy and immigration, but also who I am as a writer (hopefully of children’s books one day!), a photographer, a reader, a creative seeker, a cook, a speaker of 3 languages…

Come visit, my new blog is called “daily fieldnotes“.

I’ve been enjoying daily updates from Inside Higher Ed this summer, learning a lot about the ins and outs of a university job. I’ve found the summer writing column especially helpful, and this post about the academic job market (including suggestions of books to read). Check it out if you plan to spend time in any area of higher education!

There’s a prevalent myth in the world of academia that it’s possible to get work, and especially writing, done during the holidays. It feels like this wide open time, full of whole days that can be spent writing. And then the holidays come, and they’re full of family and food and perhaps catching up on email. So in an effort to make my holiday time productive, I’m spending my mornings at the library in Toledo this week. I hope to write up all my fieldnotes, get through email, transcribe two interviews, and plan out writing projects for January. Mixed in with these work things, I hope to start finding some excitement about the holidays themselves, possibly by making Christmas cards.

As an aside, have you seen this preview? With the babies and culture of different places, it’s the perfect movie for a grad student working away on research into cultural integration while dreaming about life with kids.

A bit of a vent here, and a plea for assistance. Any of you out there really excellent at time management? Or even just pretty good? Satisfied? Cause I’m perpetually unhappy with how I manage time, and have for about a year now made efforts to change it. I know that my future job (professor, writer, researcher) will involve managing lots of projects, people and demands, and that I’ve got to get better at managing my time now, while the demands are fewer. But I keep thinking it will happen of its own accord, and getting frustrated because I feel like I ‘should’ be working all the time, and then end up feeling like I haven’t worked enough.

Any tips? SW, JP–I know you’re better at this than I am. Help?!

Is my study about the implementation of civic education policy, or policy responses to the integration of first and second generation immigrants in school? The project as currently designed has an emphasis on citizenship, and compares immigrant and non-immigrant schools. But this brings into focus issues of implementation of the policy with native-born children, making the project de-emphasize the questions of immigration I care so much about.

What is this project about, and how should I focus it as I move forward? I know I’ll ask myself this question a thousand times over this year (and then a thousand times again as I write the dissertation, and then when I turn it into a book one day…). And as with all writing, indeed, all creative work, the answer will never be the “right” one, or the only one.

As I played with the camera yesterday, sipping my coffee and peoplewatching, I was thinking a lot about focus, and framing. Is this photo more about leaves, or the church? What about if I look at it from another angle? What if the light changes?

I think the questions I ask of my research project are similar. Is this project more about the children of immigrants, or the implementation of (education) policy in general? What about if I think about the future job talks I’ll give, and application of my work? What about if I look at it from the perspective of what is more feasible? Of what I care about most? Of which stories I care more about telling?

In the end, click, click, you take the picture. You make decisions about your project. You move forward. Perhaps later you make a collage, or crop a photo, or file it away and forget about it. Or perhaps within the series there’s a gem, and you show people, and study it, and try and go out and photograph more. And so with research studies like mine. Snap, click, time to take the next step. Move forward. Continue the creative process of finding the story within this study. Focus one way, knowing that I will end up with a collage of interviews and observations called data.

And remembering that, within those, there might be bits and pieces that will soon be forgotten, or a gem of new understandings about my topic. Or something else entirely that no one has imagined yet.

At UAB today (the Autonoma University of Barcelona), working on interview guides and thinking about blogging here. Writing in this space has become a way of tracking my progress in a way, of putting out into the world my thoughts about the process of working through the Ph.D. Being in a Ph.D. is such an all-consuming, independent, isolating process that it’s easy to have one’s progress become the whole focus (I know with my school friends that can be a lot of what we talk about!).

Being here, essentially on my own work-wise, owning my own project more completely than I’ve owned any of my work yet, I’m compelled to make the blog into something more as well. Just getting through milestones was such a huge part of the first years at Berkeley. First-year orals, position papers, required courses, and ‘real’ orals. But I’m through them now, and the final, huge, ultimate milestone of the dissertation is different from the others.  It is, in a way, writing a book on a topic of my choosing, grounded in the ideas and knowledge I’ve acquired since starting my program.

I’m working on the research for a book, a scholarly book that will be the first piece of work of my career. It’s going to require marching through milestones of progress, of course, but it’s also going to require so much more. Creativity, in-depth reading, playing with ideas, questions and more questions, talking with a lot of people, delving deeply into my topic until the story emerges. Thus, it’s time to get beyond the more procedural parts of the Ph.D. that have dominated my writing on this blog, and open it up to these other parts of the process. It feels like a risk, of course. To put ideas out there, ideas which feel nascent still, that I know will change. But getting more comfortable testing ideas and putting them out there is an early step in writing this manuscript that will be my entry into scholarship. And what better place to do this then a blog with as modest a readership as this one?

