Tag Archives: grad school

Ravynn: Act 2, Ravynn: Act 2, Scene 1, Uncategorized

Week 4.5, or Gratitude

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I’m coming to you with a midweek update to let y’all know your favorite Black Girl Doing Graduate School has successfully passed her Master’s Thesis Defense, which means that I’ve leveled up from Ravynn, MA/PhD student to Ravynn, PhD student.

Ravynn Stringfield, M.A….That’s a nice feeling.

I’ll be back to my regular schedule on Sunday with a comprehensive guide to successfully completing a Master’s Portfolio, but until then, I wanted to briefly give some shout outs to some people who have helped pull me through to this point.

Thank you to…

  • God. First and foremost. My relationship with God has gotten so much more intimate since I started grad school, real talk.
  • My amazing parents who love me, support me, encourage me, and push me. I would be nothing without my parents.
  • My fantastic advisor, Lynn, who really stuck it out with me when it got tough and who gives some of the best pep talks and critical feedback in the world.
  • My thesis committee for a fun and productive defense that I will take with me as I go forward in my journey in PhDLand. (Thanks also for just taking time out of your schedule for me, I know how busy y’all are.)
  • Cindy Jackson at VCU Libraries for helping me with my research!
  • MY CREWWWW, Kelsey, Micah and Leah, y’all are the realest, I love y’all. I don’t know how I would’ve gotten by without being to talk to y’all on the regular. Micah, you helped inspire my project and helped me think through it in its early stages. Kelsey, you push me and I push you because no one else is looking out for Black women but Black women! I would have never gotten here without your support. Leah, thank you for listening to me whine about how hard school is pretty much every day and for ALWAYS, and I mean, ALWAYS rooting for me. Protip to everyone: Get you a Leah.
  • Professor Harold, for always believing in me and having high standards for me. They’re not impossible, you know I can reach them and I know I can always ask for your help getting there.
  • Dana, you don’t know how valuable it has been to have a Black woman ahead of me in grad school to turn to when the going gets rough. Seeing that you have gotten where I want to be, encourages me to keeping moving forward. Thank you for lifting as you climb.
  • My William & Mary grad school peers: Ari, Chris, Hyunyoung, Felicia, Zarah, Adrienne, Shana, James, Travis, and Jaymi for encouraging me, whether it be bringing me books, talking comics, having Black (woman) moments with me, or simply hanging out and making me smile, y’all have all helped me get here, and I am so grateful.
  • My Outreach moms, Dean Gregory and Ms. Cathy, and my big sister, Alexis, for always reminding me that I always have a home with them, for believing in me and for just being family to me.
  • My family and friends, more generally, who have checked up on me as I’ve ventured along my grad school journey.
  • You, dear reader, whoever you may be. It’s been wonderful having this outlet to come home to every week. So thanks for reading, it encourages me to keep going.

I will more than likely forget someone immediately after I post this, but for now, consider this a working list.

Thanks everyone for helping me (and boy, did I need help) to get through this.

Ravynn: Act 2, Ravynn: Act 2, Scene 1, Uncategorized

Week 4, or (Black) Pain

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I think it’s universally known that graduate school is hard.

What may not be universally known is that it is often painful.

Being a graduate student requires vulnerability. One must not only have strong beliefs and opinions, but it must be expressed. We are expected to lay ourselves bare in the classroom and in our writings, our truths uncovered before our peers and “superiors” who more or less become judge, jury and executioner. If you are lucky, you might find yourself in a supportive space, where you are encouraged to think out loud and grow– where you feel safe to make mistakes and learn. Unfortunately, more often than not, you will find yourself subject to critique that is less about you, than it is about someone needing to prove their own intelligence, needing to find the flaw, needing fill the space with their own voice.

The discomfort of vulnerability, mistakes and learning is where growth happens. While I think we all need a certain amount of discomfort in order to grow, it becomes quite easy for that feeling to become toxic and damaging to one’s self-worth.

And that’s just one level.

Now, imagine that toxic environment– imagine the hostility, the tension, the anxiety cluttering the air like smog– and imagine that you are Black.

