Semester two’s in the books. (Already?)
The biggest difference: semester one felt like it was approximately ten years long. Semester two felt like it was approximately ten seconds long.
Groove
I like to walk, and I’ve noticed that a walk always feels longer the first time you walk through it. Later, when you know the route, the same walk seems to fly by.
Perhaps part of why I felt the semester move so quickly was because I figured out my routes. I know I need exactly three little hand towels to dry off after a shower at the gym. (Showering at the gym every day saves me 70 bucks a month.) I know exactly what to throw in my lunchbox and where to leave the note so I don’t forget it the next morning.
Perhaps the most well-developed routine is the snack spreads I do for department colloquy. It used to be a mad dash to get things chopped and prepped before people started walking in, and now we have it down so pat that we’ll regularly finish with an hour to spare. I took a nap once in that hour. It was awesome.
An acquaintance of mine, Rees Draminski, selects a personal word of the year, and in 2024 it was groove. I think that’d be my word of the semester, if I had one (I won’t steal his idea). He writes about wanting a “feeling that I was doing the right things from week to week,” and I think that’s pretty close to the contentedness I feel.
Ordo ab chao
“Order out of the chaos.” Over winter break, I sorted my tangled web of ideas into a list of projects with cutoffs between them. In principle, I thought, with the reassurance that the other projects would wait on the list for the right time, I’d be able to pick a project number one and spend a semester focused solely on that.
Did I do that? Ehhhh, kinda. Indeed I reached my milestone for project number one, but the path there was full of lulls in activity. I’d kick a ball into someone else’s court and find myself with a few days of downtime and ideas in the back of my head gnawing at me.
On my “idle” days I let myself give in to whatever was interesting at the time. But instead of tangling my web further, with the list in hand I could tell exactly which goals I was working in service of. By semester’s end, my “idle” days revealed even more order in the “backlog” projects: some I was more excited by, some I was happy to leave by the wayside. When project one wraps, there are some obvious candidates for next in line. Nice!
This loose priority ranking is coming in handy at time of writing, when I’m preparing for a fieldwork trip this summer. With my limited time I can start with the most important things and work my way down. Fingers crossed this goes well.
Delivery
I’m going to contradict everything I just said and assert that, honestly, I wasn’t that much focused this semester than I was last semester. Perhaps the biggest difference was rather that I hit a critical mass of stuff to be able to start writing and submitting things. The writing, finally, justified the wandering. No longer was I the guy with a bajillion ideas: I was the guy whose bajillion ideas got him to a draft of a qualifying paper.
You know what this reminds me of? Work. In industry there was more frequent metacommentary about people’s ideas of company culture: the company valued, and rewarded, collegiality and teamwork and good vibes. And I’m sure those things were well-appreciated on a personal level. (To my coworkers, I miss yall!!!) But in practice, the biggest predictor of the allocation of reward was what people produced. As a former boss (miss you too!) put it, “it’s all about delivery.”
I shouldn’t be surprised that academia, in its own way, is the same. I’m grateful to be appreciated for the other things I bring to the department, but the pressure’s on to be productive. This is not a new idea. This is publish or perish. But sheesh.
I said what now last time?
Reading over my semester-one-in-review:
- I’m a little better at putting things aside. When my current primary project has things that need doing, I’m good about prioritizing those. When I have downtime, I’m still scatterbrained, but I kinda like it that way. This is tentatively a good balance.
- I stopped caring about grades again, which is nice.
- I did a little better at having hobbies. I wanted to try swing dance and aerial arts, only to find that both clubs didn’t make a comeback this semester. Gah! I find that when I’m at school I make mental notes to do things I enjoy before getting home and fermenting in bed for a few hours. But I spent a lot more time just vibing, playing Tetris on the school computers, idling on Discord, cooking and eating. Maybe I’m just not a hobbies kind of guy.
I made the right choice
There were ten calendar days between my last day of work and my first day of class. I spent a lot of time my first semester, mentally, still living at that job, feeling bound by its pressures, sussing out its relevance to my current situation. I felt defeated, like I went to grad school because I left the job, not the other way around.
Sometime this semester my brain finally made the switch: I’m here because I want to, I chose to, and I like it. I’m glad I’m here. It’s a good feeling.