Is there anyone academically-affiliated that doesn’t hate this time of year? I see both students and professors shuffling around campus in a burned-out daze, and I’m right there with them. Everyone is stumbling around with armfuls of books, looking despondent and exhausted, hardly noticing the beautiful weather that’s finally graced us with its presence. Even [...]
The library means so many things to grad students. It’s a place to scour shelves for dusty old books (50 of which you will check out, haul home, and not return for three years). A place to work for long hours (especially if the library assigns carrels to grad students). A place to eat (since [...]
Some very hard-working people have inspired me to stop feeling sorry for myself and just get to work. When I talk to my grad student friends I know from other departments, they sound like I did in undergrad. They talk about how swamped with work they are, how much effort they’re putting in, but in [...]
I took this weekend to do some reading for pleasure, rather than seeing just how close I could get a match to the pages of Bakhtin’s “The Dialogic Imagination” without setting the pages on fire. I always forget how much my favorite pastime relaxes me (the reading, not the fire). It’s like a ‘reset’ button [...]
For the sake of some levity around here: “Once upon a time there was a student who wrote a dissertation. At the end of his rope and convinced his committee didn’t care about the damn thing anyway, he took a chance. A little ways in, he wrote in the middle of one paragraph, “If you’re [...]
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