Geeky Mom

I was going to write about the Chronicle article on frustrating grad students, but I was alternating between writing two articles and playing Civilization. Besides, New Kid did a stellar job. I couldn’t possibly top her.

I just want to throw in a few of my own comments, as a recent graduate student who had a lot of obstacles to success. New Kid mentioned that grad school often creates a culture the prevents students from being completely honest with their advisers. Are you really going to tell your adviser that you’re enjoying your research, but when you’re done, you think you might want to settle down and make apple pies or, god forbid, get a corporate job that has nothing to do with your work? I’m thinking that’s not going to go over well.

I think I was pretty honest with both of my advisers. The person I wasn’t honest with was myself. I should have followed my interests instead of following what I thought the market would be interested and what people told me I was good at. I liked and respected my first adviser very much and at first, I was interested in my topic, but my interest was not great enough to sustain a dissertation, much less a research agenda later on. I couldn’t get myself motivated enough to think about original ways into my topic. Throw in a relocation halfway across the country, two kids and a spouse on the tenure track and well, regular readers know how that turned out.

I’m sure I was frustrating in many ways. But life gets in the way and grad school isn’t really a culture that tolerates life events, pangs of doubt, and feelings of inferiority. So it’s hard to come clean about all of that and get the advice you need and deserve.

Both Gradgrand and some of New Kid’s commenters point out not just frustrating grad students, but unprofessional ones. Many of those may indeed put one off of advising, but it seems unfair to let the truly bad apples affect the ones who may, in fact, be pears.

I’m taking part in a series of conversations we’re having entitled “Risk-Taking in the Academy.” Our institution is going through a change in leadership. We have a new provost. We’re searching for a new president. So, the idea was to have some discussions about what that might mean for us in the context of taking risks. There have been three of these and they are attended by a variety of people–plenty of faculty, but also staff from many different areas.

Yesterday’s conversation was about two different models for an institution–the pyramid and the flock. We discussed the characteristics of both models and basically tried to draw analogies between the two models and an institution. Some pretty obvious characteristics were mentioned for each. For the pyramid, hierarchy, solidity, impenetrable. For the flock, fluid, adaptable. Although I definitely bristled against the idea of a pyramid serving as the model for our institution, I didn’t think the flock worked perfectly either.

At one point, while we were comparing the models and elaborating on how the applied or didn’t to our institution, a faculty member described how he imagined the pyramid model. He said he imagined he was in one of those boxes that made up the pyramid, running around doing his own thing, not able to move from one box to another but perfectly content because he didn’t have to worry about what was going on in the other boxes. I said I didn’t want to be in his pyramid. If I can’t move around more than that, I’ll be completely frustrated. Afterwards, we talked about this more and he said that he can go into his classroom and just do his thing and not have to think about institutional goals or even what and how the person in the next room is teaching. Someone pointed out that his teaching is in the service of the institutional goals so whether he’s thinking about that or not, it’s part of what he does. I told him to try being a staff member sometime. We can’t not think about institutional goals. That’s kind of all we do. We have to think about internal and external pressures on us to change. I explained that simultaneously I have to look at trends in technology and determine how they’re going to affect the institution and respond to internal pressures to add services or keep services. And that it’s a very complex dance that way. And he said, yeah, you don’t have a classroom where you can be protected from that.

The whole conversation, both the discussion as a whole and the brief side conversation I had at the end were really fascinating and they certainly revealed to me a lot about how people position themselves within an institution and what they think an institution should be for them. I think these conversations can go a long way in helping people to understand where different people are coming from, what they think their role is within the institution.