As someone who takes great time and pride over titles in my work I am disappointed in myself. “Lauren’s Blog”, hardly sets the world on fire does it? It’s brief, it’s accurate, but it’s just not sexy.
Today’s plan… I think i might try and pull my finger out and get on with some work on my “Monstrous Geographies” paper. I know what it is basically, I’m going to argue that what makes zombies scary is the way the change our relationship to space, not the fact that they want to eat our brains. I’m considering trying to use Some Bakhtin, but i havent read him since undergrad, and I’m not 100% sure he’ll be appropriate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakhtin#Rabelais_and_His_World:_carnival_and_grotesque Specifically his work on the carnivalesque.
I love the vocabulary relating to his work. Now I’m off to crowbar “Heteroglossia” into a facebook status update.
I just read this and I recognize this behavior as something I used to do all the time as an Undergrad.
http://gsas.columbia.edu/content/writing-resources?q=node/378
I used to be a terrible binge writer. I hear loads of people talking about it in the classes I teach, especially in the first year classes. I can’t say I’ve never pulled an all night-er during my masters but it’s something I would defiantly try to avoid doing now. On the other hand, I always had the best sleep after handing in an essay I stayed up all night to polish. My inner editor is a pain in the butt and has caused me many a sleepless night.
Not exactly a “new year’s resolution” but a 15th of November’s resolution…
Update more!!
I’m reading a pretty good article at the moment so I thought I would share it:
“How to become an iconic social thinker: The intellectual pursuits of Malinowski and Foucault.”
http://est.sagepub.com/content/15/4/427.full.pdf+html
Pretty interesting stuff!
Today I came in at lunchtime expecting to do some work, and it appears I have spent 5 hours doing nothing.
nothing at all.
well… I did eat lunch and I have had 8 cups of tea. I even spent a good half hour reading all of the staff 20 question thingys on the schools website. I now know that lots of the lecturers here have very similar tastes in writers and no taste at all in music. 😉
And would you believe it I just distracted Emily (the other sociology blogger) with my musings on whether its “thingys” or “thingies”…
My motivation is at zero.
This might be because I’ve just had my last supervisor meeting of the year and although I leave them full of beans the few days after I find it hard to get started.
Never mind… Tonight Emily and I are going for a curry with some people we vaguely know. I started a face book group called “Not just another night out on the lash” because I was bored of just going to the pub. This way I could tempt friends and friends of friends into fun and frolics that might involve drinking but would also involve something more adventurous. Well since then a few of the people on the group decided to start going for curries together regularly. Which works out fine for me because my boyfriend HATES curry, so I have people to go with.
Yesterday was productive. I went to a http://www.britsoc.co.uk/ thing at Northumbria and met some REALLY interesting people… and I was also reminded of why I am not a fan of feminist sociology. (Yes gender is important, but I find a lot of people labouring under the F words are just as suppressive as the ideas they are fighting against.-but thats a rant for another time.)
Long-time no Blog!
It’s been a while hasn’t it? I received a subtle poke via email that strongly implied that I should make an update …or else… I’m only kidding… or am I?
So, I bet you’re wondering what I’ve been doing with my time whilst blog dodging? Well, it’s been crazy. The last month especially has been a rollercoaster of terrifying anticipation, personal victories and a dearth of socialising. I’m normally a work hard / play hard sort of person, this month has been all work and no play. I have become a VERY dull girl.
For a long time things were quiet… too quiet. I was just plodding along, doing; some reading, some writing and some teaching. The run up to Easter and Easter itself was pretty mellow. So I thought, well, this seems like a good time to do some “CV building”, and as I’m sure you might have guessed by the fact I wanted to blog about my student experience I’m a ‘keener’, if someone asks for a volunteer my hand is in the air like a shot. I need to curb it, it’s a bad habit, and it has led to everything heaping up at the end of term. So my last month has been really stressful, fun, exciting, educational, but stressful.
One of the biggest time devourers that I have lumbered myself with is ACTION 2012: Social renewal. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great! A truly exciting an interesting opportunity, but it is a little time consuming. In a nutshell PhD’s and postdoc’s from across the university come together to tackle a problem, this year it’s social renewal. So we formed groups, I’m working with a diverse bunch, different nationalities and backgrounds and we have to develop a technical solution to resolving a problem of social problem. It’s early days, but this means meetings, training, brainstorming and form filling. It’s consuming mentally as well as temporally. All that said, I’d recommend anyone who is in the first year of their PhD go for the opportunity next year. I have found it quite educational and I’m really excited to see how it pans out, but be warned it is a massive commitment.
May is the season for “annual progress reviews”- The APR is basically how the university makes sure you haven’t spent the last 9 months playing solitaire and drinking Lambrini. It’s actually supposed to be a supportive process where a fresh pair of eyes look-over your work and they chat to you about your choices and ideas, but no matter how nice it’s supposed to be no one ever likes the process, it’s a bit like applying for a job and then having job interview… but it is WAY more important.
The first step is filling in a big form and submitting some work. Personally I found this bit the worst step, because it’s that tedious form filling and box checking that I loathe. The mere sight of a form is enough to send me into a dyslexia induced panic cycle. On the other hand, it has made me realise just how valuable the E-portfolio system is… and how slack I’ve been in filling it in. It was a bit of a rude awakening, it reminded me how chaotic my working style can be and how I should probably try and be more organised. The second step is the meeting, but I’ll return to that later.
After submitting the form (“of doom”, as I like to affectionately call it), I had the HASS (Humanities and Social Sciences) first year conference. This was something that I had helped organise. Months before I’d helped develop the name, the poster and suggested a key note speaker (who ended up being the one to close the conference) which was all peachy. However, now I had the training modules on how to present, a presentation to write and the other setting up and on the day responsibilities to juggle. It was all pretty overwhelming, and time consuming. Still, everything was alright on the night, I helped people check in, I chaired and presented. I was extremely pleased that about 4/5 people came to my room specifically to see me present! I love my project!
