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!
…go! It’s April and I’m nearing the end of the Fulbright and this first phase of dissertation data collection in Barcelona. It’s challenged me hugely, forced me to get better at approaching people, imposing gracefully, and asking for things. Just three months ago I had to write down my introduction and build up the nerve to make phone calls in Catalan (which rapidly turned to Spanish). Today, I still had butterflies in my stomach at picking up the phone, but understood every word and was able to make 4 different phone calls in Catalan and set up interviews with people. This is important for understanding people working in education here, and a personal accomplishment to have learned this much Catalan in so little time. Now, the final phase of research begins. Goal: 50+ interviews by the second week of May. I’m optimistic and motivated to work hard these last weeks. The prize is near!
**Credit goes to my husband for these great pictures, taken on a short vacation to Italy last weekend.**
See you soon, I hope to start posting more often again!
The birds swoop over our heads as we walk by, diving towards bread tossed from the small boy’s hand. They fly down and linger a moment, trying to fill their bellies with bits of bread. The bread blankets the beach, and the birds must quickly find as many grains of sand as crumbs of bread because they sail back to the breaking edges of waves and settle down upon the water again. But their bellies call them again, and the instinct to seek food, and once again they burst toward the bread and peck away in the sand.
We walk with shoes off, toes curling around pink, gray and brown rocks that spot the grainy sand. My nose is filled with the smell of fried food, myseriously blanketing the beach though I see no fast food joint in sight. The smell, and the loud roar of traffic in the distance remind us that we are on an urban beach, on the edge of a teaming city.
I hold my breath, stare into the foam, feel the cold Mediterranean water on my toes, and hope to follow the birds this week, bursting forth again and again, pecking in the sand, flying on inertia and instinct. My bread is my research. I am here, in this city, knocking on doors, calling for interviews, looking for people who will talk with me and share their stories. Like the smell of fast food as we walked down the beach, the weight of the project is ever present, nagging at me, sometimes scraping and grinding, sometimes sparkling into inspiration. I wonder what I’ll find in the sand this week.
***
How’s the week looking to you, dear readers? Thank you for your thoughts, reactions, comments. I love hearing what my writing and photos bring to mind for you.
This year in my work is about data collection. Gathering the stories, interviews, statistics, fieldnotes, curriculum that I will analyze for my dissertation. It’s hard to imagine what all of this will look like when finished. The time here in Barcelona has been a very good start on it though, and it’s getting better by the day, as I gain confidence and access to schools. And who knows, maybe between now and May I’ll finish, and I can make new goals for the rest of 2010. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?!
A new year has arrived, one with a blue moon on New Year’s Eve, and family visits that kept me busy and gave me a break from worrying over my project for 10 days. I really needed the break, the complete focus on being an aunt. The fact that you never really disconnect has been one of the most challenging things about doing a Ph.D. for me. I know people doing startups, or writing novels, or becoming artists, or doing other original work probably face this too. Your work is with you all the time, and feels all tied up in who you are, in your identity in the world. How the work is going seems to matter more for for how you feel about yourself than in other jobs where you’re not trying to create something new. The rewards feel few and far between.
It often makes me miss teaching, the satisfaction of knowing you’re helping people learn every day. When I taught I had days where I was exhausted, my home life was a mess, and I didn’t know where I would find the energy to go to work. But then I got there, and the connection with my students was so rewarding that it made the problems pale in importance. I can’t wait to have this connection with students at the college level, in classes on culture and education, immigration, language policy, qualitative methods, and social networks. One of the most rewarding experiences in my life is helping people learn, mentoring them, supporting and encouraging their growth. I just need to get past this milestone/rite of passage of the dissertation!
A post soon about my goals for the new year. I’ve seen others do some last year/this coming year reflecting on their blogs and it’s inspired me. I haven’t made new years’ goals in years, but feel like it would help with the next stage of my study.
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.
The goal was to write 700 words a day this November. The result: an average of 678 per day, with the most being 2120, and several days of 0 (yes I kept track, in a spreadsheet!). On the whole it felt like an attainable goal, and I almost met it. Some days I used the writing time as a way of pushing forward on things like interview guides that had felt tedious and difficult (and thus led to procrastination). Other days it was a way of taking notes and reflecting on experiences, like the trip to meet a group of researchers in Jaén. Many days I wrote about research methodology, a necessary thing to think about right now. This feels like an important step in my career, becoming a regular writer. The goal for December is the same, 700 words a day, with a new focus: work on context/background material for my dissertation.
What are you working on, writing-wise this month? How’s it going?
I’d seen a few yellow-splashed trees around campus and the city, but hadn’t yet seen a deep red fall leaf. And finally, a month into the autumn, I’m feeling fall here in Barcelona. Maybe it’s because along the Mediterranean it comes later. Or maybe because without classes, I didn’t have that feeling of settling into school. But now here I am, sitting at my desk at the university, looking out on pines and spots of yellow-dotted poplars. My project papers are spread around me, and the idea of research design is starting to feel less like something other people do and more like something I might get good at.
I’ve got a long list of things to do (people to contact, websites to read…) in this first week of real fall work on my research project. And I’m going to work on these. But I have one simple goal that is at the top of the list, part of a long-term goal of becoming a writer and researcher in my field: start writing 700 words every day. At first. And then once I settle into that, perhaps a bit more. The goal is to work on making daily writing a routine during the next month. I’ve tried this before, but it’s usually fizzled if I don’t have a deadline. So I’m trying anew, inspired by writer blogs I follow and their efforts to write furiously during the month of November.
What are you working on this Fall? How’s it going?
We went to Barcelona. Found a house. Came back to Toledo. And next week we move. While in Barcelona looking for houses I heard one person talk about schools as being good, with the first reason being there were no immigrants. I had heard of this as a criteria for “good” schools in Spain these days. Though a special report in the Vanguardia newspaper of Barcelona talks about the fact that most Spaniards actually have very little contact with immigrants, many hold strong negative feelings towards them. I wonder how this compares to what we find in other new destinations of immigration, for example the South in the United States, or Italy. Or what differences we might see by class background of the parents. Or how language plays into the issue of judging the quality of schools.
Little interactions like this one make me want to do a larger study of relations between immigrants and natives, and look beyond the school. But to do a good dissertation involves drawing on theory and basing my work in planning that is flexible, but at the same time draws on previous research. So my third goal for the rest of this month is to work on planning, to try and finish reworking my dissertation research plan, while also working on planning each work day to be as focused as possible. Because once I’m in the field I’m going to see a thousand paths and questions like the one above, and doing good work involves having a larger plan I’m following, while also having routines that include planned time for writing up fieldnotes, and synthesis memos.
We arrived in Spain last night, to wide open plains, blue sky stained with spots of clouds, and the quiet of suburban life. We’ll be staying with my in-laws for two weeks while we look for a place to live and though we’ll be working (I plan to work half days most days and a few full days) it feels like a vacation. After months of preparing this trip, we’re finally here. Sitting and listening to birds sing, sprinklers make their rounds, and the breeze moving through the poplar trees next door.
I’d been craving quiet, outdoor space all summer. Wanting a break from city life and most of all city noise. So here we are. And my goal to accompany these two weeks is to sit outside, with this view of brown grass, red buildings, wide open skies, and write each day. In the morning, before the heat of the day. Or at night, when the sweltering heat has passed. This year will be about collecting dissertation data, and writing time will be taken up by memos and fieldnotes most days. But for the next two weeks I’m still in scholarship, still drawing more from the books than the field, still reading more than talking with people, and I want to use the expansive quiet space I have in this house for writing about it. So, a 30 minute walk each day, and an hour of writing.
