" title="Notes from an Accidental Scholar"> Notes from an Accidental Scholar

I started grad school 5.5 years ago with stars in my eyes and a dream to teach and write among the anointed intel­li­gentsia. Now it’s Spring Term 2011 and I’m still work­ing on the first chap­ter of my dis­ser­ta­tion. I have a ton of excuses — I had a baby, dis­ser­ta­tions are hard — okay, just two excuses, but now that I’m fin­ish­ing up year 6 of my pre-doctoral career, my men­tal state is shift­ing from gen­eral anx­i­ety to sheer panic. Throw in some despair about the aca­d­e­mic job mar­ket and you can see how hid­ing under my blan­ket, in a well, under a moun­tain on the LOST island seems like a rea­son­able fantasy.

My biggest strug­gle comes from my habit of think­ing about my project, rather than within it. I found this 4-year old post on Tim Walker’s blog, What I’ve Learned So Far that addresses this very prob­lem. Walker calls it “workiness”:

Writ­ing a dis­ser­ta­tion (and, to a lesser degree, pass­ing qual­i­fy­ing exams) requires you to take fairly intan­gi­ble goals — build­ing a body of knowl­edge, con­tribut­ing new ideas to your field — and turn them into a (quite long) series of (daily, pos­si­bly bor­ing or painful) con­crete tasks. That’s hard to do. The temp­ta­tion, instead, is to keep­ing think­ing ABOUT your intel­lec­tual project, to keep read­ing ABOUT it and talk­ing ABOUT it, instead of work­ing THROUGH your project. The dis­tinc­tion may not sound like much, but it makes all the dif­fer­ence in the world. For as long as you stay “meta” with your topic, so that you’re off to one side of it, you don’t achieve real clar­ity on it, and you don’t put your guts into it. This is a tempt­ing state in which to abide, for thinky grad stu­dents who are prone to over-abstraction.

I’m hooked like a junkie on think­ing about my project. When I think/read/write about my dis­ser­ta­tion, I get a really nice dopamine fix. This comes from the inherit poten­tial of my project: I think “It could be won­der­ful!”; “It could show the world that I’m smart!” and that “I belong!” When in real­ity, the goal of the dis­ser­ta­tion project isn’t to ful­fill these dreams. A won­der­ful dis­ser­ta­tion is a fin­ished dis­ser­ta­tion. No one will think I’m any smarter when it’s fin­ished. No one ques­tions whether or not I belong, because most peo­ple are too con­cerned with whether they belong to notice. I get all this. But it doesn’t stop me from free-basing my dissertation’s poten­tial greatness.

So isn’t this blog just another out­let for a meta rela­tion­ship to the diss? Yes and no. My prob­lem is over-indulgence. If I can mod­er­ate this meta think­ing, reduce it to bite-sized, 1,000 words-or-less chunks, I think I can use “Dacia Takes Note” as a doc­u­men­tary space for the process of writ­ing and completion.

I just fin­ished catch­ing up on Nate Simpson’s blog, Project Waldo, about his jour­ney from an idea to completion/success through unem­ploy­ment, despair, and lots of videogames. He human­ized the cre­ative process with hon­esty and gen­eros­ity — char­ac­ter­is­tics often obscured or even frowned upon in acad­e­mia. The suc­cess of Project Waldo wasn’t sim­ply in his tone and writ­ing, but that his blog serves as a toolkit to facil­i­tate the cre­ative prac­tice as process.

I will write much more about the “prac­tice as process toolkit” later, for now I have worked on this post for an hour and its time to look at my dissertation.

Thanks for reading!