graduate students

July 1, 2010

The problem of smartness

We have this idea that smart people belong in school. It’s as though we think that somehow school is the very best use of their talents, their ideas, their innovation. We think smartness is rarified, special, different, and so it must be kept in a place that is rarified, special, different.

If the last twenty years have taught us anything, however, it’s the power of smart people outside of school.

Steve Jobs? While I wouldn’t want to sit next to him at a cocktail party, I’m not sure anyone can deny that he’s really fucking smart. Atul Gawande? Really fucking smart. Joan Didion? Really fucking smart. Thich Naht Hahn? Really fucking smart.

All of these people — and countless others — have changed the world by bringing their smartness to bear on questions, contemplations, and innovations outside the classroom, outside the lecture hall, outside the lab, outside the venerated halls of thinkers. And we are better for it.

So why are we holding on to the idea that the place for smart people is school? And why are we telling ourselves that if we’re smart, we must necessarily go for the highest degree possible?

So often, that degree is supposed to reassure us that we’re smart. It’s supposed to be the unassailable proof that we’re smart, so that if we screw something up, if we make a mistake, if we try something and fall flat on our face, we can still point to the degree to prove that we’re really smart, underneath whatever just happened. And we’re mostly convincing ourselves.

What if we were able to sit in ourselves and have confidence in our own smartness, enough to follow our hearts to what we really want to do instead of what we’re expected to do? What if we were able to trust that screwing up while we experiment is, in fact, part of our smartness? What if we would could bring our smartness to bear on whatever it is that makes us passionately, excitedly happy?

For some people, yes, that will be academia. But not everyone. And if you’re in academia or contemplating academia because you’re smart and people think that, therefore, you belong in academia, please, consider what you want and where you fit into the world.

Because we need your smartness. It just may be even smarter to put it to use elsewhere.

Thanks to Jo VanEvery and Sam Ladner for the Twitter conversation that sparked this!

June 23, 2010

Letting go, taking back

I told you a while back that my wife is starting graduate school in the fall. Theological school to be exact, and last week we went to the first orientation meeting.

In some ways it was entirely standard: These are the classes you need to take in your first thirty hours, here’s how you register, here’s how the money part of it works, please don’t mess up your student aid, really we’re all here to help you so please ask for help before you drown.

What wasn’t standard (for me in my experience of academia, not for them) was the praying, the references to the Holy Spirit, and the singing. (I’m pretty grateful my entering class did not sing at orientation. I heard them sing later, under different influences. It was all for the best.)

Two things stood out for me, though, in this orientation, two things that I think academia as a whole could do better to emulate.

Thing the first

First, the entering students were told to think about what they would have to give up in their lives for graduate school. This wasn’t particularly original, but the tone of it was. When I’ve heard this advice before, it was in the spirit of lovers throwing themselves at the feet of the beloved — you should want nothing more than this, and anything less than total dedication is a sign that you don’t love it enough.

Here, though, the advice had a different cadence. This is likely the only time, they said, when you have the opportunity to do nothing other than study. Most people who get the PhD in this field do so while working as ministers, so they’re part-time students while juggling full congregations. This three-year period really may be the only time to immerse themselves so wholly in the intellectual and spiritual engagement with the subject.

In some ways, this is also true of non-theological-graduate school — despite all of our myths to the contrary, professoring is anything but sitting around and thinking Great Thoughts. Publishing, teaching, and service are all necessary and even rewarding, but they aren’t the same as immersing oneself in the field and swimming around gladly. The early years of graduate school may be the only time that’s possible, with all of the stress and pleasure that come with it.

What this amounted to, in her orientation, was a focus on the experience and goals of the students themselves. Discipline, I’ve heard said, is remembering what you really want, and they talked about focusing on what you really want and prioritizing that during this period.

That raises the question, though, of what you really want. It’s a question too few graduate students ask themselves as they get caught up in the flow of graduate school and the expectations and ambitions of advisers and professors and administrators.

I’d argue, though, that it’s a crucial question — no matter where you are in the process. What do YOU want from this experience, this process, this degree? Why is that important to you? And how can you arrange things to meet your own goals and expectations.

