The First YearWhat I remember best about my first year in graduate school is what didn't happen, what I didn't know, what no one on the department's faculty bothered to tell me. I spent my last graduate school semester working in the office which held all the new graduate students; judging from their reactions to their first experiences in graduate school, that hasn't changed. No one on the faculty ever told me that the graduate secretary had copies of all the old MA exams. To tell the truth, no one ever told me about the existence and whereabouts of the MA reading list! No one ever told me that the office posted the next semester's offerings far in advance of the university timetable's appearance -- this becomes important when one must get one's next semester's schedule signed by one's adviser a full week before the timetable is scheduled to appear. I learned these things from other students, usually after nearly exploding in frustration. It's worth noting here that the main social support for graduate students in this department is teaching; what no one on the faculty ever bothers to say, students learn from each other in the big communal TA offices. I didn't teach, my first three years in the department -- my Javits fellowship basically forbade it -- so I missed out on a lot. There was plenty I didn't know about classes, too. My second semester, I signed up for a seminar on La Celestina to be taught by a guest professor from the Hispanic Society of America. Little did I know that this man had no intention of actually teaching; he only wanted cheap labor for a project of his. Aside from reading a prepared paper and showing a few videos, he did nothing whatever to prepare for his classes. Instead, he handed us a time-consuming, pedagogically worthless project to do (minute comparisons of various stage and screen versions of the drama to the actual text) because he wanted the results. (I don't know whether they've been published, and I don't especially care. He had us sign away all rights to our work shortly before the semester ended.) Call me naive, but although I had heard the usual horror stories about exploitation, I was too dumb then to realize that it was happening to me. The professor, on the other hand, seemed to know perfectly well what he was doing; when he handed us evaluations to fill out at the end of the semester, he said he had no desire or intention of reading them, because he wasn't sanguine about our good opinion. I'm sorry to say that I did not give him the poor evaluation he deserved. This was not, unfortunately, the only class I took my first year in which I did not know enough to evaluate the class and professor properly. I suspect a lot of professors, in this department and elsewhere, get away with a lot of garbage in lower-level graduate courses because they can count on student naivete. The students get burned, of course, when MA exams and Ph.D preliminary exams come around and the professors haven't come close to adequately preparing students for them -- but by then, the course evaluations are long over. (I have commented on my experiences in survey courses, with benefit of hindsight, in the section on MA exams.) I did enjoy the pedagogy class I took. The professor used to ask me on casual meetings in the halls or the elevators how I was doing, and whether graduate school agreed with me. He also complimented me once or twice on my writing style. These commonplace courtesies loom rather large in my memory because, in all honesty, I have trouble remembering any compliments on my work or any sincere concern for my progress from any other professor in this department. The professor who called to tell me I had passed my MA exams complimented me on my High Pass on the Golden Age section, I remember that. One of the linguistics professors took the time to comment personally on one of the several seminar papers I wrote for him. I don't remember anything else. Ever. It wasn't that I didn't try for approval. Of course I did. (Excuse me if I go a little beyond my first year at this point.) Once I decided on linguistics as my specialty, I tried very hard to do the kind of work that attracts attention. In the first seminar I took from the other linguistics professor (whom I shall call Dr. A because he figures prominently in this account), I did a project which was in my opinion rather more complete and better-documented than those completed by others. (The project was a linguistic analysis of a text in Old Aragonese.) I heard nothing about it, aside from the A I received in the course, and as far as I know, everyone in the course got an A. Over time, I became the fastest paleographic transcriber in the department (typing 90+ words per minute helps!). I never heard anything about that, either. It never seemed to matter what kind of work I did or how well or how fast I did it. I almost never got any feedback beyond the bare grade. I never expected to be ignored. Honest criticism, even when negative, is preferable; at least it shows that someone is taking an interest. Eventually, I started wondering why I myself should care about my progress or my projects, since clearly no one else did. I am very proud of my BA and what I accomplished as I pursued it; I really did learn things, really did grow, really did begin to contribute to human knowledge. In contrast, I feel no especial pride over my master's degree, which is surely rather sad. I don't feel that it marks any real growth in my understanding; it signifies only that I warmed chairs in classrooms for two years and barely managed to pass a test... |