Keep Fallin'

My real complaint about grad school by Jill
For a while now, more specifically for the past year and a month or two, I've been thinking about and trying to articulate my various opinions about graduate school, specifically the Masters program in Film and Literature at Northern Illinois University. I've often bounced back and forth between feeling utterly hopeless as a grad student--that I don't belong here, that this is not what I want to do, that I'm a tourist and will be found out shortly, that I am a complete outsider in the world of academia, and feeling alright with everything and that I eventually will become a professor and will love doing it. One of the more important aspects of my inner-debate that I keep coming back to and am thinking about currently is the writing of academic papers. I am able to write very formal papers, but seldom willing to do so. I hate. Let me repeat, I really utterly depside, detest, abhor, and hate, fucking hate writing formal papers. Funny that I'm a grad student in English, you say. When I'm allowed to be somewhat informal, I feel better about writing essays. Needless to say, I have found many opportunities to write in a style that suits me throughout my academic career. I am in a course this semester that looks to be quite the opposite, so I am very much looking forward to writing a paper for that professor. Anyway, formality/informality aside, I have almost always looked at papers as simply something assigned to me. There have been some occasions where I actually wanted to write a paper, where I felt I had something to say and something to contribute to the pile of literary interpretation, but the ratio of these times to times I have had to write a paper is something like 1:10. I think my biggest (personal) issue with graduate school as a system (and I'm speaking very loosely here since all I am basing it on is my personal experience in my particular field in my particular part of the humanities in my particular university) is the writing of papers. In my ideal version of grad school that was in my head, I pictured a lot of reading and discussion. I pictured actually becoming a Master in the field in which one was studying. Devoting two to three years to really get to know your shit. To read as much as possible what's been written for and about your field of study, and to talk about it with learned people and other pupils eager to gain this knowledge. That by the time you were done, you could go to a cocktail party, and someone could ask you about post-modernism (yay for inside jokes), and you could speak knowledgably for a good amount of time without ever resorting to pulling things out of your ass. I'm alright with being tested about knowledge at the end, I'm alright with writing a thesis on something specific that you spend a lot of time on, I'm not alright with writing term papers simply because the professor can't think of a more original way to track how much you've learned and worked over the course of a semester. And let me pause here to reiterate that I'm simply writing about my opinion and experience. I'm more than willing to concede that I'm alone in my complaint here because maybe I'm just very lazy (which I am) and a slow reader (which I am) and like to complain about things (which I do) and perhaps need to always be in the position of railing against the norm around me (which is quite possible). Maybe I enjoyed my undergraduate experience because I was someone who like school in the middle of many people who were there because they were told to go there after high school, and now I'm no longer someone who is different or special and am around people who really like school. Perhaps I'm finding out that I like school because I knew my way around the system and did whatever I felt like doing within the confines of the educational system and didn't like actual jobs, and now I'm seeing that maybe I didn't really like school, I just liked doing what I wanted and the opportunity to not do work. Anyway, I want papers to be organic. I don't want to be forced and pressured to skim over various texts to find enough bullshit that supports some argument I don't really care all that much about making to fill twenty pages. And I realize that I'm papers are supposed to be organic, and that I'm supposed to read rather than skim things and really care about my argument, that I'm supposed to find something in the text I really care about arguing. But the thing is, I need more time to do that. I want to find a subject I like on my own, not because I have a deadline approaching. I then want to read everything I can find (that is not completely dull and uninteresting, in which case I will really try to read, but most likely end up skimming) on the subject, so that I actually know what I'm talking about in the paper, mull it over in my head a while until I feel confident in the matter and sincerely argue something. I want to become an expert in whatever I'm writing about so that I feel I can write about it. I'm not willing to become an expert (or even try that much) in every subject of every class I take. I admire those students who go the extra mile for every assignment and read something three times over and look up everything that they are confused about or find interesting, etc. I can't do that. Not with three classes, two sections to teach, friends to hang out with, a boyfriend to miss, TV to watch, music to listen to, movies to see, and more interesting things to read. I think I'm losing any conciseness and organization that I may have started out with here. Anyway, the point is I want to want to write papers, I want the process to be more natural, and I want to actually learn things in grad school. The whole idea of learning things just for a test or just for writing a paper has never felt more real or more appropriate than it does right now. And that just makes me sad, makes me think I'm wasting my time, and makes me want to work at a bookstore or in a videostore so that I can at least try to live up to my ideal grad school on my own. All this being said, I still think that I may feel differently about an MFA program in poetry, but I also know the odds of my being disappointed with that are pretty good. I know that I complain about grad school a lot, either in talking to people or in writing this blog, but it's something that I think about quite a bit and I can't help myself.