budding scholar

The application’s in! So it’s time to laugh at graduate work a little. Really, doing a Ph.D. is probably something like parenthood. You join this club, and suddenly all these things that used to make no sense feel like second nature. The most important thing? The dissertation. So I got a good laugh at these guys. And since I’ve put off having a family because of my work, I laughed at this comic too.

Now that I’m actually in Spain, starting my research, the whole process is starting to make sense and I feel like what I’m doing is worthwhile more often than not. But really, the amount of self-doubt and wallowing that happens in a Ph.D. program is astounding. Which is why a good laugh can really help things.

Where have you found a good laugh recently? While in Spain I’m missing my old standby of the Daily Show…

An important part of being in academia, starting with graduate school in most places, is seeking out funding for research. Whether you’re looking at social questions like I am, or searching for answers to climate change, all research depends on funding, and whether you get it depends on grant proposals. This involves learning to package your work in different ways, talk about its importance to different people, zoom in or out of the details. I’ve done this successfully once, with the Fulbright, but the Fulbright application process is much different (and arguably easier) than most other application processes, because you’re limited to 2 pages.  I’m currently working on a dissertation fellowship application for the Spencer Foundation, which receives 600 applications a year and awards 20. Very steep odds! But worth a try, I think. Just going through the process has been a learning experience, and helped me refine my project.

Most professional fields require selling yourself, looking for funding or a position, figuring out how to move forward with your work. The most challenging aspects of this for me are:

• Starting the writing early enough, so I can get feedback from many different people on it, and spend a lot of time improving the persuasiveness of my writing.
• Deciding to apply at all, especially with very competitive things.
• Believing in my idea enough, and building an argument that is convincing outside my own head.

What about you? Have you applied for grants or other positions to support your own creative or intellectual work? What has your experience been?

A week ago I met with a professor here who’s helping me with my fieldwork, and we had an in-depth, lively discussion about my project. We spoke in English and Spanish, and debated about which direction my research could take. He really took up my questions, pushed my thinking, gave me new ideas. These notes are from that conversation, he drew and wrote as he talked. The conversation was really valuable; too bad I can’t make sense of the notes or even tell what language they’re in!

Which of the following makes a better title?

Incorporating the Children of Immigrants in School: A Comparative Study of Policy and Social Belonging in Spain

or

Integrating the Children of Immigrants in Spain: A Comparative Study of School Policy and Social Belonging

or

Integrating the Children of Immigrants in School: Policy and Social Belonging in Spain

I think I’ve settled at last, found the fruit of my study. After days of flip-flopping again, soul searching about what I really care about spending the next three years understanding, I’ve made a decision to focus on specific programs that target integration for newcomers to Spanish schools, and drop the citizenship education focus. This is the opposite of where I thought I’d end up, but I think it makes sense. It allows me to study the broad questions that have been driving my work since I started graduate school. And it avoids the problem of veering too far from issues of immigration, cultural integration, and school interactions. As much as the citizenship education part would be interesting, it takes me too far away from the questions I care the most about. Questions like:

• How do educators, integration programs define integration in Catalonia and Madrid?
• What is taught in these programs?
• What interactions are there between teachers of newcomer programs and mainstream classes?
• How about interactions between students in these programs and the rest of the school?

The next steps are to re-write my study design, tweak the theoretical framing, and start making calls for data collection. (That is, if I don’t flip-flop once again. Hmmm, I hope not!)

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’?

After a final trip this weekend into the Castilla La Mancha countryside for another wedding, I’m sitting down to my desk on this Monday knowing that the whirlwind move out of San Francisco/trips/start the Fulbright/get settled in Barcelona is over. Fall is here. My time is my own for a while now. No obligations to any other projects, just my dissertation research, a little bit blurry in my head, waiting to take shape and define the landscape of my year here.

Goals for this first week of full time work on my project in Barcelona:

• Return to daily writing.
• Create a schedule.
• Make my way through my list of contacts.
• Find a language class.
• Background reading.

I am really asking myself this question. I always knew with the wedding trip and move to Barcelona that September was going to be a wash in terms of my project, but really–a full on bleached out starched and put away while I was sleeping wash? It’s now October first, it’s the first time in three weeks I’ve posted here, and I’m feeling like I need to put some serious effort into organizing my time and making myself a plan for the next nine months, beginning with October.

So that’s the plan for the day, organize my life, beginning with October. Luckily I’ve now got a desk to work at in our Barcelona apartment and I feel like I can wrap my head around what I’m doing for the first time in weeks. In fact, sitting at this desk, I feel *ready* to be productive, to write, to delve deeply into my ideas and schoolwork.

How do you recalibrate yourself, sit down and plan out your time, when you manage most of your time on your own? Any tips?

Tomorrow the Fulbright year officially begins, with the orientation in Madrid. After 3 weeks in Toledo, working on finishing projects ranging from editing/commenting on a book and a paper with my adviser, I’m now going to turn to my own work. The dissertation research that brought me here. The group of people I’ll meet through the research. The year of managing my own work, carrying out my own independent research project. I have a plan, but it will surely change. How much can I expect the project to change? Who will help me with the project? How will the second part of the project work out?

I’m filled with anticipation and nervous uncertainty as I look ahead to the year. Worried because the 3 weeks in Toledo haven’t focused enough on my own work. But knowing at the same time that that’s because they needed to focus on other things (family, tying up other loose ends of work, a couple days off here and there). So now, starting tomorrow, my focus is on my project (with a little more vacation in there for two friends’ weddings…).

Goals for the year, as I sit thinking in the slant of late evening sun setting over the Castilian plains:

• Meet and talk with as many people as I can, break through my natural shyness and go deep into getting to know the people in my project.
• Be ambitious with the project, both in terms of methods and in terms of the time I dedicate to it.
• Write as I go, working on fellowship applications for the dissertation year, and synthesizing the findings of my work to improve on what I’m doing throughout the project.
• Learn some academic (written) Spanish, and conversational Catalan.
• Attend some classes, lectures, conferences, talks on immigration and schooling in Spain.

What are your goals for the year? In what ways are you facing unknowns in the months ahead?