budding scholar

Another gray day, and I hunger for color. Magenta and papaya oranges like these flowers I saw on my walk yesterday. Color flowing like these balls of bouncing blue and red and yellow through the streets of San Francisco. The writing is flowing better, but I still wish for more ideas, for the work to come even a little easier. Even as I know that the real color won’t come until I’m on the ground, in Spain, talking to people and keeping fieldnotes every day. But there’s still this proposal to write, a milestone that our professors have set out for us to make sure we’re ready to make sense of the field once we get there. So I sit here, gray skies over browns and creams of San Francisco buildings, listening to this piano music, writing with the colors I have.

What inspires you in your work? Do you find that the weather affects your feelings about doing the work at hand?

A gentle evening summer breeze comes through the open window as I sit working late in Graduate Student Services, in Berkeley’s Doe Library. It’s re-discovering an old favorite. Finding true quiet that hums with productivity is harder than I’d have expected at Berkeley. The only sounds here are a train in the distance, sometimes the click of another student’s keys. I see people working on literature theses, their tables piled high with books.

Like views and breezes and humming productive silences, I have rediscovered language, nationalism and citizenship this week. The kind of belonging that is about not only passports, but civic duty and common social identity as well. Like a daffodil sprouting from an old bulb in spring, I hit upon a policy to use as an entry point for my study of immigrant integration in Spain, and the other pieces started growing into the beginnings of a real dissertation.

Now I hear a plane. The breeze gets cooler through the window but the late evening sun still comes warmly through the blinds in laticed stripes. I’m thinking about re-reading old writing, pulling and reshaping to fit it to the shape of my dissertation proposal.  I’m thinking about writing new sections. The pieces from orals and years of reading taking a new shape. And for the first time this dissertation proposal feels possible.

In a favorite spot, so that is good. Ready to think about how I’ll plan my summer of writing. Several important projects ahead, including the dissertation proposal, a conference paper, and two ongoing papers I’d like to turn into something more. More than anything, by the end of the summer I’m hoping to have a clearer idea of how to focus my fieldwork, and of what this larger research project is focusing on. Goal for today: work on the proposal, incorporating feedback and making a reading list.

Though nothing spectacular, this writing view has been working for me this week (rainy SF days, Bernal Hill still green in the distance, red brick and the boxes of a 15-foot loft window). Two days of morning writing just the way I like it. Back to using my desk upstairs, it feels just right.

I think I found a writing buddy for the summer. Still looking though so if you’re interested let me know. Maybe one day in the city and one day over in the East Bay. Libraries, coffee shops, I’m open to anywhere. The idea is to just support each other in making writing time happen, working toward writing goals.

Most of my writing next year will be dissertation fellowship applications and a lot of fieldnotes, memos, early dissertation writing. I wonder what my writing view will be in Barcelona? What’s your writing view? Maybe I’ll document here my favorite writing spots.

Today I am trying something new. I’ve been reading a book about writing the dissertation, and one of the things Joan Bolker recommends in establishing a writing routine is doing continuous writing, starting with 10 minutes, every day. So I’m going to try, when I post here, to make it part of my writing for the day, to really focus on living into the writing process through the tidbits I put here.

One thing I’m thinking a lot about this afternoon is how feelings about graduate study, about the person I’m becoming as a result of my work, can be as pressing to attend to as the work itself. Talking with my friends who started the same year I did, I felt for the first time like maybe some of the doubts about advising, and mentorship, that I’ve been having aren’t just my problems. It is really obvious when I put it down in writing, but it helps a lot to not feel alone in the process. Every time we’ve done that, confided in each other about our real feelings about how things are going, it’s felt more surmountable to me. Why do graduate students end up feeling so alone, so isolated in what they’re doing? Is this a rite of passage, a necessary part of the experience? Or is it just bad organizations and lack of mentorship? I didn’t feel it as much when I was at Stanford in the Master’s program, but then that was also a shorter program.

The wild thing too is the feeling of personal and professional uncertainty converging, when relationships start mixing together and it’s hard to know which emotions to pay attention to. My own wry humor thinks–time to bury my head in a book or take a walk in the fresh air when that happens, because I start feeling like I’ve lost all perspective.

Those are my ten minutes for today, a smorgasboard of emotional confusion about who I am in this academic world, how to be good at what I do, how to balance hard conversations with my mom and friend with hard feelings about my work, trying hard to do the right thing in every area in every area of my life. Not amazing writing, but then, a blog, and a writing habit, are about putting it out there, trying to make sense of thoughts and feelings by putting words to a page. At least at first, according to Joan.

Found a great new study spot, in the library up in the Alcazar. A really good place for me to come work when I’m here. It’s funny how so much of the level of work I get done depends on where I set myself up to work. Libraries, offices, and some cafes are the best places for me, and libraries are definitely at the top of the list. The view above is from the library (although unfortunately not from the study room).

Am working on some research for my adviser, reading and writing for my position papers, and reading for the Berlin conference next week. It feels great to be productive!

Working on the last of my class final papers, hopefully ever! Classes will be done next semester. It actually already feels like my work is on its own path regardless of classes.

At the last minute I decided to abandon the empirical paper I was writing for my Immigration Studies class and polish up a proposal I wrote last month that drew heavily on the class. Found my statistics skills weren’t all there yet, and that the dataset had a few major flaws for answering my questions.

So I’m revising this proposal, and am excited to get my professor’s feedback on it. Although I want to keep exploring some more before comitting myself to a dissertation project, I think I have a good idea, and that the proposal has some very good writing in it. I’m excited about improving it.

Failing in the statistical effort (or at least, suffering a setback), despite quite a bit of work, makes me wonder about the process for writing these kind of papers. Do people usually do most of the analysis, then go write up the theory? I feel like I needed to have done more of the analysis before I could really sit down and write the paper, yet the design for the study draws heavily on the literature. Perhaps if the dataset had not had such a paucity of variables for answering my questions it would have worked too.

For the moment, I’m working on the proposal. Have a regular writing schedule set up for this week to keep going on the other project (and a deadline for the statistics project which should help with the statistical analysis piece). I know where I’m trying to get to, just not sure of how yet. The only way to figure it out is to keep working.

I’ve been writing quite a bit, but not here. I even call my journaling about school my budding scholar journal. But there’s a part of me that hasn’t made the leap to being comfortable putting the range of my thoughts out there on a blog. I’d like to start writing here more though, it would be nice to have a network of other “budding scholars”, to read about their process of becoming an academic, to write about my own. To not feel alone when things are challenging. To have a place where my thinking develops.

The truth is writing helps everything for me. Keeping a running journal on my desktop has helped process a lot of big shifts in recent weeks. What would it feel like to have anyone be able to read all those thoughts?

For some reason, as I work to write a 2-page fellowship application (short, right?), I cannot get past the first paragraph. I have 4 pages of text, but it’s now time to condense it into one concise 2-page argument, and I’m stuck stuck stuck. Usually listening to music helps, but not today. Sometimes taking a break and coming back to it does the trick. Hasn’t worked either. What do you do when you’re stuck in your writing at the edit/refine/shape the argument stage?

Am up early writing this morning. It reminds me how much more focused I am about writing early in the morning. Makes me think I should start up my morning writing discipline again. I can accomplish more in 30 minutes or an hour in the morning than 2 hours in the evening sometimes. Especially since there is so much writing to accomplish before the end of the semester… Starting up daily writing will help to kickstart those final papers in the right ways well ahead of time.