budding scholar

Looking ahead, the week is full. Work in the morning, snatches of time in the library, visits to Gaudi architecture with my parents, meals at home. Looking back, the weekend was fuller. Walks along harbors, roads, parks and waterfalls; a 90th birthday celebration.

My 700 words a day has been a challenge, made just 3 days of the goal so far. But I think of them as October practice. Now it’s really November, and a Monday, and I’m excited about keeping up the writing this month. I find there is rhythm and flow to writing with a goal of 700 words a day. So my next hour includes a warm cup of Chai tea and writing. And each morning this week will be the same.

Do you ever write with a goal in mind? What kind of goal works for you?

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?

I wish I could go to this conference, in Berkeley next weekend. It’s hosted by UC Berkeley’s Center for Urban Ethnography, an organization I’d like to learn more about and perhaps get involved with. In the future I hope to have my research use more participant observation and ethnographic approaches. Part of me sometimes wishes I’d become an anthropologist! And the conference is focused on children around the world, and peoples’ up-close research on their experiences of adaptation and survival. A very important topic. Anyone planning to go?

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…

An important part of being in academia, starting with graduate school in most places, is seeking out funding for research. Whether you’re looking at social questions like I am, or searching for answers to climate change, all research depends on funding, and whether you get it depends on grant proposals. This involves learning to package your work in different ways, talk about its importance to different people, zoom in or out of the details. I’ve done this successfully once, with the Fulbright, but the Fulbright application process is much different (and arguably easier) than most other application processes, because you’re limited to 2 pages.  I’m currently working on a dissertation fellowship application for the Spencer Foundation, which receives 600 applications a year and awards 20. Very steep odds! But worth a try, I think. Just going through the process has been a learning experience, and helped me refine my project.

Most professional fields require selling yourself, looking for funding or a position, figuring out how to move forward with your work. The most challenging aspects of this for me are:

• Starting the writing early enough, so I can get feedback from many different people on it, and spend a lot of time improving the persuasiveness of my writing.
• Deciding to apply at all, especially with very competitive things.
• Believing in my idea enough, and building an argument that is convincing outside my own head.

What about you? Have you applied for grants or other positions to support your own creative or intellectual work? What has your experience been?

A week ago I met with a professor here who’s helping me with my fieldwork, and we had an in-depth, lively discussion about my project. We spoke in English and Spanish, and debated about which direction my research could take. He really took up my questions, pushed my thinking, gave me new ideas. These notes are from that conversation, he drew and wrote as he talked. The conversation was really valuable; too bad I can’t make sense of the notes or even tell what language they’re in!

Which of the following makes a better title?

Incorporating the Children of Immigrants in School: A Comparative Study of Policy and Social Belonging in Spain

or

Integrating the Children of Immigrants in Spain: A Comparative Study of School Policy and Social Belonging

or

Integrating the Children of Immigrants in School: Policy and Social Belonging in Spain

I think I’ve settled at last, found the fruit of my study. After days of flip-flopping again, soul searching about what I really care about spending the next three years understanding, I’ve made a decision to focus on specific programs that target integration for newcomers to Spanish schools, and drop the citizenship education focus. This is the opposite of where I thought I’d end up, but I think it makes sense. It allows me to study the broad questions that have been driving my work since I started graduate school. And it avoids the problem of veering too far from issues of immigration, cultural integration, and school interactions. As much as the citizenship education part would be interesting, it takes me too far away from the questions I care the most about. Questions like:

• How do educators, integration programs define integration in Catalonia and Madrid?
• What is taught in these programs?
• What interactions are there between teachers of newcomer programs and mainstream classes?
• How about interactions between students in these programs and the rest of the school?

The next steps are to re-write my study design, tweak the theoretical framing, and start making calls for data collection. (That is, if I don’t flip-flop once again. Hmmm, I hope not!)

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?!

Is my study about the implementation of civic education policy, or policy responses to the integration of first and second generation immigrants in school? The project as currently designed has an emphasis on citizenship, and compares immigrant and non-immigrant schools. But this brings into focus issues of implementation of the policy with native-born children, making the project de-emphasize the questions of immigration I care so much about.

What is this project about, and how should I focus it as I move forward? I know I’ll ask myself this question a thousand times over this year (and then a thousand times again as I write the dissertation, and then when I turn it into a book one day…). And as with all writing, indeed, all creative work, the answer will never be the “right” one, or the only one.

As I played with the camera yesterday, sipping my coffee and peoplewatching, I was thinking a lot about focus, and framing. Is this photo more about leaves, or the church? What about if I look at it from another angle? What if the light changes?

I think the questions I ask of my research project are similar. Is this project more about the children of immigrants, or the implementation of (education) policy in general? What about if I think about the future job talks I’ll give, and application of my work? What about if I look at it from the perspective of what is more feasible? Of what I care about most? Of which stories I care more about telling?

In the end, click, click, you take the picture. You make decisions about your project. You move forward. Perhaps later you make a collage, or crop a photo, or file it away and forget about it. Or perhaps within the series there’s a gem, and you show people, and study it, and try and go out and photograph more. And so with research studies like mine. Snap, click, time to take the next step. Move forward. Continue the creative process of finding the story within this study. Focus one way, knowing that I will end up with a collage of interviews and observations called data.

And remembering that, within those, there might be bits and pieces that will soon be forgotten, or a gem of new understandings about my topic. Or something else entirely that no one has imagined yet.