budding scholar

Perspective, focus, from a favorite photo taken the other day. Waiting to hear this week about that fellowship I applied for last October (they said by end of April). A chai latte from Starbucks on the plaza in the sun (my first time in Barcelona). Wandering through the late spring afternoon, arms linked with my husband, wondering about what comes next for us. Reading the newspaper in Catalan and understanding it. Debating language politics while eating tapas, perched on high stools in a Basque place near our house. Now, dusk falling over the courtyard out our bedroom window, stillness falling across the bed. The muffled voices of neighbors arguing above us. Two weeks left in this apartment, this city, this space of our lives.

I leave for the metro at 7:30am. The day is young, air still cold, the sky just growing light in the distance. I pass a mother carrying loaves of bread, and I see a line has already formed at the bakery. A man talks on his phone, sitting next to a bucket in front of a hotel, hand lightly resting on the window-cleaning brush. The grocery store, pharmacy, bank, and produce stand are all still dark, most not opening until 9 or 10. I stop at a crosswalk and the buzz of motorcycles taking off fills my ears, while I fumble in my pockets for gloves. I hear a train just leaving as I walk down the metro stairs, and the platform is empty of people. No one taking the train this time of day, I think. Then the next train roars up, the doors open, and I have to slide my bag down my arm to fit in the car, my gray wool coat crushing against the blacks and browns and whites of other winter coats.

My days are colored by these pieces of city life. The first thing I see out the window when I wake up are which windows in the loop of apartments outside have light. When we go to sleep late, I notice which windows still have light. There are too many to keep track of which ones have light from day to day, so I invent stories about anyone and everyone. On the weekends, I see people hanging their laundry on drying racks that take up half the balcony, covering them with plastic when the sky threatens rain. The traffic is a distant roar, punctuated by the honk of sirens during rush hour. The elevator takes my attention more when I’m home, and the distant rumble of a train 8 or 9 floors down under the ground, and the hum of the neighbor’s motorized shutter. Quiet, compared with our apartment in San Francisco.

And yet, all I crave today is open space, somewhere else. A different kind of noise. The sound of wind in pines, or rain soaked leaves whipping the windows at night. Birds singing, or the silence of fresh snow. Perhaps the slap of waves on a lake shore, or the roar of a river. After five years and two different cities, I’ve never yearned for trees and water the way I do now.

Yet here I am, in this city, at my desk in a windowless spare room, hearing the elevator gears and clink of a neighbor’s dishes. I sip peppermint tea and turn my thoughts to tomorrow’s school visit and interviews.

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What are the sounds of “here” for you right now? Is this where you want to be?

I sit and work on interview questionnaires. Organizing categories of questions, writing an introduction, translating English to Spanish. I consider different ways of asking people about their work, their ideas about immigrant integration in schools.

And my mind races ahead. This should have been done a month ago. What’s it going to be like to ask real people these questions? What if I can’t find schools to do my research in? What if my project changes? What if my project stays the same? How will I ever publish anything? Who will support my work? And on. And on.

Why is it so difficult to be in the present moment in my work? To have this be all. The act of sitting at my desk, thinking about my research questions, and putting together questionnaires. Thinking about these ideas I’m so interested in. Learning how to do my own study, learning how the day to day of research feels. Why does my mind take me straight over a precipice of worry? Tumble over dreams of future work, far away people, someday family? Rush over stones of expectation and shoulds about how I spend my time?

Is this part of doing creative or original work? Part of using the mind for work? A rite of passage of graduate school? Or just human nature?

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?

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…

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?!

That my efforts this year will not be enough. That this churning attempt to do a project on my own will fail. That this academic track I’m on is not meaningful enough in the real world. That making a contribution to academia and making a contribution to the world are very different things. That the excitement for asking questions and seeking meaning eludes me. That I will not find a story, a study, worthy of a dissertation. That I won’t figure out how to own my work, care about it enough to carry it forward. That I will forever struggle to meet deadlines. That I’m not sure what the questions are I’m studying. That I’ll waste time trying to figure it out.

I feel passionately about making the world a better place for children, youth and families. About intercultural understanding and peace. About the plight of women and girls in Afghanistan and other places where they are similarly oppressed. About understanding peoples’ stories. About education and teaching as something that inspires growth, new ideas, community. And I worry that these things I care about are not central enough to the work I’m doing. That the academics won’t contribute to these things in meaningful ways.

Tomorrow I trust I’ll have insight. Probably feel more convinced about what I’m doing. Perhaps find new inspiration in my project.  But today I worry, and wonder how to bring together these things I care about with this academic path I’m on.

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?

Black lines on swirls of green concrete floor. Traffic, voices echoing up through the windows from the parked cars below, one floor down. Three years of looking at these buildings, of hearing these street sounds. Three years as a student at Berkeley working my way through milestones, books, articles. A transition point now. I defended my dissertation proposal on Thursday last week, and Friday we moved out of our apartment in preparation for the year in Spain. How appropriate that this milestone would happen the day before our last day in this loft, which fit our lives so perfectly until now (mostly because of the proximity to BART and ease of getting to Berkeley).

A month of transition now, before we’re settled in a new place in Barcelona. Inspired by a friend thinking big, I’m going to take this month as an opportunity to try for a little more, take risks myself, think bigger, share more of the process here. For a while I’ve kept another document on my computer, also called “budding scholar”, where I keep track of ups and downs of the Ph.D. process. Whenever I’m stuck in my work, or inspired, or anything in between, I write there. This month I’m going to bring more of that into the blog, risk sharing it with whomever happens upon this space.

I’m starting with that. But I like bigger goals too, being a goal-oriented kind of person. So I’m thinking about what else to try for this August, in this transitional moment.

Any ideas?

My mind drifts this morning, out into yet another gray day outside my window. Yesterday filled with sun and productivity all day. Today worry and uncertainty press in again with the gloom of the fog. I lose myself in the dahlias bringing sunshine to my desk, seeking summer in their golden centers. Remembering gardens of dahlias from years past. Aching for a garden of my own.

Ownership. What do you own? Beyond the hard, soft, old, new material possessions, what do you own in your work? Your career? Ownership is huge in academic work. We are all building on past work, making a unique contribution to a larger world of scholarship. All professional careers have ownership buried within them, choices that add up to a career. Talking with writer friends I find that some of the struggles of ownership and working through my own contribution are similar. All summer I have felt like having the garden and sanctuary of a home with sun and no plans to go anywhere would help with thte more abstract ownership. Dahlias of my own to tenderly weed around and smile upon each day. Yet the world of work would still be out there, and graduate school would still be there waiting to be completed, and the questions of ownership of “my work” would press in just as persistently.

Instead we rent, and cut dahlias grace my desk this morning. My mind skitters from worry to worry, landing upon a hard rock of anxiety about my dissertation project. All my own. What choices should I make? A post soon with the options I’m weighing.

How do you feel about ownership of your work? Your career? Your professional life?