Month: November 2006 Page 1 of 3

Well, November finally hit Waco. Walking a half-mile to school in freezing rain really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

After our last Bibliography and Research class last night, several of us students had a mini-party, which was well-deserved in my opinion. Sangria, chips and salsa, and good conversation. And I’m totally not alone in my current disillusionment with the grad school thing. Several of us voiced the feeling that we’d expected to come to grad school to learn more about English literature, but instead of content, we’re getting career training. Granted, that was sort of the point of Bib & Research, I suppose, so none of us have lost heart completely yet, since we hope that next semester will be more content-based. Yet, I don’t know. I lot of what I’ve read about grad school is that it really is career training…I just didn’t believe it. Perhaps I should have. If that’s the case, what about those of us who don’t really want the career it’s training us for? There are at least two or three of us, I know, that don’t really intend to follow out the professor’s career path, seek tenure, and all of that. We either don’t want it badly enough to put up with the tenure-track requirements, or we don’t want it at all.

(Part of this is a problem of academia and scholarship being increasingly institutionalized…many of the great literary scholars and critics a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago were not strictly academics. They were preachers. They were lawyers. They were journalists. Matthew Arnold was even a government employee, as a school inspector. But now, the idea of being a literary critic in your spare time is nearly unheard of. The barrier of entry into the field is horrendous.)

If what we really want out of grad school is the content rather than the career outcome, what better way would there be to get that content? 1) Reading on our own. But reading on our own doesn’t give the additional viewpoints or accountability that reading for class does. Also, you lose the discussion with others who are reading the same things. 2) Book club group or some such. I’ll grant you, I haven’t been in too many book clubs, but although I like the idea, I have a connotation of shallowness associated with them. As in, they read the latest “serious fiction” book and talk about how it relates to them, as opposed to how it relates to literature throughout history, which interests me more. Are there “academic” book clubs out there? If I started one away from a school environment, would people come and really engage the literature? 3) Take random classes. I like this idea, but it’s expensive. Plus, you’d never really be a part of the community, especially if the majority of the other students in the class were full-time students, and you weren’t.

So what I want is the content and the community that you get from being in school (especially the closer community you can get in a good graduate environment, which I think we have here), without the career training expectations and mentality. Where would one find that?

I’ve been sort of down on and off for days, not just worrying about papers due and such, but whether I’m even in the right place. I was so frustrated this afternoon (in the moments leading up to the class wherein I had to present on Sir Thomas Browne–see previous entry) that as my friends and I were in the lounge waiting until it was time for class, I offhandedly remarked that I was going to shoot myself in the head, especially thinking of the venerable Sir Thomas.

Well. I got set straight on that one pretty quickly. Not five minutes later another friend walked up, something clearly wrong. It turns out that a boy in a fraternity house down the street from her…a fraternity that she’d been close to as a Baylor undergrad and the fraternity her boyfriend had belonged to…shot and killed himself this morning. Talk about showing how unimportant a presentation on metaphysical prose really is in the ultimate scheme of things. To make things worse for her, she presented today, too…and did fine…but she commented that we really didn’t need to worry about our presentations (we were worrying about them together, last night, sort of, on Facebook), given how small a thing a single grade in a single class really is. Thinking that for this boy life was so unbearable that he felt he had to end it puts our grad school stress in perspective–virtually all of us first-years have thought and said over the past few weeks variations on “shoot me now,” but he really meant it. What was that insurmountable to him? I may never know, but it’s sobering.