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pantryslutSince this came up more than once this weekend, I guess I have been less than forthcoming about my plans for higher education.
Yes, it's true, I am applying to graduate school. I intend to study something that can be classified as English, or as Cultural Studies, or as Gender or Women's Studies, depending on how you want to slice up that particular academic pie. Words and gender roles and texts.
I have very mixed feelings about this whole thing. For one thing, I don't want to move. For another, I've applied to graduate school in the past, more than once, and been turned down. Of course, the last couple times I applied, it was for writing programs -- poetry, in fact, long in the distant past. I got waitlisted a lot. I got discouraged a lot.
For a third, I am rather poor at the moment and will need a lot of financial aid to even attempt to do this.
For a fourth, I have a fraught relationship with academia, and academic discourse in particular. I'm a populist at heart. I know a lot of esoteric shit, but I want to share it with more than just a circle of people who know the same jargon that I do. Academics (the people not the subject) can be so *boring,* so lost in their own world. I don't want to be like that.
And I've been away from that world for such a long time. I have a lot of anxiety around that. I get grumpy every time I run into those fresh-faced college seniors. And we have them a'plenty, living right next to Berkeley and all.
So I haven't been talking about it in part because I don't want to get my hopes up, and I don't want everyone getting excited for me just to watch me fail -- or decide that this isn't what I want to do after all. I also don't want my friends here to think they have a limited time to see me in before I go away. I hate that feeling of borrowed time.
I'll save my grumblings about the glorified trivia quiz that is the GRE Subject Test in English -- which I took Saturday, just in case I go insane and decide to do this *again* someday -- for another time.
Yes, it's true, I am applying to graduate school. I intend to study something that can be classified as English, or as Cultural Studies, or as Gender or Women's Studies, depending on how you want to slice up that particular academic pie. Words and gender roles and texts.
I have very mixed feelings about this whole thing. For one thing, I don't want to move. For another, I've applied to graduate school in the past, more than once, and been turned down. Of course, the last couple times I applied, it was for writing programs -- poetry, in fact, long in the distant past. I got waitlisted a lot. I got discouraged a lot.
For a third, I am rather poor at the moment and will need a lot of financial aid to even attempt to do this.
For a fourth, I have a fraught relationship with academia, and academic discourse in particular. I'm a populist at heart. I know a lot of esoteric shit, but I want to share it with more than just a circle of people who know the same jargon that I do. Academics (the people not the subject) can be so *boring,* so lost in their own world. I don't want to be like that.
And I've been away from that world for such a long time. I have a lot of anxiety around that. I get grumpy every time I run into those fresh-faced college seniors. And we have them a'plenty, living right next to Berkeley and all.
So I haven't been talking about it in part because I don't want to get my hopes up, and I don't want everyone getting excited for me just to watch me fail -- or decide that this isn't what I want to do after all. I also don't want my friends here to think they have a limited time to see me in before I go away. I hate that feeling of borrowed time.
I'll save my grumblings about the glorified trivia quiz that is the GRE Subject Test in English -- which I took Saturday, just in case I go insane and decide to do this *again* someday -- for another time.
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no subject
Date: 2003-12-16 05:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-18 03:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-18 06:50 pm (UTC)1) I picked nontraditional programs specifically with some of this in mind. I'm pretty clear that what I want to do is more akin to cultural criticism and the history of literature than it is to what more usually goes on in English literature programs. (I actually looked at programs in history, too, but that's not quite right either.)
2) It may sound arrogant, but I don't think the system will ever crush me. More likely I'd quit out of frustration first. It took me ten years, more or less, to get around to doing this because I carefully considered questions like, "would you be happy if you didn't get a PhD.? Didn't get a job after you earned your degree?" I'm at that place now. I've got skills I can fall back on if something goes wrong or I decide that I hate it after all. But I don't have anything career-wise in my life that I am unwilling to give up or suspend, either. I'm tired of freelance writing, I'm tired of trend-chasing, and I'm tired of having to dumb myself down.
And I really want to teach. And what I want to teach I think is better reserved for college students, partly because I want a lot more flexibility when it comes to designing curricula, partly because of the stuff I want to talk about in my teaching. I thought about being a secondary school teacher for a long time, actually, but *that* system daunts me even more.