Okay, it isn’t really a NEW perspective. I’ve been utilizing this perspective on and off since I started grad school, but I’m now embracing it even more fully. The perspective is this: School is for learning. That’s it. Simple, right? But oh-so-helpful when most of the people around you are driven not only to learn stuff, but to produce and publish original research at an alarming rate, even as first-year students. Now, I have no problem with this; a lot of people want to do that, and they want the job that it will get them. I neither want to do it, nor do I want the job it would get me. And trying to compete with people who DO want those things stresses me out. So I’m vowing right now not to do it any more. If I start to try, stop me.
This new contentment in the face of a paper that’s due tomorrow (thirteen hours and counting) came out of a conversation with a fellow first-year grad student is also no longer sure this is what she wants–in fact, her thoughts on the subject are remarkably similar to mine, up to and including the probably intention of going into library science after the English degree. We came to grad school to learn. I certainly have no pretensions of being able to say ANYTHING new about nearly anything, especially not European Romanticism when I’ve had exactly four weeks of graduate study in Romanticism (in this class) and roughly two weeks of undergrad study on Romanticism in a survey course, and especially not when my professor is, like, incredibly knowledgable on the subject. So I’m going to learn all I can and not worry about whether or not my essays are publishable.
The last two weeks studying for this paper, I’ve read two or three full books on the sublime (my chosen topic, which is fascinating, but HUGE), plus bits and pieces of ten or twelve other books, plus Kant. KANT, people! I don’t know whether I’m overwhelmed by how much I struggled with Kant, or pleased by how much I was able to eventually comprehend. (It does get easier after reading six different commentators telling you what he’s saying.) And I have learned A TON. It’s not everything, it’s not even probably enough, and it certainly isn’t as many original sources as I’d like (except for Kant, because hey. I can now say I’ve read Kant, and that’s worth something, right? Even if it wasn’t ALL of Kant? Right? Never mind…), I still sort of feel like I’m drinking from a fire hose, and I feel like that though everything in my essay is TRUE, it may not be significant because I haven’t read everything out there on the subject. But you know what? I know a hella lot more about it than I did two weeks ago. And I’m considering that a plus.
So my new perspective is that school=learning and learning=good and whether or not the professor is totally entranced by my essay is, given my goals for this phase of my life, somewhat irrelevant. Not that I’m saying we shouldn’t do our best…just that our best can be somewhat qualified by our goals, and my best doesn’t have to look like the best of someone who’s gunning for a PhD and a tenure-track position in a few years. And I’m okay with that. And knowing that has kept me wonderfully stress-free even while reading all these books over the past few weeks, because suddenly my motivation wasn’t to quickly find all the right information to feed into my topic, but to learn as much as I could and gain as wide an understanding as I could before narrowing down my topic (which I did today). I know a lot more now than I would have if I’d done it the other way. And I’m rambling. Because being stress-free doesn’t mean I’m not tired at 2:30 in the morning.
(Rambling side-note: it’s much easier for me to be stress-free about papers when only the professor is reading them, like this one. My next paper is a seminar paper, meaning the whole class will read it before class, and I will read it in class, and we will discuss it. This scares me a whole lot more, because grad students are scarier than professors. I do not know why this is. They are not scary in one-on-one situations; they are my friends. But in class? Reading my paper? Scary. All this side-note to say that in two weeks, if I start stressing out, remind me of this post, and that I’m not competing with the other grad students, even with my seminar paper.)