budding scholar

A picture from the Golden Gate Bridge Webcam, a few minutes ago. The fog hangs over the headlands. I see it from my window, it never quite burned off today. Craving sunshine and heat, and days without worrying about all these dissertation decisions.

For now, I’ve got mini-vacations. Last night we drove across the bridge with the top down, the towers engulfed in high-flying fog, reflecting the lights of the bridge back at us. The views worth bundling up against the cold. Yesterday spent wandering through towns of Napa Valley in warm, summer weather was deeply satisfying. The French Laundry Garden. Calistoga. Yountville. Even San Rafael. Dinner at Ad Hoc, then fireworks from their outdoor patio. Drive home with the top down and music turned up loud. Best of all, a day with my husband, good friends, beautiful weather, and delicious food.

A new goal is to get out of the city at least once a week, get to sunny places, plan on real breaks from this work. Otherwise, it is all-consuming and feels like it involves most moments of my day. And the fog only makes that feeling press in stronger.

Do you have any mini-vacations planned this summer? How do you balance vacations and academia?

Thursday afternoon in the Mission and the sound of a tow truck bringing a car to the repair shop across the street pounds against my head. Backwards forwards, beep-beep-beep. Not sure when it happened but one day I’d had enough of this neighborhood, this house, and now I can’t wait to move. Quiet. Outdoor space. Sun. Warm summers. These are the things I’m craving today.

And a vacation. A real one, where I don’t think about work for at least a week. Where the enthusiasm for what I’m doing can be rekindled.

Doing a Ph.D. is hard. One of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It’s filled with uncertainty, loneliness, and a whole lot of decisions that I need to make on my own but don’t quite know how to handle. And maybe one of the biggest reasons it’s so hard is the uncertaintly. Half the time it doesn’t even feel worthwhile, it’s hard to see how it is going to help me make a contribution to much of anything.

Noise, noise. Noise outside, noise in my head. Time to seek out quiet and stillness, and take some time off. Good thing we are going for a hike this weekend.

We’ve begun packing up the house for the year in Spain, selling things on Craigslist, giving things away, making lists of new owners for our belongings.

If only preparing my study were as straightforward. Instead I spend day after day mucking around, reading, writing, talking with people, but not feeling like I make real progress.

The main thing keeping me from being excited about the year away at this point is not knowing what my project is going to look like. I work every day, but don’t finish anything. And yet, yesterday as I talked with a former student of my adviser about my dissertation dilemmas, I felt closer.

The challenge is there are so many decisions to make. Which discipline I’m most closely aligned with, since education is multidisciplinary (sociology, some political science, I think)? Which one or two theories to use (assimilation/integration, social networks, boundaries, policy implementation…)? How to sample? Whether to focus more on immigrant students or teachers of immigrants (have decided the students I think)? Two cities or one in Spain (depends on the research questions)? And the list goes on…

Any thoughts?

Found a great new place to write and study, in the main library in San Francisco. Beautiful light, fairly quiet, high above the city. A new favorite. Can see myself spending a lot of time here working on papers this summer.

Working hard to identify that center of gravity of my study. Had a brainwave in the shower yesterday (anyone else typically get ideas in the shower?). But then tried to explain it this morning and it came out all wrong. But I feel closer. A post soon with the new ideas.

One week from orals. Was feeling very ready and calm. But the anxiety has now hit along with the pressure that comes along with setting off to do my research next year. There’s a lot riding on doing well with these milestones. Figuring out theory and research and how my study is going to make a real contribution seems like it’s 5 steps ahead of where I currently am, but yet I’m trying to get a prospectus done today to send out to my committee.

Three deep breaths. Three more. This is just one step. I’ll have so many many more. I’m working hard, every day, and that’s going to get me to the best place I can be for the exam. And it’s really all I can do. Breathe deep and keep a positive attitude. Looking at this ocean photo from Spain a year ago helps. My life might be urban SF Mission, BART, and the Berkeley campus right now, but ocean views and a week-long vacation are just around the corner… so breathe deep and look beyond the current moment of stress…..

Funny how a pep talk to yourself can actually work sometimes. I’m ready to strike out into the day, hit the library, and try my best. It’s not supposed to be easy after all, but I’ve always gotten through these kinds of challenges by sticking with them and giving a good effort. So here goes, another day of my best orals efforts…

If only getting through this week, this month, this semester were as easy as making a quilt. Playing with the design. Deciding on colors and shapes. Cutting the squares. Sewing the pieces together. Instead, the colors of my paper elude me. The shape of my ideas hides just out of reach. When quilting I can work for hours, when writing moments feel hard to sustain sometimes.

After taking a much needed break and doing some yoga, I came across this old quote from a fortune cookie “Use your abilities at this time to stay focused on your goal. You will succeed.” And I know it’s true. For a moment tackling the work again feels as easy as quilting. But then the aching wrists take over again as I sit down at the computer. And the night feels endlessly long. And I stare at the screen feeling the stress build, because really, it’s actually not possible to accomplish all of this in the time I have.

As I think about it I remember that sometimes making quilts can feel kind of endless too, but as I sew square by square and see it starting to come together, it’s a lot easier to focus on the finished goal. And imagining how much my friend (in the case of the picture here) is going to like it helps too. With my work all I have is my own satisfaction at being done, and meeting expectations.

Back to it for now, trying to think of paragraphs as squares, of ideas as colors, hoping to find the inspiration to keep at it.

Most of the weekend spent coding, reading interviews, applying categories, refining them, cutting and pasting text. The messiness of qualitative research. Given how close I am getting to my deadline it’s crazy I’m still working on coding. The hazards of committing to things without being realistic about how long they really take. The nice thing is I can do it for hours on end from couch, with my husband. A pleasure of my work for sure. I might be working all weekend, and up until 4:30 in the morning, but I’ve got a guy who can work with the computer pretty endlessly too (especially with 3 classes this semester!) and that makes for solidarity and even enjoyment. We’re really looking forward to next year, to this coming summer, to some time off.

I’ve got a week to finish papers, and it’s going to be a full one. The first paper’s in great shape, just a few edits and then signed off. The second one still needs too much work. Like writeups for the findings I’m still finding. But it will all get done because it has to. And really, these kinds of projects can be endless anyhow, especially with the amount of data I have to work with (3 years, multiple teacher, coach, district interviews…). So it’s good to have an interim deadline. Hopefully people like the idea/analysis as much as I do and it will grow into a larger paper that could become a publication. Thinking about that kind of makes the madness of the current moment all worth it. That and other great news this week about the fellowship application I submitted last September (I got it!).

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.

Who is going to value my work? Am I crazy to be trying to accomplish so much in so little time? Am I going about this all wrong? Who believes in my ideas? Is this feeling indicative of the lonely road ahead? Am I really cut out for this kind of work?

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?