Shifting Gears on this Blog
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’?
October 8th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
I would like to be more confident in the way I make claims about findings from existing research. I’ve become much more open to sharing my written work but still struggle to completely express my ideas orally (hence I’ve got a few fears about the qualifying exam!). I also feel that I still have ideas/insights gained from my experiences as a practitioner that–unfortunately– I have not yet tapped into as a scholar/researcher.