Thing the second

In contrast to programs that ask you to declare your subspeciality as you walk in (more and more common these days), this program admitted from the outset that as students experienced the program, their goals, their ambitions, and their career paths would change. Because they would be learning and growing.

This is another one of those things that varies (um, like everything, really), but the impetus in most graduate programs is the Creation of Professional Academics. Everything is geared towards that end, despite the long history of degree overproduction and despite the obvious evidence that not everyone wants that outcome for themselves.

There is no way to go to graduate school and remain unchanged. It’s too long, it’s too immersive, it’s too mind-bending. But it was refreshing to see a program acknowledge and plan for the fact that people will change in ways they didn’t expect. They will become people they didn’t foresee.

All of which is to say, if you’re starting out, expect your own unexpected growth. And if you’re already in or through, it’s okay that you changed in ways that didn’t fit the linear model.

Everything in its season

Both of these themes suggest something else as well: That there will be a point at which you add things back in, because your goals are met, your changes experienced, your life in a new place.

I’ve seen too many academics come up for air and realize that they’re unhappy, not because they hate their jobs, but because they have lost contact with all of those other parts of themselves — their creativity, their joy, their playfulness, their sense of fun, their ability to relax.

It’s easy to defer them. You’ll relax once the dissertation is defended. You’ll return to your hobbies once you have a job.You’ll embark on that new thing that looks fascinating when you have tenure. There’s always something else pressing, something else important.

But if you’re unhappy, it’s worth looking at what you’ve given up, and what it might be time to add back into your daily experience of life. Because no matter where you are in the process, this IS your real life. This is the only one you have. And if you’re unhappy, it’s time to make change.

May 31, 2010

What kind of time do you need?

I read a fascinating post the other day about the difference between a manager’s schedule and a maker’s schedule. Here’s the gist of it:

There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.

When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done.

Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.

Naturally, this made me think of academe. (What else do I think about, you ask? Good question.)

The problem of both

One of the challenges of academia is you’re never just a manager or just a maker — you’re both.

In your role as teacher, adviser, and administrator, you’re on manager time. Tasks can usually be broken down into half-hour intervals, and often we’re grateful to break them down into shorter intervals just to put some boundaries around them and avoid drowning. (See: grading.) Meetings abound, and you’re generally running hither and yon with a few stops to chat with people doing the same.

In your role as researcher, however, you’re on maker time. Sure, running a database search for relevant articles may be able to fit into manager time, but brainstorming, reading, thinking, and writing are all tasks that work best when you’ve got nice chunky slots of uninterrupted time.

Which means it’s kind of no wonder that most academics bemoan an inability to get research done. It’s not just avoidance or bad time-management. It’s a lack of the kind of time that best allows for getting that work done.

Yes, people do manage it

I know some rockin’ mama professors who manage to schedule time and work on their research and writing with focus — and they get a lot done. If you can do that, power to you.

If, however, you need longer stretches of time in order to get momentum on your project, knowing that is half the solution.

The other half is finding / making those stretches of time appear at regular intervals.

Planning, planning, planning

It’s easy to get caught up in the “as soon as I do X” sort of thinking. As soon as I’m done with this grading, I’ll make time. As soon as I’m off of this committee, I’ll make time. As soon as this personal problem resolves, I’ll make time.

The problem is that this isn’t so much “making” time as “finding” time — and believing in a mythical future when there won’t be as many demands on the time you do have.

That may work in the “as soon as the semester is over and I can hibernate for three months” situation, and in fact, frontloading all other work during the school year and keeping the summer free for research works for many people. (Beware the need to teach for summer salary, however.)

But if summer brings kids home from school or the need to teach or family obligations or whatever, then making time is your best bet.

That might mean setting aside one day a week for research and writing. It may mean sitting down on Sunday night and blocking out a morning or afternoon (whatever happens to work that week) and planning to get tasks done around it. It may mean clustering other tasks and activities so that stretches of time previously full become available.

Just how you, personally, will create maker time for your maker activities, will be unique to you and your life and priorities. But making time for your inner maker can relieve a lot of the “but I should be getting more writing done!” stress that’s endemic in the halls of the academy — and you’ll get more done, to boot.

There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.

When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done.

Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.