Hii I am a sociology student (in the process of finishing my bachelors), I love your blog and I want to ask you to tell me a bit about your academic journey and what do you like about sociology. Also, where are you from and where do you live??
hi @somegrrrl ! thanks for asking! i'm really happy to hear you like my blog lol. i like coming out here and speaking into the void and lurking on how everyone else is doing. i especially love snooping on soci students when they pop up lol. i hope your bachelors is going well!
your last question i can answer somewhat easier. i'm filipino, born and raised in japan, moved and grew up in china, then the midwest of the united states. nowadays i'm living and studying in canada :) hearing this it makes sense i ended up studying communities and place attachments lol.
let me answer all of your other questions at once with this very self-serving ramble.
honestly, i went into university with no idea of what i wanted to do. as a kid i wanted to be in animation *so bad* but my parents said i needed to do something that would sustain me (so obviously sociology phd student is an excellent alternative /s), so i entered uni for a BA in psychology thinking i'd become a therapist. we should all be glad i am not a therapist.
at least for me and my department, my first year in psychology was very 'here is freud, here is a skinner box, cognitive revolution, here is a chi squared test...' standard gigantic lecture hall of 100+ students where content is dictated to you. psych departments are often very large, so doing tutorials would be pretty unwieldy i'd imagine. brutal midterms and finals afterward. we also don't have any chances for exploring anything in further depth unless you made it into the honours program or became an RA. our department doesn't have a qualitative methods course. for a discipline that's about people i felt that i wasn't actually learning about them at all? (*important caveat!!! this is about pedagological choices, i have many friends in psych who are very wonderful people and the discipline is very important ofc lol)
somewhat selfishly, i also still didn't think i got any of the answers i had about myself and the people i knew. i was an international student, my family migrated a lot, and i was surrounded by immigrants and the consequences of movement. but all of that was compartmentalized to one 'cultural psychology' course or unit and the rest was just kind of 'oh, culture exists by the way so these findings might not be generalizable'. i took sociology as an elective and our term paper was entirely a self-application of various sociological concepts. i'm pretty sure i wrote about educational classism in international schools and cultural homelessness among third culture kids and got an A+.
took more soci courses and ended up declaring a soci minor. wrote more term papers. i loved participating in discussion sections. i loved staying after class to ask more questions. eventually other students started to recognize me because i never stopped talking lmao. i also got to know a few professors pretty well. all symptoms of a future grad student lol. but it was only because i felt seen in the discipline that i felt like i could make a home there. by the end of second year i swapped my minor and my major so i was now a soci major and a psych minor.
later on as an international student i wanted to try to earn some money, so i figured with my grades and unfortunate inability to shut up i could try out TAing. i got my first TAship in my third year, was given 50 students to run tutorials with, and was scared shitless lol. but i remember clearly the end of my first tutorial session, i called up a prof i was close with who asked how it went and i said "i think this is what i want to do forever." at the end of my third year i applied for the honours program, got in, and the rest is history.
to think that nothing about us is 'wired' to create anything as random and complex as we've made it was such a revelation for an 18 year old and all i've wanted to do is pick it apart ever since. i entered university during COVID at a time where the world and every system we ever relied on was falling to pieces thinking nothing mattered. 6 years later i guess i've learned that yeah, nothing does matter. and yet for some reason it's everything. in a way that's pretty interesting too, isn't it?
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