1.30.2006
Cruise control
In the realm of exciting news, I just booked our very first cruise! We'll be going on Royal Caribbean's "Sovereign of the Seas" (that's the ship's name) in May, two days after my semester exams are over, and the ship is going to two different places in the Bahamas. It'll be warm and sunny (we hope) and relaxing, and we'll get to visit places and do things we've never done. I'm so stoked! Since this is my last semester, it feels weird in a lot of ways, so it's neat to have something so fun to look forward to after my exams are over and I turn in my last term papers. =)
What follows is a post I started to write last Tuesday, which I'm now finishing because I figured out what else I want to say. I love the fact that I can save a partial post in Blogger and come back to it before I post it. Anyway, here are my thoughts from Tuesday, plus some extra from tonight tacked on to the end:
Today was a chilly, humid day. The sky felt smaller and colder than usual. It wasn't a bad day, but it was grey. It was just the sort of day when I wanted to listen to Miles Davis's Kind of Blue on my iPod. The slow, mellow sounds of Davis and his band may have influenced my mood, or I may have wanted to listen to the album because I was already in that sort of mood, but the day unfolded in a grey way, reminding me of a comment that a professor made last semester when he was asking us to bring in the music we liked to listen to: "You are your playlist." The thing I love most about my iPod is that I can decide what to listen to at the very moment I put the earphones in my ears, rather than having to grab a CD in the morning and hope that it corresponds with my mood. For the first week I had my iPod, the only thing I wanted to listen to was Fauré's Requiem, making me oddly calm for about a week. Since then, I've loaded it up with all of my favorite albums, but I've made a point of adding some music I don't normally spend a lot of time with, like the jazz that always seems so attractive but that I can't just sit and listen to for long stretches. Jazz is, however, perfect walking music on a grey day.
The whole semester has been grey, actually. I feel like I'm being phased out. When I was an undergrad, I took most of my classes with people in my year, so in my senior seminars, we were all at relatively similar places in our school careers. At LSU, though, most of the classes I take can be taken by any grad student at any time as long as s/he has passed the diagnostic exams, so in my first semester, I was with a lot of students who knew a lot more than I did. As I've progressed, though, the balance has shifted, and now that it's my last semester of coursework, I've got more experience with these professors and this knowledge base than most of the other people in my classes.
Last Tuesday, I was obviously feeling separated from the other students. I have only one class with the other theory people, whom I know well and consider friends, and in my other classes, I feel kind of like an outsider. I remember Jeannette's going through something similar last year, during her last semester, and she had to add the fatigue and craziness of pregnancy (and her long commute) to all that as well. I'm still having a great time in my classes, as usual, but since I've been here longer than just about everyone else, I've heard the professors mention the same things several times now, and I sort of feel like the torch is being passed to the next group. Don't get me wrong; giving up the torch is a good thing. I'm ready to teach my own classes and be a self-sufficient adult, even though I still have to write a dissertation before most anyone will let me do that full-time. I know the routine of classes like the back of my hand, and I'm ready for something else. But it's still a little bit sad. I'm seeing things a bit from the professors' perspectives now -- the things they take care to mention each time they talk about a certain subject, for example -- and it's fun. They're giving me a lot to consider about how I want to teach. But I'm still sad, likely because I used to think I could stay in school forever and just keep being handed knowledge. Practically speaking, that wouldn't work, and I mostly don't want it anymore. I want to be a professor. That means, however, that I'm going to be a different sort of lifelong learner than I thought I wanted to be. School is easy. Figuring out what to learn and then doing it myself is hard for me. Staying motivated is even harder.
Anyway, the cruise will be good. We went to Florida for a weekend last year over my spring break, but other than that, we haven't taken a vacation alone since our honeymoon. I like Jack, so it's good to escape with him and go be adventurous. And when I get back, I'm going to have nothing ahead of me academically but my massive general exams and my ever-more-massive dissertation. I tell you, I'm going to feel so much better when I have a dissertation topic.
What follows is a post I started to write last Tuesday, which I'm now finishing because I figured out what else I want to say. I love the fact that I can save a partial post in Blogger and come back to it before I post it. Anyway, here are my thoughts from Tuesday, plus some extra from tonight tacked on to the end:
Today was a chilly, humid day. The sky felt smaller and colder than usual. It wasn't a bad day, but it was grey. It was just the sort of day when I wanted to listen to Miles Davis's Kind of Blue on my iPod. The slow, mellow sounds of Davis and his band may have influenced my mood, or I may have wanted to listen to the album because I was already in that sort of mood, but the day unfolded in a grey way, reminding me of a comment that a professor made last semester when he was asking us to bring in the music we liked to listen to: "You are your playlist." The thing I love most about my iPod is that I can decide what to listen to at the very moment I put the earphones in my ears, rather than having to grab a CD in the morning and hope that it corresponds with my mood. For the first week I had my iPod, the only thing I wanted to listen to was Fauré's Requiem, making me oddly calm for about a week. Since then, I've loaded it up with all of my favorite albums, but I've made a point of adding some music I don't normally spend a lot of time with, like the jazz that always seems so attractive but that I can't just sit and listen to for long stretches. Jazz is, however, perfect walking music on a grey day.
