A Lamentable Struggle
So, I've got a whole 1,554 words of my dissertation written! Leaving... 18,446 left to go. That's pretty depressing.
The daily life of the graduate student is a curious thing. Now that we don't have any classes (and haven't since the end of March), it's very difficult to keep track of time. The only thing which distinguishes the days from one another is the fact that I have rehearsals Tuesday through Thursday; otherwise I have no idea what day it is, and half the time I can't be sure whether it's morning, afternoon or evening. We're finally moving back toward a normal distribution of daylight hours to night, which is a profound relief. In the height of summer I actually experienced great difficulty sleeping due to the fact that sunset didn't occur until about 10:30 pm and the sun started coming back up again at about 3:30 am. And, of course, the torrential rainfall we've been experiencing since late April has meant that it was dark most of the day.
But the unenviable routine of research and writing must go on regardless. Some people insist on working in the library, but I can't do that. Not only is the JB Morrell library an uncongenial location in many respects (not least because its very existence calls to mind all of the books one was unable to find there, either because the university is too cheap to buy them or because someone has managed to lose them), but I find the presence of other books too distracting. It is my great misfortune to find my work deeply interesting -- until I actually have to do it, at which point I'd rather be doing just about anything else. So instead I work in my flat, where I am slowly figuring out techniques to keep myself productive. Unplugging the internet for a time seems to work wonders, as does ensuring that I have a hoard of snack food so I'm not tempted to skip off to the kitchen.
It takes a surprising amount of stamina to do this. We have all reached the point where we detest our dissertations and want nothing more than for them to somehow write themselves so we can get on with our lives, and that goes even for the people who intend to go on to a PhD in the very near future. There are, according to my supervisor, several different types of graduate students, most of whom can be successful. My type, he says, are those who "have very high aspirations and perfectionist tendencies, coupled with an appalling lack of self-confidence." In order to cure my severe case of blank-page panic, he has instructed me to write something bad (he literally said that), just to learn how to write quickly and clearly. Tomorrow I'll meet with him to ravage what I've written, and then we'll try again.
But my supervisor is merciful. That is not the case for some of my coursemates. Indeed, the traditional week for most of the MA class consists of about four days of frantic writing and revising, followed by a meeting with one's supervisor in which she or he massacres the student's work and inquires whether there is something wrong with her/him. People have a variety of ways of coping with this -- a good cry, a long nap, and a pint of Ben and Jerry's (or some combination thereof) are amongst the most popular remedies -- but whatever they need to do to get over it, they do, and then spend a day or two going out to pubs and reading what we have come to call "crack fiction" (mostly young adult novels; supervisors have been horrified this week by how little people have accomplished on account of Harry Potter), before realising that they must again produce more work to be savaged.
At the moment we can only cling to the knowledge that virtually everyone somehow manages to finish, and in the meantime we channel our frustrations into Romeo and Juliet. The fact that that production is coming to be nearly as stressful as our academic work seems not to matter; and anyway, it'll be over in less than two weeks. Then we'll have nothing standing between us and the dissertation, which is quite frightening.
The daily life of the graduate student is a curious thing. Now that we don't have any classes (and haven't since the end of March), it's very difficult to keep track of time. The only thing which distinguishes the days from one another is the fact that I have rehearsals Tuesday through Thursday; otherwise I have no idea what day it is, and half the time I can't be sure whether it's morning, afternoon or evening. We're finally moving back toward a normal distribution of daylight hours to night, which is a profound relief. In the height of summer I actually experienced great difficulty sleeping due to the fact that sunset didn't occur until about 10:30 pm and the sun started coming back up again at about 3:30 am. And, of course, the torrential rainfall we've been experiencing since late April has meant that it was dark most of the day.
But the unenviable routine of research and writing must go on regardless. Some people insist on working in the library, but I can't do that. Not only is the JB Morrell library an uncongenial location in many respects (not least because its very existence calls to mind all of the books one was unable to find there, either because the university is too cheap to buy them or because someone has managed to lose them), but I find the presence of other books too distracting. It is my great misfortune to find my work deeply interesting -- until I actually have to do it, at which point I'd rather be doing just about anything else. So instead I work in my flat, where I am slowly figuring out techniques to keep myself productive. Unplugging the internet for a time seems to work wonders, as does ensuring that I have a hoard of snack food so I'm not tempted to skip off to the kitchen.
It takes a surprising amount of stamina to do this. We have all reached the point where we detest our dissertations and want nothing more than for them to somehow write themselves so we can get on with our lives, and that goes even for the people who intend to go on to a PhD in the very near future. There are, according to my supervisor, several different types of graduate students, most of whom can be successful. My type, he says, are those who "have very high aspirations and perfectionist tendencies, coupled with an appalling lack of self-confidence." In order to cure my severe case of blank-page panic, he has instructed me to write something bad (he literally said that), just to learn how to write quickly and clearly. Tomorrow I'll meet with him to ravage what I've written, and then we'll try again.
But my supervisor is merciful. That is not the case for some of my coursemates. Indeed, the traditional week for most of the MA class consists of about four days of frantic writing and revising, followed by a meeting with one's supervisor in which she or he massacres the student's work and inquires whether there is something wrong with her/him. People have a variety of ways of coping with this -- a good cry, a long nap, and a pint of Ben and Jerry's (or some combination thereof) are amongst the most popular remedies -- but whatever they need to do to get over it, they do, and then spend a day or two going out to pubs and reading what we have come to call "crack fiction" (mostly young adult novels; supervisors have been horrified this week by how little people have accomplished on account of Harry Potter), before realising that they must again produce more work to be savaged.
At the moment we can only cling to the knowledge that virtually everyone somehow manages to finish, and in the meantime we channel our frustrations into Romeo and Juliet. The fact that that production is coming to be nearly as stressful as our academic work seems not to matter; and anyway, it'll be over in less than two weeks. Then we'll have nothing standing between us and the dissertation, which is quite frightening.
posted by Ehren at
7:34 AM
2 Comments:
Last March I'll bet that it seemed like a long, long time until the end-of-September deadline for the dissertation.
By
Unknown, at 8:01 PM
It still seemed like a long time as of the end of June when I was home. Then, not so much. And now it feels like plenty of time again, since my supervisor liked what I wrote for this week and he and I have worked out an outline for my whole dissertation. It makes a huge difference just to know how many chapters it's going to have and what needs to go in the introduction. And since I've proven that I can churn out a rough draft of 1500-2000 words in several hours, it seems much more manageable to work in small chunks like that. I probably won't have my conclusion yet by the end of August, but I should have a rough draft of the rest of it done by then, and I can spend September refining it.
By
Ehren, at 1:14 PM
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