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meanderings
For an aspiring academic I tend to be rather lukewarm to my friends' grad school ambitions; that's partly because I spend a lot of time reading articles like this one, but the greater influence is probably my mother, who left Johns Hopkins a good chunk of her way toward a Ph.D. in intellectual history (seventeenth-century religion), having realized that, though she was good at it, she didn't care quite enough.
She called me today, and reminisced: "When I got to Hopkins there were ten comparative-literature students to every intellectual history student, and I was in an odd position. Most people were like you: they'd gone through the American system and were jumping straight from M.A. to Ph.D. I was ahead of them, having done a three-year European M.Phil.; but I didn't know how to be an elitist American, only an elitist European intellectual. And this was a department which Derrida had just left, and they had learned all their terms from him. It was like that game-- what do you call it, Stratego? The one where you're trying to take over the world, but the pieces are all hidden. Everyone knew the values of all the counters-- they could tell you that three of these meant one of that-- but they'd forgotten what the words meant. And I'd blunder in and ask, and they wouldn't be able to tell me. Obviously they'd all thought very hard about these things, eight or ten years ago, and worked out the values of all the counters, but they'd forgotten. You could see it was embarrassing."
My mother also informed me that my sister's transfer application to Lewis & Clark has succeeded, which is exciting. I'm still hoping she'll go to Eugene Lang, though, since given Lang's influence on Swarthmore, it would be a Cosmic Expression of Sisterhood. (My sister and I look very different and sound like the same person on the phone. This is probably symbolic; but then one can only have a non-metaphorically-charged conversation in our family by talking to my father about machinery, as you may have observed from the above transcript.)
And finally, my grandmother (in whose honor I use the White Queen-Sheep icon) is taking Zoloft, which is bringing her closer to the real world, and has been nominated for what my mother calls "little old lady of the year" for the Portland Rose Festival. My grandmother will be very polite about it all, and secretly rather sarcastic.
***
In non-familial news, I have a new pair of boots. I bought them at REI, which is like a glossy-magazine hyper-Seattle taken solid form, and makes me want to resurrect the Johnny Wu story and write more imitation Gibson.
She called me today, and reminisced: "When I got to Hopkins there were ten comparative-literature students to every intellectual history student, and I was in an odd position. Most people were like you: they'd gone through the American system and were jumping straight from M.A. to Ph.D. I was ahead of them, having done a three-year European M.Phil.; but I didn't know how to be an elitist American, only an elitist European intellectual. And this was a department which Derrida had just left, and they had learned all their terms from him. It was like that game-- what do you call it, Stratego? The one where you're trying to take over the world, but the pieces are all hidden. Everyone knew the values of all the counters-- they could tell you that three of these meant one of that-- but they'd forgotten what the words meant. And I'd blunder in and ask, and they wouldn't be able to tell me. Obviously they'd all thought very hard about these things, eight or ten years ago, and worked out the values of all the counters, but they'd forgotten. You could see it was embarrassing."
My mother also informed me that my sister's transfer application to Lewis & Clark has succeeded, which is exciting. I'm still hoping she'll go to Eugene Lang, though, since given Lang's influence on Swarthmore, it would be a Cosmic Expression of Sisterhood. (My sister and I look very different and sound like the same person on the phone. This is probably symbolic; but then one can only have a non-metaphorically-charged conversation in our family by talking to my father about machinery, as you may have observed from the above transcript.)
And finally, my grandmother (in whose honor I use the White Queen-Sheep icon) is taking Zoloft, which is bringing her closer to the real world, and has been nominated for what my mother calls "little old lady of the year" for the Portland Rose Festival. My grandmother will be very polite about it all, and secretly rather sarcastic.
***
In non-familial news, I have a new pair of boots. I bought them at REI, which is like a glossy-magazine hyper-Seattle taken solid form, and makes me want to resurrect the Johnny Wu story and write more imitation Gibson.
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Wow, that sounds just like my grandmother.
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It's funny- how different you are in words than in person, Ursula. I've learned a lot more about you from livejournal than I did in our brief acquaintance. Just... thought I'd mention that.
Hurrah for the intellectual elite!
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http://www.optimizationprime.com/archives/000063.html
Of course, I have a very different view of grad school from people in the humanities, since science and social science programs sometimes pay much more. But I do agree that you have to be pretty interested in what you're doing to make it through, even if you are making enough money to live on while you do it.
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Where did your mom get her M.Phil, and in what?
It's funny, I was talking yesterday with some of the Religion professors about setting up a small masters program at Swarthmore, sort of as an extension of the Honors program, where an Honors student could stay on an extra year or so and get a graduate degree (it would ideally only be available to Swat undergrads). The idea would be that since (in the opinion of these Religion profs) the seminar experience here (at least in Religion) is actually better than in most graduate programs, students may as well get the most from it. We decided it would have to be an M.Phil that was awarded, not just a plain M.A., to give it that extra bit of cachet.
It probably wouldn't work for most departments here; seminars are already too crowded and professors too busy. But in my dreams, perhaps...
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Though that only matters if you're not in North Carolina next year.