The whole semester has been grey, actually. I feel like I'm being phased out. When I was an undergrad, I took most of my classes with people in my year, so in my senior seminars, we were all at relatively similar places in our school careers. At LSU, though, most of the classes I take can be taken by any grad student at any time as long as s/he has passed the diagnostic exams, so in my first semester, I was with a lot of students who knew a lot more than I did. As I've progressed, though, the balance has shifted, and now that it's my last semester of coursework, I've got more experience with these professors and this knowledge base than most of the other people in my classes.
Last Tuesday, I was obviously feeling separated from the other students. I have only one class with the other theory people, whom I know well and consider friends, and in my other classes, I feel kind of like an outsider. I remember Jeannette's going through something similar last year, during her last semester, and she had to add the fatigue and craziness of pregnancy (and her long commute) to all that as well. I'm still having a great time in my classes, as usual, but since I've been here longer than just about everyone else, I've heard the professors mention the same things several times now, and I sort of feel like the torch is being passed to the next group. Don't get me wrong; giving up the torch is a good thing. I'm ready to teach my own classes and be a self-sufficient adult, even though I still have to write a dissertation before most anyone will let me do that full-time. I know the routine of classes like the back of my hand, and I'm ready for something else. But it's still a little bit sad. I'm seeing things a bit from the professors' perspectives now -- the things they take care to mention each time they talk about a certain subject, for example -- and it's fun. They're giving me a lot to consider about how I want to teach. But I'm still sad, likely because I used to think I could stay in school forever and just keep being handed knowledge. Practically speaking, that wouldn't work, and I mostly don't want it anymore. I want to be a professor. That means, however, that I'm going to be a different sort of lifelong learner than I thought I wanted to be. School is easy. Figuring out what to learn and then doing it myself is hard for me. Staying motivated is even harder.
Anyway, the cruise will be good. We went to Florida for a weekend last year over my spring break, but other than that, we haven't taken a vacation alone since our honeymoon. I like Jack, so it's good to escape with him and go be adventurous. And when I get back, I'm going to have nothing ahead of me academically but my massive general exams and my ever-more-massive dissertation. I tell you, I'm going to feel so much better when I have a dissertation topic.
Labels: listening miscellany, school, travel
- posted by erica 1/30/2006 10:33:00 PM
-
Comments:
Hola! Going around pinging people... Nicole sent me folks' websites. I'm glad to see someone I knew from band in high school has stuck with music. I thought it kind of sad that up to reading your stuff, everyone else seems to have left music behind. Including me, but I'm hoping that is temporary.
A very belated Congratulations on getting married! All of y'all are making me feel like some old spinster with all of this marriage stuff going on.
A very belated Congratulations on getting married! All of y'all are making me feel like some old spinster with all of this marriage stuff going on.
# posted by 
: Fri Feb 03, 10:53:00 AM EST
: Fri Feb 03, 10:53:00 AM EST
Exciting about the cruise!! Sounds fun! :-)
I hear you on the torch being passed, I get that feeling too in our weekly developmental program meetings with faculty & grad students. It's always interesting to me to contrast the arts/music PhD training model with the social science one. For instance, your last semester is defined by finishing classes, but that wasn't quite such a finite point for me. I recognized it (I had this revelation that, "hey this is the last time I'll be on the student end of a classroom, that's weird!) but it was anticlimactic since other aspects of my work since then are still bound to the campus--going to talks of job candidates or visitors, running studies, attending lab meetings, supervising research assistants daily, etc. So, it didn't feel so different for me pre vs. post coursework. It seems that it's going to be REALLY different for you though. I guess it's the nature of our different fields--since in social sciences we have to rely heavily on dept/university resources to run studies, whereas (as I understand it), in arts/music, your resources for your general exam and dissertation are primarily your advisor, your brain, your computer, maybe an instrument or recordings, and the library! Anyway, most of the people I'm surrounded by are in my program (fellow "tools of the university system" as Z would say! LOL!), so I see no diversity of graduate training models. Interesting!
I hear you on the torch being passed, I get that feeling too in our weekly developmental program meetings with faculty & grad students. It's always interesting to me to contrast the arts/music PhD training model with the social science one. For instance, your last semester is defined by finishing classes, but that wasn't quite such a finite point for me. I recognized it (I had this revelation that, "hey this is the last time I'll be on the student end of a classroom, that's weird!) but it was anticlimactic since other aspects of my work since then are still bound to the campus--going to talks of job candidates or visitors, running studies, attending lab meetings, supervising research assistants daily, etc. So, it didn't feel so different for me pre vs. post coursework. It seems that it's going to be REALLY different for you though. I guess it's the nature of our different fields--since in social sciences we have to rely heavily on dept/university resources to run studies, whereas (as I understand it), in arts/music, your resources for your general exam and dissertation are primarily your advisor, your brain, your computer, maybe an instrument or recordings, and the library! Anyway, most of the people I'm surrounded by are in my program (fellow "tools of the university system" as Z would say! LOL!), so I see no diversity of graduate training models. Interesting!
Lori! It's great to hear from you! I'm glad you found my blog since it moved. =) What are you up to? Drop me an email me at ericaATjackandericaDOTcom.
I'm so jealous that you're going on a cruise! That should be our next girls trip.. a short crusie somewhere tropical. You can get pretty decent deals on them from what I've researched. I expect lots of picutres and a detailed report of how it was, K? So I can live vicariously through you.
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