budding scholar

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?

Another gray day, and I hunger for color. Magenta and papaya oranges like these flowers I saw on my walk yesterday. Color flowing like these balls of bouncing blue and red and yellow through the streets of San Francisco. The writing is flowing better, but I still wish for more ideas, for the work to come even a little easier. Even as I know that the real color won’t come until I’m on the ground, in Spain, talking to people and keeping fieldnotes every day. But there’s still this proposal to write, a milestone that our professors have set out for us to make sure we’re ready to make sense of the field once we get there. So I sit here, gray skies over browns and creams of San Francisco buildings, listening to this piano music, writing with the colors I have.

What inspires you in your work? Do you find that the weather affects your feelings about doing the work at hand?

A gentle evening summer breeze comes through the open window as I sit working late in Graduate Student Services, in Berkeley’s Doe Library. It’s re-discovering an old favorite. Finding true quiet that hums with productivity is harder than I’d have expected at Berkeley. The only sounds here are a train in the distance, sometimes the click of another student’s keys. I see people working on literature theses, their tables piled high with books.

Like views and breezes and humming productive silences, I have rediscovered language, nationalism and citizenship this week. The kind of belonging that is about not only passports, but civic duty and common social identity as well. Like a daffodil sprouting from an old bulb in spring, I hit upon a policy to use as an entry point for my study of immigrant integration in Spain, and the other pieces started growing into the beginnings of a real dissertation.

Now I hear a plane. The breeze gets cooler through the window but the late evening sun still comes warmly through the blinds in laticed stripes. I’m thinking about re-reading old writing, pulling and reshaping to fit it to the shape of my dissertation proposal.  I’m thinking about writing new sections. The pieces from orals and years of reading taking a new shape. And for the first time this dissertation proposal feels possible.

A New York Times article this Sunday talks about Somali-Americans in Minneapolis choosing to go back to Somalia to fight for an Al Qaeda-affiliated group that is trying to overthrow the government in Somalia. One of their teachers talks about their reasons for joining as being a “crisis of belonging”.  These young boys, who had come to the U.S. as teenagers or been born here to immigrant parents, felt disconnected from both their homeland and to their new country. Many of them had done well in school, gone on to college, but still felt they did not belong. Fighting for this group in their homeland gives them a feeling of purpose and belonging.

Belonging is important. Feeling that we have a place in the world, a meaningful place with others. I wonder about belonging for the many immigrant youth in Spain. I wonder about studying it here in the U.S.  I wonder whether anyone is studying the links between belonging and policy, how school policies might make a difference for youth experiences of belonging. Could the schools where these boys went in Minneapolis have handled things differently? What about the communities? What can schools do to teach people to be tied to their new country? What, if anything, should they do?  And what about policy implementation–does the policy matter if it’s not implemented?

A lot of discussion of language and multicultural policy talks about this very issue, with people having differing opinions about what schools should be doing to foster belonging to the country. I am curious what they actually do, under current policies. And what experiences immigrant youth are having. Perhaps this will be one focus of my dissertation.

What do you feel you belong to? What, if anything, have your schooling experiences had to do with your feelings of belonging?

Inspired by sunshine and a late afternoon at the beach that turned sunny and almost warm. Pear martinis. Quiet walking with an old friend, taking photos, focusing on things other than our troubles. Seems that the more I worry and worry about my work, the less break I get, and the more lost in a vortex of anxiety about the dissertation. Yesterday was a day of just that, but ended instead with an escape from the fog, both outside and in my head. And today dawned sunny, with an answer to an email from a student ahead of me, filled with helpful advice and openness. What a roller coaster of feelings compared to yesterday morning.

I’ll take the good days and moments as they come. Back to the day now, fingers tapping keys, eyes glancing from the screen up to sunny rooftops and Bernal Hill in the distance. Getting writing done and appreciating that there’s not a shred of fog in sight.

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?

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?

Thinking a lot about networking these days. Ph.D. programs are solitary pursuits, lonelier I like to think than any other point in my career. A friend who’s looking for a job has been talking about her approach to networking as she does it, and it’s made me think about networking in my Ph.D. program. Not to get a job, or get anything in particular out of people just now. Just to build relationships based on mutual interests in the fields of education, immigration, and sociology. So I’ve started trying to have lunch, coffee, email contact with people on a more regular basis. Following up when I’ve read what someone sends me, letting them know my ideas or questions about it. Reaching out for ideas and help, but more importantly simply conversation and sharing about the topics we have in common. In the last week it’s helped a lot with feeling less alone in my pursuits.