Orals

I completed my reading year, and finished my oral comps this morning. I will begin the written exam on Monday.

My chair gave me a few minutes of feedback afterwards in preparation for the written exam, and at some point in the conversation she asked me if I liked being a student. "YES!!!!" I said, looking up into a giant pine with a leap in my heart. I have always loved being a student, from the first moment I picked up a crayon and asked my mum to show me how to write my name. I crave data.

"Well," she said, "all that's over. That's what the exam means. This is the point when your life as a student stops, and you become an [academic]."

*I pause and think about the implications*

"If you don't like this part - sustaining an original argument - , or you don't think you can do it, then don't waste the next three years. Because this is what academics do. But I think you can."

I wonder if I haven't been infantilizing myself in the way that I inhabit this model of information absorption. It's rather misleading, and entirely pejorative. I'm so, so old to be suddenly trying to change into an adult. In one week. Can I change how I see myself from a fat, wrinkled graduate student to something astute, something stately, as some kind of authority?

Short answer? No.

Long answer: Probably not, but don't give up until you've tried.

Longer answer: How much of your success really depends on your self-image? I mean, besides the "all of it" that pop psych would ascribe. Freud and the post-Freudians would probably say that your imago, your ego-image is the mediation between the subject and object, and therefore "all of it." You have two days to fix yourself.

Longest answer: 

I have options. If I want to retrench into a safer space, or remain in a passive reader model, I absolutely can. I can sustain it indefinitely. But in order to achieve a PhD I need to be adaptable to other models as well: scholarly models of entering the conversation as some kind of authority. What I find most frustrating about that adaptability is that it is not taught: it's another one of those things that is somehow invisibly embedded in the discourse of academia. It's a fluency issue, and it's that fluency that is at the heart of all of my academic nightmares. I'm not talking about words - that's another issue. I mean the behaviors and value systems. I mean the pattern of reader response that creates a "unique" perspective. It means that graduate papers are hit-or-miss guesses, and until you hit on a formula that yields favorable results, you're screwed. Like all Discourse, this cannot be taught. It can only be learned through patterns of observation and imitation, and will only be successful through an apprenticeship. Ultimately, my committee are asking by this examination whether I am ready for a journeyman phase.

See the above "longest" answer.