Tag Archives: grad school

Coronavirus, Dissertation, Other Resources, Projects, publishing, Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 6, The Journey, Uncategorized, writing

Job Hunting, Preparing to Pivot and Finishing Up

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Another semester is sliding to a close, and for the first time since I started graduate school, this was a semester in which I didn’t write a single Black Girl Does Grad School post. It’s an odd feeling. While I did write a “beginning-of-the-end”/good-bye post over the summer, knowing that I didn’t add anything to this project to which I dedicated five years of my life left me a little heart sore.

For five years, I wrote about everything grad school related. I wrote about the victories, the hard moments, the moments when I felt like I wasn’t taking care of myself, when I shifted gears and tried pursuing different paths. Now, as I’m crawling toward the finish line of this chapter and beginning to curate my post-grad life, it feels weird to not write about how the stars are finally aligning. And so, here we are once again.

Along with dedicated time to finish my dissertation, the Halleran Dissertation Completion Fellowship I was awarded through my institution’s provost’s office gives me time to job hunt. I spent most of the semester shifting between revising my dissertation and perfecting my job materials. As I’ve said for the last few years, I am prepared to shift out of academia. I’ve spent the last two years building my resume as a freelance essayist and an agented fiction writer while I finished my dissertation. Editor Matt Ortile picked up my first essay for Catapult around this time two years ago and I’ve stayed very close to the magazine since, writing more essays and a column dedicated to superhero girlfriends, reading fiction from their Submittable queue, teaching a one-day course on creative non-fiction for academics, and even motivational consulting. Catapult has provided me with a launchpad to explore many of the skills I’ve gained in grad school in spaces outside of the academy. It gave me the confidence to know that I could make it if I decided to pivot out and write, edit and teach elsewhere.

That confidence allowed me to say that I would only apply to academic jobs that I felt would be perfect fits for me. As I’d lost my taste for academia, I informed my advisor I would not be applying for any and every job that could even loosely be a fit. I would only be applying for jobs that checked my boxes: I wanted jobs that would support and help me develop my deeply interdisciplinary and creative intellectual interests, where my fiction would be as welcome as my peer reviewed manuscripts, in places that I could see myself living and most importantly, that were near my family. Grad school taught me that I am built for mid-sized cities within a few hours of my primary support system, my parents. The only reason I got through grad school was because I was an hour from my home—a place where people cared more about me than what I could do. They remind me to be human, and that means I have to be more than my work. They remind me that I am not, and was never, a grad student first: I was a daughter and a friend and a niece and a granddaughter long before I even considered making this my life.

As a result, I only applied for a handful of jobs this semester, but I was very pleased with each position. It also meant that I could spend more time crafting materials that I felt were great representations of me and my work. I was fortunate to have an application due early on that required a lot of materials: a cover letter, CV, research statement, teaching statement and a writing sample, plus recommendations. Having all of that perfected before anything else was due made it easier to use those documents as templates for other jobs. I was able to reverse engineer a kind of formula that worked best for me and use that as a guideline for the next set. I absolutely did not do this alone. I had a lot of help from my advisor, who offered lots of careful feedback and did a mock interview with me before my first one, and the director of our Arts & Sciences Graduate Center, who helped me punch up my materials and made sure they were spotless before I clicked, “submit.” I am grateful to both of them, as well as the many friends and family members who hyped me up and reminded me who tf I was.

For the first time, I’m starting to feel confident about what my life will be like come May. It has less to do with job opportunities, and more to do with me finally ceasing to force the different pieces of my life and interests to fit together. I’ve stopped trying to make myself choose one path. I’ve worked so hard over my time in grad school, and I think now is the time to step back and watch God work.

So where am I now? After putting the finishing touches on a few academic pieces, giving a couple of talks, submitting those applications, while revising my dissertation, I’m focusing on rewriting the introduction to the diss and finishing up an articular manuscript that’s forthcoming. The introduction I’d originally written didn’t quite work for all of the revisions and restructurings I had done to the project since May. I’ll admit, it’s difficult to get myself to focus at this point. I open the document and my eyes glaze over the screen. I feel burnt out and like I’ve given all that I can to this. My solution has been to take breaks; if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. At this late stage, it’s better to have it done than perfect. And I know it can get done if I give it a few good days of work, but those good days haven’t made themselves known to me yet.

