and some more thoughts on academia and grad school
ok and the second thing i wanted to post (to remind myself to return to it later) is a follow-up email i wrote to her after our call, which got me reflecting on academia in what felt like a different way than i have before. (i probably owe the seeds of these thoughts to various people and things i’ve read of late, most likely macky but also i am sure others.)
anyway here is the email i sent her. i do not know anything about how admissions committees work for grad school! this is purely just me thinking aloud/speculating about what might go into that process.
i was thinking more about what i said over facetime about how the SOP is less about proving to them that you meet their base requirements and more about giving them a sense of your mind at work, or letting them feel your sensibility as a reader and writer. and i would add to that thought that i wonder if they are less interested in "are you smart enough to deserve admission" and more interested in figuring out whether you are temperamentally a good fit for graduate study. if you think of the various academics we have known, they are all without exception very odd birds, and it seems like most lifelong academics are people who are not just weird but are weird in very specific ways that make them well-suited to life in academia (and possibly ill-suited to a life outside of academia).
i would imagine that the faculty choosing the incoming class are looking to admit you as someone who will finish the program. and i feel like at my institution and among friends who went to other phd programs, i’ve seen a lot of very smart, creative people discover a couple years into graduate school that they HATE how isolated scholarly research is and how totally abstracted from life academic inquiry can often feel. it is not that those people can't hack it in academia. it's that they come to realize (often painfully and after a long period of agonizing self-doubt) that the working conditions of academia or the forms of thought it demands are not conducive to them doing their best thinking, writing, etc. so it seems like possibly what a committee is looking for is less “are you smart” and more like... are you comfortable with very little structure and long periods of little external guidance? does the idea of having to endlessly generate your own research questions horrify you or excite you? does digging obsessively into a two or three-year-long research project seem like something you would enjoy? and so on. they want to invest in people who they think are going to enjoy being in grad school and be able to get some use out of their degree, even if they don't go on to become a professional academic. and they also don't want to waste YOUR time! because once you are in a program, it is very easy for the people who end up not loving it to just drift through year after year of unstructured study, spinning their wheels and feeling awful about themselves for no reason. and then when they are finally like "fuck this" they feel angry and bitter that they were allowed to drift for so long.
in a lot of respects, applying as an older student who has lived and worked in many different educational settings will probably be to your advantage, even though you feel like you’re out of practice at academic writing. because unlike someone applying straight out of undergrad, you probably have a much stronger sense of your sensibility as a reader and a better grasp on the kinds of working environments where you really thrive. like, i'm glad i did a phd and i would do it over again, or even like.. do a phd in a different subject someday, bc i think that a program of deep sustained research really can enrich your practice as a writer and teacher. but i had ZERO conception of what grad school was going to be like, what professional scholarship looked like, or what academia would feel like. (IT FEELS BAD A LOT OF THE TIME. I WISH I HAD KNOWN HOW NORMAL IT WAS TO FEEL BAD A LOT OF THE TIME, BECAUSE I WOULD'VE FELT LESS BAD.)
anyway that is all for now -- more later, i’m sure.
p.s. thinking about academics not being able to survive outside of academia reminded me of this amazing passage from woolf's a room of one's own:
Moreover, it was amusing enough to watch the congregation assembling, coming in and going out again, busying themselves at the door of the chapel like bees at the mouth of a hive. Many were in cap and gown; some had tufts of fur on their shoulders; others were wheeled in bath-chairs; others, though not past middle age, seemed creased and crushed into shapes so singular that one was reminded of those giant crabs and crayfish who heave with difficulty across the sand of an aquarium. As I leant against the wall the University indeed seemed a sanctuary in which are preserved rare types which would soon be obsolete if left to fight for existence on the pavement of the Strand.
p.p.s. also probably sometimes the admissions decision at big state universities is bc they need cheap grad student labor and they don’t care toooo much if you drop out as long as they get a couple years’ teaching work out of you. but idk i think i am less of a cynic than some people in that respect. or like i want to believe that at least some of the people making these decisions have our interests at heart. idk it seems complicated.
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