So, beginning today, I’m going to bring more of my ideas, my questions, my ruminations here. I’m going to think of this as a space to not only “track  progress” for myself, but as a place to test out ideas, ask questions, and put myself out there as a ‘sociologist of immigration, education, and policy’.

What are the ways you’d like to grow in your work? How do you struggle with ‘putting yourself out there’?

A blistering afternoon, where a wall of heat hit me as I walked out of the parking garage toward the library. Vast blue skies. Sticky behind my knees and down my back. Luckily it’s Friday, so I found a spot to work in the crowded Alcazar study room. A far cry from Grad Services at Berkeley, with it’s open tables, easy plugs for the computer, and my study buddies. But there’s some charm to being here too, surrounded by Spanish young people preparing for September exams, and it’s quiet, and away from the distractions of my in-laws, so it works.

Am working on editing a book that was a colleague’s dissertation, and it has me thinking a lot about how difficult it is to do good research. My adviser often talks about how challenging it is to connect theory with data, but until I started to try and do it myself, and critique how well others did it, I didn’t see the full picture of what she was saying. Because while any piece of research broadly relates to and touches on a lot of different areas, the possibilities of one study to really show evidence for something are actually quite narrow. So oftentimes books in particular claim to be addressing a broad swath of issues, many of which are unmeasurable by the methods in the study.

The challenge is to balance the philosophical and theoretical questions the study’s topic broadly raises with the conclusions drawn based upon the research itself. Complicated to do well. Even writing this here, I’m thinking to myself–How will I do this?

This is just one challenge of my dissertation, as I work to revise my proposal and begin my study. Critiquing how this professor has done it is relatively easy. Doing it well myself is much more difficult.

What’s your experience balancing these things?

***

And as an aside, if you need a moment to be filled with love for your country (as in the Estados Unidos de America), look through this art project. Or if you’re interested in immigration. Or if you just want to be inspired to make creative and beautiful things.

Keep reminding myself that this is all worth it. That I’ve attained the goal of getting my fellowship, and therefore am one step closer to doing the study I’ve dreamed about doing. The painful learning curve stretching the bounds of my mind and pushing my tolerance for sleeplessness will add up to preparation for doing a better study in Spain. The harder I work now preparing these orals, linking the areas together, writing and drawing connections between ideas and areas of scholarship, the better prepared I’ll be for doing a good quality study.

Funny how we can usually go much further than we think we can. I find I’m ready to give in, throw in the towel for the night, just get some sleep, but then push forward and sometimes even do the best work of the day after midnight. It makes me think of marathon runners, mountain climbers, of young parents, of people fighting illnesses–small and large ways life tests us, and if we can find a way to push past that wave of exhaustion or loss of confidence, the growth comes.

Listening to shouts of the Mission as I write this, Saturday night revelers whose laughs bring to mind lighter, less work-centered times. In a little more than a month it will be time to revel a bit myself. Just need to push a little bit more.

How do you motivate or push yourself when you hit a wall with academic work? How about with other pursuits? What keeps you going?

……….…………

I just got news this morning that I made the first major cut in the selection process for doing a Fulbright in Spain next year! I submitted my application back in September, it went through an on-campus Berkeley review, and then it went to the Fulbright commission in New York. The odds in that round were about 16%; they accepted 27 out of 167 applications last year. I did my best on the application but that’s a lot of competition! So now that I’ve made this first cut my application goes to Spain and the committee there reviews it. According to the program they take 2 of every 3 they receive, so my odds just got much better!

Whether I get it or not, I feel really good at this point. Just making it past this point feels like a huge accomplishment, and doing the application at the beginning of this year helped me immensely in focusing my work this year. Whether I get it or not I’m now planning to do my dissertation research in Spain next year.

On my way back from Spain I went to a conference on the second generation of immigrants in the United States and Europe. It was excellent! I presented the dissertation proposal idea I’ve been working on, and we had a discussion about it. We all read each others’ papers ahead of time and I got a great sense of the European literature in my areas of interest. It was very small so there were a lot of opportunities for interaction and getting to know each other. Everyone was either a student, or recent graduate, or young professor. I had a strong feeling of meeting and getting to know future colleagues, from the U.S. and Spain, as well as France, Belgium, Germany, England, Austria, Turkey, and Switzerland.

There were two themes of the conference: education and the city. As I read peoples’ work and listened to the keynote talks, I got excited about perhaps doing my dissertation as a comparative study between two cities, maybe even San Francisco-Barcelona. Need to talk with professors and other colleagues and get feedback on the idea, as well as other things I’m considering for my study design.