As far as the manuscript is concerned, I’m really excited for this one to go up. It’ll be my first peer-reviewed article in a pretty reputable journal. I don’t want to share details just yet, but perhaps when it’s done and available, I’ll write a post about what that process was like from start to finish. I also want to do a couple posts on job materials, if I feel up to it.

I know this is the long good-bye, but there are still a few more secrets and resources to share. There are still some exciting things yet to come that I will want to reflect on.

And I’m glad to be back and to have this space to use for when it feels right.

Uncategorized

The Long Good-bye

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As I reflect on the first half of the year, I’m increasingly aware of the increasingly infrequent nature of my blog post updates here. Last year, it made sense: the stress of the pandemic (which is not over, by the way) had everyone off their game. Even this past semester I could contribute my sporadic posting to my investment in my class. Still, as I adjusted to my reality, I simply couldn’t get back into the swing of my weekly posting habit that had characterized this blog since I started it almost five years ago.

But truths are truths, I think, and here’s one that’s bittersweet: I’m outgrowing Black Girl Does Grad School.

BGDGS has been my way of “speak myself into existence,” in the words of Jessica Marie Johnson. It was me making sense of a world whose rules and infrastructures I didn’t yet know or understand and yet was expected to make my way in. In a lot of ways, the start to my journey into academia reminds me now of finding myself in France as a twenty-one year old: I knew French in theory, but the shock being dropped down into a country where I only understood every fifth word sometimes and overwhelmed by how different things were, but still expected to find your way to the hotel by yourself, almost short-circuited my brain. The feeling was not unlike how I’d felt in early grad seminars—only understanding half the words and having to learn unspoken cultural norms simply by doing.

But also like my time studying abroad, as time went on, the more I began to find myself in a rhythm. I could find my way from the hotel to class, to my favorite cafes and restaurants…I didn’t always completely understand every word that was spoken to me, but I increasingly was able to get the gist and respond accordingly.

That’s been me in graduate school; every experience help a new piece of cultural knowledge fall into place, making each new thing a little easier to manage. I’ve always used BGDGS as a crutch, to help me fill in the rest of the blanks…but…I guess I don’t need it as much anymore.

In France, I was able to make my way through a world that wasn’t mine but that I found things I loved in. And then, as classes ended, I was reminded that I was only a visitor in this world that I had learned to navigate and love…and that soon, it would be time to leave.

I feel now, as I did then: a little disconcerted that this chapter of my life is almost over, relieved to leave, and also…grateful for all that it taught me.

This isn’t the good-bye; more like the beginning of the end. I still have time. I still have a pretty sizable list of things to finish, least of all finishing up and defending my dissertation. And I’m going to want to write about these things. But this is it, what I’ve been working towards. The finish line is a ways off, but in sight. After several years, I get the sense that these last few months will fly by.

And then it will be time for the good-bye.

But at this moment, I’m realizing that most of the blog posts that come after today will likely be the last of their kind. The last dissertation check-ins, the last reading updates, the last gratitude posts…This is the beginning of the end of an era.

BGDGS has gotten me through many a tough moment. It’s given me space to reflect, and helped me build a flourishing community of folks outside of my institution who are invested in seeing me succeed. It’s given me the tools to ask for help and help others. It’s been a lifeline.

But as I start transitioning out of this “pot” and into a new one, I know that this is one piece of my life that will stay in this chapter. BGDGS is where I learned to be a writer and what it means to have an audience; nothing will ever change that.

So wherever I go next, whatever I write next, this will always be where it all started.

