budding scholar

Thinking about the future, how I’d like to be a professor, advise students, have my own research projects. Thinking about revising papers from journals, and having a regular writing schedule, and reading more. Orals are stressing me out to some degree but nothing like the feeling of what it will take to reach that future goal. I keep thinking about how I struggle with writing, and how much reading I’ve been doing for orals, and how both of these things–reading and writing–are the most central tasks of my craft. If I can master these two, having a regular reading and writing routine in my life, the rest of it (conferences,  teaching students, administrative duties in my department, writing grants…) sounds easy, fun, something to look forward to.

Battling against the feeling of being alone in the pursuit right now, with only my own time to manage. Of not always prioritizing things in the right way. Of putting off dealing with feedback on a paper and not yet having my dissertation prospectus written. I’ve got plenty of notes and ideas, but it feels like such a commitment to put it all in 7 pages for discussion during orals.

Wishing I had a writing buddy, someone who I consistently got together with and did the writing part of my day. Maybe this is something I can find in my friends at school. Or maybe even with my writer friends. The point is that we support each other in meeting our goal of writing consistently, not that we talk or be writing about anything that is similar. If you’re interested let’s talk!

For now back to the solitary writing, going to try and get a draft of the prospectus sketched out before sleep.

• I write best in the morning.
• Libraries are always productive places for me to work.
• I write best in the morning.
• Exercise is a beautiful thing.
• I write best in the morning (yes, repeated because it is so hard but so true!)
• I only sometimes work well at home (late nights and early mornings are best).
• Keeping a journal (whether blog or other) helps writing and overall state of mind.
• Making a schedule helps me be productive.

What helps you independently manage your work in this jungle of academia?

Late nights are the norm these days. Work and studying. Yesterday we spent another Sunday at the office downtown, in a conference room (above is the sunset view from our window). Whereas better work happens with writing when I wake up early, orals studying goes well late into the night. Am not a huge fan of staying up late but I’ll take the productive time where I can get it!

Questions I’m thinking about as I study:

• Who’s the reference group in studying immigrant children (their parents? their peers?)
• If studies were replicated exactly across 3 countries, would they find similar things in terms of immigrant experiences?
• How to think of top-down vs. bottom-up policy in the context of language policy in schools?
• How do cities vs. countries operate as sites of integration?

An ongoing series of the New York Times on immigrants and their impact on institutions in the United States brings home how timely my project is. There’s so much to figure out about how social integration works, and the role of schools, and relations between different groups. Interesting how so much is happening in the suburbs now, rather than the cities. I wonder what this means for the social institutions like schools that serve immigrants and their children. And what about debates about language? What do all of these questions look like in Spain? What would a similar series of investigative reporting uncover?

Another article in the same series has a quote about teachers: ” Teachers set the tone. In their classrooms, some tiptoed around the immigration debate or avoided it altogether. Advisers to student groups created to examine pressing issues — including the school newspaper, the Model United Nations and the World of Difference Club — similarly ignored the matter. And the teachers for those learning English made little effort to organize activities that would bring them and mainstream students together.”

High school is especially difficult because it’s the gateway into college and the labor market, into being on one’s own. I’m reminded of the time I spent working with a newcomer program while I was at Stanford. The local high school was unprepared for so many newcomers, and created separate classes for them, as well as structures to support them in mainstream classes. Tension with native-born Mexican students was often high, as were relations with Black students. Many of the students were undocumented.

How can policy support these teachers, these students, these schools?

Keep reminding myself that this is all worth it. That I’ve attained the goal of getting my fellowship, and therefore am one step closer to doing the study I’ve dreamed about doing. The painful learning curve stretching the bounds of my mind and pushing my tolerance for sleeplessness will add up to preparation for doing a better study in Spain. The harder I work now preparing these orals, linking the areas together, writing and drawing connections between ideas and areas of scholarship, the better prepared I’ll be for doing a good quality study.

Funny how we can usually go much further than we think we can. I find I’m ready to give in, throw in the towel for the night, just get some sleep, but then push forward and sometimes even do the best work of the day after midnight. It makes me think of marathon runners, mountain climbers, of young parents, of people fighting illnesses–small and large ways life tests us, and if we can find a way to push past that wave of exhaustion or loss of confidence, the growth comes.

Listening to shouts of the Mission as I write this, Saturday night revelers whose laughs bring to mind lighter, less work-centered times. In a little more than a month it will be time to revel a bit myself. Just need to push a little bit more.

How do you motivate or push yourself when you hit a wall with academic work? How about with other pursuits? What keeps you going?

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!).

Working hard on papers and orals lists. It feels good to be framing my questions in terms of reading lists. I can’t help being nervous about my second paper, but I feel really good about the first one. Overall, although it’s stressful, I’m glad to be doing orals this semester. There’s something satisfying about working this hard, having moments this focused day after day. Different from pressure of classes in the past. I feel like I completely own this pressure, I decided to do things this way, to do so many milestones in one semester.

If I could just get past this hurdle with the second paper things would start to feel much more manageable. It’s about the analysis, not the writing, which is a nice change I suppose, after agonizing over the writing of the first paper for weeks.

I spend a lot of time writing in my various brainstorm and journaling spaces on my computer. Here’s a taste–this was brainstorming the text that will tie my three areas of specialization together:

…The core issue I’m interested in is how schools are playing a role in the integration of immigrants in Spain. How does immigrant integration work? What is the role of education policy? How are schools and education policies part of immigrant integration? How are schools changing to respond to new populations of immigrants?…

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?