budding scholar

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.

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’?

After a final trip this weekend into the Castilla La Mancha countryside for another wedding, I’m sitting down to my desk on this Monday knowing that the whirlwind move out of San Francisco/trips/start the Fulbright/get settled in Barcelona is over. Fall is here. My time is my own for a while now. No obligations to any other projects, just my dissertation research, a little bit blurry in my head, waiting to take shape and define the landscape of my year here.

Goals for this first week of full time work on my project in Barcelona:

• Return to daily writing.
• Create a schedule.
• Make my way through my list of contacts.
• Find a language class.
• Background reading.

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?

Tomorrow the Fulbright year officially begins, with the orientation in Madrid. After 3 weeks in Toledo, working on finishing projects ranging from editing/commenting on a book and a paper with my adviser, I’m now going to turn to my own work. The dissertation research that brought me here. The group of people I’ll meet through the research. The year of managing my own work, carrying out my own independent research project. I have a plan, but it will surely change. How much can I expect the project to change? Who will help me with the project? How will the second part of the project work out?

I’m filled with anticipation and nervous uncertainty as I look ahead to the year. Worried because the 3 weeks in Toledo haven’t focused enough on my own work. But knowing at the same time that that’s because they needed to focus on other things (family, tying up other loose ends of work, a couple days off here and there). So now, starting tomorrow, my focus is on my project (with a little more vacation in there for two friends’ weddings…).

Goals for the year, as I sit thinking in the slant of late evening sun setting over the Castilian plains:

• Meet and talk with as many people as I can, break through my natural shyness and go deep into getting to know the people in my project.
• Be ambitious with the project, both in terms of methods and in terms of the time I dedicate to it.
• Write as I go, working on fellowship applications for the dissertation year, and synthesizing the findings of my work to improve on what I’m doing throughout the project.
• Learn some academic (written) Spanish, and conversational Catalan.
• Attend some classes, lectures, conferences, talks on immigration and schooling in Spain.

What are your goals for the year? In what ways are you facing unknowns in the months ahead?

Photo by Jim Wilson at the NYT

Who looks after elder immigrants? How do they meet people, get out of the house, make a new life? Is anyone studying their experiences? An article in the New York Times yesterday looked at older immigrants from India and Afghanistan mostly, in Fremont, California. According to the article, one in three seniors is foreign-born in California, and nationwide, about 11% of recently arrived immigrants are over age 65. To my knowledge, no researchers in immigration studies are looking at this population. Traditionally immigration studies has focused on adult workers, and recently there’s been a lot of emphasis on studying the experiences of the second generation. But perhaps I’ll focus my next project (post graduate school!) on studying the integration experiences and challenges of older immigrants. Perhaps I could convince people who fund research on the elderly (which is a growing population, and area of research) to fund a study of older immigrants, and/or one of my graduate students could study their experiences.

A blistering afternoon, where a wall of heat hit me as I walked out of the parking garage toward the library. Vast blue skies. Sticky behind my knees and down my back. Luckily it’s Friday, so I found a spot to work in the crowded Alcazar study room. A far cry from Grad Services at Berkeley, with it’s open tables, easy plugs for the computer, and my study buddies. But there’s some charm to being here too, surrounded by Spanish young people preparing for September exams, and it’s quiet, and away from the distractions of my in-laws, so it works.

Am working on editing a book that was a colleague’s dissertation, and it has me thinking a lot about how difficult it is to do good research. My adviser often talks about how challenging it is to connect theory with data, but until I started to try and do it myself, and critique how well others did it, I didn’t see the full picture of what she was saying. Because while any piece of research broadly relates to and touches on a lot of different areas, the possibilities of one study to really show evidence for something are actually quite narrow. So oftentimes books in particular claim to be addressing a broad swath of issues, many of which are unmeasurable by the methods in the study.

The challenge is to balance the philosophical and theoretical questions the study’s topic broadly raises with the conclusions drawn based upon the research itself. Complicated to do well. Even writing this here, I’m thinking to myself–How will I do this?

This is just one challenge of my dissertation, as I work to revise my proposal and begin my study. Critiquing how this professor has done it is relatively easy. Doing it well myself is much more difficult.

What’s your experience balancing these things?

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And as an aside, if you need a moment to be filled with love for your country (as in the Estados Unidos de America), look through this art project. Or if you’re interested in immigration. Or if you just want to be inspired to make creative and beautiful things.

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.

Yes, plain old walking. Up hills, into parks, to places with views and fresh air. Noticing flowers. Letting my mind wander. Walking always clears my head and gives me perspective on life. Especially if it’s exploring new places, or rediscovering old ones. In college I walked in the arboretum near campus, especially when I was working on papers. So I’m going to walk this month, every day if possible.