budding scholar

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.

Found a great new place to write and study, in the main library in San Francisco. Beautiful light, fairly quiet, high above the city. A new favorite. Can see myself spending a lot of time here working on papers this summer.

Working hard to identify that center of gravity of my study. Had a brainwave in the shower yesterday (anyone else typically get ideas in the shower?). But then tried to explain it this morning and it came out all wrong. But I feel closer. A post soon with the new ideas.

One of my professors talked about identifying the “center of gravity” of my dissertation project. By this she meant the main question driving it, the main way of tackling the question. We’re all interested in a lot of things, and want to include them all in one study, but for a dissertation project we need to hone in on one slice of the interest. Especially for the field research. Once we have collected our data we can start circling out again. But doing good research requires focus.

The center of gravity of my intellectual interest is on cultural difference and commonalty, how people learn about them, teach about them, come to understand what they mean. Government policy, personal interactions, community life. All ways people might encounter or learn about cultural difference. Studying immigration is my way of getting at this, since it almost always raises questions of difference, sameness, identity.

This is very mushy sounding. But I feel like in working on designing the dissertation, I’m revisiting my passions, why I’m in graduate school in the first place, as a way of ensuring the project I do will be meaningful.

Education is multidisciplinary and as a result we end up knowing bits of things from many different disciplines. Anthropology, political science, sociology, economics, and myriad crossover disciplines like public policy. This can make it more difficult to figure out our intellectual identity in education, especially if we are more academic than practice-oriented.

Immigration studies is an interdisciplinary field as well, pulling from the traditional disciplines much like education. Most scholars have training in one of the traditional disciplines.

Where does someone trained in education fit in terms of disciplines? I struggle with this sometimes. Figuring out where my contribution will be.

In a favorite spot, so that is good. Ready to think about how I’ll plan my summer of writing. Several important projects ahead, including the dissertation proposal, a conference paper, and two ongoing papers I’d like to turn into something more. More than anything, by the end of the summer I’m hoping to have a clearer idea of how to focus my fieldwork, and of what this larger research project is focusing on. Goal for today: work on the proposal, incorporating feedback and making a reading list.

After working harder than I ever have the day finally came and went and now it’s Thursday May 14th and orals was yesterday. Here’s a picture Juanjo took as I was leaving the room for the profs to confer. So much build up. Nerves. Anxiety. Worry. And then the day comes and you walk in there and do your best and hope that’s good enough. And it was. I did my best and feel like I showed all that I’d learned and knew and answered all the questions using what I know and have thought about. Amazing, it’s done! THANK YOU to all of those who supported me the last few months, this last year, but especially these last couple of weeks and days.

…taking an unfinished product, and making it look finished. As said to me this morning by a friend, who says it’s her boyfriend’s (hafl-joking) mantra (he just finished a Ph.D. in philosphy). Such is my task for orals–not some “finished” perfect mastery of the material, but the best I can do with what I have. Making all the reading and synthesizing I’ve done look “finished” when I open my mouth to answer questions on Wednesday.

A last weekend of studying before the big day. Priorities: getting through the last pieces I need to read or re-read, practicing talking out answers to questions with anyone who will listen, and solidifying my mental map of the literatures I’m covering. Personal priorities: get a good amount of sleep in the last nights before the exam, eat well, and get exercise. Luckily it’s the last weekend of work for Juanjo too in what’s been a very busy semester, so we’ll both be working and taking breaks together. Hopefully he won’t mind being my audience for practicing answering questions about policy, immigration, language in schools, and sociological theories!