Every time you have to point out racism, a pain cuts through you, like a dull knife. It won’t kill you, but it still stings.

When my blood boiled at hearing a white woman say that a freed slave was “afforded the opportunity to be great” by white people, I felt the muscles in my neck tighten and I tried to make my voice steady when repeated the words back to her, so she knew how absurd it was that she believed that the white people who had kidnapped, brutalized, enslaved and abused a man could also be responsible for his “greatness.” I felt my intestines knot themselves up when I had to tell a white man that Frederick Douglass never needed to be “vindicated” by white anthropologists– Frederick Douglass has never been a marginalized figure. Why is that Douglass’ observations weren’t valid to you until white scholars said it was so? I felt a pain like I had been stabbed in the stomach while I sat in bed, observing the minutes that passed– one minute past when I should have gone to my doctor’s appointment, two minutes, three minutes, four. I didn’t want to explain to her, yet again, how much pain I was in, only to have to feel like I was defending myself, trying to prove and justify my pain, when what I really need is simply to be helped.

By Thursday I was choking on that toxic air, nursing open wounds, and a hand over my chest, which throbbed with dull pain. On Thursday we talked, at least in part, about Black women, and despite knowing that only Black women are truly here for other Black women, I failed a friend. I watched her burn our class to the ground with the intensity of truth, and when she asked, “Do you think that white women have appropriated the term intersectionality?” I could do nothing but look at her in awe. The kumbaya answer added burns to my body, which matched the bruises I got from watching a film in which the Black feminists were marked as vigilantes and malcontents until the final minutes, when white feminists swooped in with their golden badges of support and allyship, and suddenly the media thought they might be heroes.

Even with in my own race, I have to keep my guard up. I often feel as though I have to fight to prove my value not only as a scholar but as a person with my classmates and my professors. The Black men in my life only rolled through to remind me that though we both might be Black, he was a man, and thus entitled to stake a claim on those who are absolutely not his– as though we are property to be claimed and protected as opposed to people to be respected.

This was the week that I learned how to articulate a brutal sensation that, until now, had been unnamed and had settled to a spot just under my ribcage: Black pain will always be less important than white pain in American society. When Black women and white women are both expressing pain, the white woman will be attended to first.

I have been talked over, down to, around and about. I have been ignored and forgotten.

My poor body, suffering from asphyxiation, blunt force trauma to the head and chest, with multiple stab wounds, took a fatal hit when I realized that even the best of intentions can kill.

It seems like nothing grows in America without Black blood.

Each day that I come to class, remember how I look. You will not be able to see the damage, so I have held up a mirror for you. When you wonder why I sharply correct your diet racism, despite it being the only offensive thing you’ve said today– remember that I’ve got a body covered in bruises. They never get to heal before I’m forced to return to my seat in class, before I’m forced to gag on toxic air again, be stabbed and hit, with hardly anything to shield me.

Remember that I walk through this world in pain.

So when I finally scream back, don’t you dare wonder why.

 

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Ravynn: Act 2, Scene 1, Uncategorized

Week 1, or Ravynn Begins Again

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Sometimes it’s still hard to believe that I have an entire year of graduate school experience under my belt. I was an editorial apprentice for a year, I presented a paper at a conference, I took six classes and wrote substantial papers for all of them. I did archival research, wrote a Masters thesis, and even took a summer job as a Course Instructor for the Keio program.

One entire year later, I stand once again at the precipice of another academic year, filled with surprises, challenges and joys, knowing that if it gets harder, at the very least, I can say I got through one year already– what’s another?

This year, this semester, looks a lot different for me already. Instead of the highly structured work of being an Omohundro apprentice, I’m now working with the nebulous Lemon Project, where my physical presence is only required for one hour a week, which I am to spend in my office in Blair Hall. Thus far, this year’s assistantship has been a lot of e-mails and meetings, going to events and planning for them. It’s a good year to be doing the work I’m doing, as it’s the 50th anniversary of residential African-American students at the College. I’m sure a lot of interesting opportunities will arise because of this over the next year.

My current task is simply to organize the first Porch Talk of the semester. I suggested making it self-care themed, as this is a particularly difficult time for a lot of people, given the political climate of America, and also recent events in Charlottesville. Now’s as good a time as any to work on keeping ourselves sane while preparing to fight the good fight.