Personal Essays, Projects, Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 5, Ravynn: Act 5, Scene 2, Ravynn: Act 5, Scene 2, Service, Teaching, The Journey, Working

Taxing Labor, Energizing Work

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My relationship with academia is fraught. The years I have spent in graduate school have been filled with intellectual epiphanies, community building in digital spaces, and a lot of time to search for answers to my long list of questions. Instead of answers, I have often found more questions. Some have been intellectually generative, and push my scholarship further; others underscore the limitations on freedom in academia for a Black girl. 

As a result of time in the academy and currently participating in more service work than I ever have, the questions I have become more urgent and constitute a fairly constant refrain in my mind: Why is my institution, and many across the board, unable to retain faculty of color? Why are we unable to fund diversity efforts and support our contingent faculty? Why are non-tenure track faculty, staff and graduate students’ voices and opinions shunted to the side, as if only tenured professors and students make up a campus? If we know that something (like hiring practices or tenure and promotion, for examples) can reinscribe hierarchies and oppressive systems, why do we continue to prioritize meeting those expectations? Why do we (as an institutional body) still think talking in circles around issues is moving us forward? 

The longer I am here and the more I do, the angrier I get and the more I want to do— and then don’t. Being in academia is a never-ending process of seeing an issue… and then going to seventeen meetings about it, and at the end of which, everything remains the same. It’s made me jaded, it makes me resentful and it will likely make me pursue a career outside of the academy. 

I think often about Toni Morrison’s statement about the function of racism is to distract you. At Portland State University in 1975, she said, “The function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.” Well the fact is, racism is keeping me from doing my work, making me tired and all I want to do is rest. In short, it’s doing its job, it’s doing it well, and I am, unfortunately, failing to continue to muster the energy to do anything about it.

I’m torn between wanting to keep working and doing and hoping that maybe I can do something, anything, to change the culture of the institution, but at the end of every meeting, I am exhausted. Not just exhausted, I am often near tears. My therapist, bless her, is likely at her wits end with me signing onto our sessions already crying. Many Black folks and people of color in the academy build up a tolerance for institutional bullshit, but I am still green. Every time someone raises their voice, I bristle; when I am talked over, I feel defeated; when (white) folks express shock that I could have a useful idea, I scowl; when they compliment me on my well formulated responses, I hear “articulate” and cringe because, of course, I couldn’t be. And I am TIRED. 

And I just started.

This is taxing labor, labor that I pay for with my time and energy and tears.

It keeps me from what I find to be energizing work: teaching, workshopping, and collaborating. 

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Stanford’s Black Studies Collective. This hour long conversation with the students was electric: we built off of each other’s energy, traded tips, offered advice, and enjoyed this moment of congregation together, filled with smiles and laughter. This work can be joyous. It can look like discussing the myriad of ways to translate your research into publicly consumable knowledge, it can look like helping folks think through the ways they organize themselves to get the most out of their day, it can look like explaining how I learned to fly.

I find that this work is most joyous in community.

This is why having collaborative aspects of my first course is important to me. For their introductory/get to know you assignment, I had my students contribute at least one song to a collective and thematic class playlist. I wanted to get a sense how they are thinking about the intersections of Black girlhood, fantasy and digital culture, what sorts of considerations and questions they will bring to the table and offer an opportunity to begin working together towards a shareable product. Building together helps me feel like I am contributing something. I am no longer just interested in making the space, but I want to play in the space I’ve created to see how we can construct the impossible. 

That feels like energizing work, soul fulfilling work. 

And the Academy makes it as hard as possible to revel in the joy of communal building with my students, peers and other faculty and staff. 

I want better for us, and I will be completely honest, I don’t know if I’m the person to be a part of the move towards tearing down what no longer serves us and in its place, crafting a better university. Just from my special combination of mental health issues, if I can avoid stressors as a way of keeping mood episodes under control, I will. I sacrifice my health to fight as hard as I do. And I want so much better for us, but I only get one life, one body, one me. 

And while I want better for us, I also want better for me. 

I don’t have an answer. I may never.

What I do know is that I got to look at a screen with a lot of Black faces on Friday, all eager and ready to learn from me and each other. It was joyous. And it keeps me going. 

They keep me going.