In addition to this, I’m also going to help my boss move forward with her idea for a Lemon Project journal, hopefully to come out during the Lemon Symposium in the spring. I’m certain that this is going to be my pet project for the duration of my time with Lemon.

In terms of classes, I’ve got a dope line up: New Media, Old Media (it is what is sounds like, a media studies class); Anthropological Reflections of the African Diaspora (taught by a former Black Panther); and Feminist Theory (a class that I have astonishingly managed to miss despite my interest in feminism). It’s going to be tough: it’s the first class line up I’ve had in grad school that doesn’t have at least one literature course, which usually helps me break up the monotony of the academic-ese and theory I have to read. Plus, I’ve never taken a media class (I just sort of got drawn to it on my own and was self-taught until now), I did anthropology once my first semester at UVA, and theory isn’t my favorite. But, given that I do comics and often talk about their television and film counterparts, New Media, Old Media will be useful; I love doing Black Studies in basically any form; and who doesn’t need a good feminist theory class? (Rhetorical; I can think of a few people who think they wouldn’t need it.)

Not only will these courses take me out of my academic comfort zone, they will also challenge my critical thinking skills and how I express my knowledge. New Media, Old Media is going to require me to write blog posts and do a scalar project (I don’t know what this means yet, my first class is tomorrow), so my final paper will be shorter because I’m doing so much other work. Feminist Thought is going to have me thinking outside of the box as well: my professor wants us to write a book review and an oped during the semester, and a research proposal or a lit review for our final papers. She thinks it’s worth being able to express yourself in a variety of ways; I couldn’t agree more. Reflections of the African Diaspora will be more traditional, but even that final won’t require me to do a research paper: my professor wants a lit review.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m excited to have different creative projects this semester, but I will admit, I was already starting to think about the research paper I could write for Feminist Theory about the Dora Milaje in Black Panther. It would be a cool paper that could potentially turn into a dissertation chapter, or at the very least, something to submit for a conference. At least I can write the proposal for that paper and tuck it away for a later date.

And amid all the chaos of starting classes and a new assistantship, I have my biggest project yet looming over me: my Masters thesis. The Dean kindly reminded my advisor that I need to be defended in September. It’s not as though I won’t be ready, but the message definitely jolted me awake and reminded me that I can’t let edits drag on forever. The fact is, I had my first draft in to my advisor on August 1. She gave me my edits back. Now, I’m working on them and the goal is to have draft 2 in by September 15. That gives me time to organize my committee and prepare my notes for my defense for the last week in September.

I can absolutely do it. The edits my advisor gave me are substantial, but doable in the amount of time I have, if I focus. Fortunately, time management and self-discipline are some of the strongest tools in my arsenal.

My plan for this week is to keep editing as I’ve done the last few days, letting my reading for class sort of take the backseat for a few weeks until I’ve gotten through my Master’s Defense. (Though I have every intention of keeping up.) I want to see my advisor about a few finer points she brought up in her comments, suggestions for citing a few things, and maybe a pep talk, but after that, I want to kick into high gear.

If all goes to plan, I’ll be 23 with a Master’s Degree, and the newly freed up mental space to take on new projects in 2018. Then, I can think about the next set of obstacles: Comps.

Fortunately, I have a low key assistantship with flexible hours, so I can afford to spend more time on my thesis this first month of the semester. Most of the work comes in the spring, I hear, with the arrival of the Symposium and Branch Out. I’ve also got a dog that I love, who helps remind me that the most important things in my life are not on my computer, a mom and dad nearby to catch me if I fall, and a community of mentors, scholars, and friends who encourage me. Talking to a friend from UVA who is now ABD at Penn gave me the jolt I needed to jump start my year; Kels is my perpetual hypeman– she keeps me going when I want to give up, so I do my best to return the favor when law school plays too much; and seeing all that Professor Harold has accomplished reminds me that, if she can do it, so can I.

My academic community may not necessarily be here with me in Williamsburg, but I know there are some people out there who’ve got my back. They give me the strength to begin again.