So once that was over I had my Teaching Assessment to look forward to. Remember earlier in the blog I mentioned that I was taking part in ACTION 2012? Well as part of it I swapped some teaching hours with Mark, the lecturer for whom I’m running seminars for this term. Teaching twice as many seminars in the last week of term seemed like a great idea at the time, in hind sight, maybe not. So this coincided with my assessment, and it meant I had to work with a bunch of people I had never run a seminar for before. So I was a bit worried, I wouldn’t know who was likely to have done the reading, if they were a vocal group, or anything I like to work out as early as possible to help me with my teaching. It was all needless stress, they were a pleasure, the class went well, and I received a really good review. This was probably the sweetest of all my personal victories. So yeah, the rest of the week’s teaching went largely without a hitch. However only two people showed up for my 9 am seminar on the Wednesday, those girls are troopers!
On that same Wednesday all the first year PhD’s, myself included, had our progress reviews. So did a couple of the more senior people. Everyone was a little on edge, my colleague Emily was up fist. She came back after 23 minutes, quite happy and that was that. My meeting was later in the day, so we had lunch and I continued to fret and prep in equal measures. I was quite lucky I knew one of my panel and didn’t know the other member. So Kate tried to put me at ease before it all kicked off but it was quite nerve wracking and intense! Remember how I said Emilies was 23 minutes? Mine was at least an hour more than that. It was useful and productive, but I’m glad I have a year in between them!
You know you spend too much time trying to write academically when you want to finish your final paragraph with something like “in conclusion” or ‘to conclude:’. )
Don’t let this put you off if you’re reading this blog to get a flavour of what being a PhD is like. It’s great. It really is. I was a fraught few weeks, but after every achievement I felt myself feeling better about my position than before. If you imagine it like setting up a chain of dominos and then knocking them down, that’s what it feels like. Frustrating, then exciting, then over.
This whole belly dancing malarkey isn’t playing out! I went for a few lessons, and now I’ve missed two, so I suspect I might be a bit behind! Last week I was feeling a bit rough, and this week I was so totally engrossed in uni work I missed the time I needed to leave uni to get there. Oh well, I think I might sack it off and take it up again next term. I can’t let my amazing jingly jangly scarf go to waste can I?!
So today has been really good. I had a nice supervisorial meeting. Rob and Elaine liked the photos I’d taken and the notes I’d made, so that’s great. I’m looking forward to summer when exploring these places will be pleasant. The days I went out and took photos were awfully cold and dreary!
I’ve really gotten into the swing of being at uni. I’ve started coming in more frequently, I’ve got a stash of coffee and tea in the office, actually I even have a stash of breakfast cereal and pot noodles. I’m such a student!
I’m quite excited, next week I start my teaching assistant work again. This semester I’m TA-ing on Regulating Sexuality. It was one of my favourite modules as an undergrad so I was pretty pleased to get the gig!
The rest of this week is a little quiet, busy socially but quiet uni wise. Then it reverses next week, and it’s all business! I’m very excited, this week it’s skeptics in the pub on Wednesday, a thing on the science of light on Thursday, tea with a friend on Friday, I’m not sure about Saturday, and tonight I’m off to the cinema to see The Gray. I hear its rubbish, but it’s cheap night so who cares, right? Next week will be all work and no play, teaching, a HASS lecture and I was supposed to have a PGR lecture but it’s been cancelled, so good bye to my free lunch!
Well, it’s been a while hasn’t it?
You would not believe the amount of times that I have sat down to begin writing something for this blog and then stopped. More often than not it’s what you might call “non productive uni work guilt”. You know, when you’re doing something for uni that isn’t uni work, but you have uni work you should be doing? Well…. I know what it is. When its not NPUWG, it’s “ooo my cows need feeding on that facebook game, hang on people are talking at me on facebook chat, ooo I missed Eastenders last night lets watch that on Iplayer.” or as I like to call it semi-professional procrastination. The internet is too full of wonderful tempting irrelevancies!
So, what did I promise to talk about? Oh yeah the Christmas party and the HASS module.
The Chirstmas party was awesome. We had secret santa and a bring something meal. Now don’t get me wrong, the PhD community at Newcastle is a VERY friendly group, but I suspect there’s a lot of competitiveness between us when it comes to baking (yes, baking). So many of us are amazing at cooking, there was mulled wine, mince pies, pizza, Mexican lasagne, so much yummyness. I made pumpkin and apple muffins and chocolate truffles in 3 different flavours. I must admit that I wouldn’t have put so much effort in if I wasn’t trying to make an impression on the other PhD students I don’t know well. I was tempted just to pop into the shops on my way there and bring in a bunch of pre-bought snacks, but I’m glad I didn’t! The secret Santa was fun too. Iain got me a “do your own graffiti” mug. Inspired by my last dissertation on toilet graffiti I’m sure. I LOVE it! It was supposed to be anonymous but I knew exactly who would get me that. I would like to tell you all what I got for someone else, but I think its still a secret!
The HASS module I mentioned was “The nature of explanation and enquiry”. Hand’s down it was by far my most favourite module offering from HASS so far. Basically every lecture is an introduction to different perspectives, for example Feminism or Marxism. I was introduced to ideas like Hermeneutics for the first time and recapped old favourites like Bourdieu. I was so disappointed that I wasn’t offered this as part of my MA, it would have been SO useful to me back then, but now I’m fairly committed to my love affair with Situationist – Psychogeography- reinterpreted sociologically. Also, I would have liked more lectures. I’m sure other students will hate me for saying this but there were weeks where we only had one lecture and others where we had two, honestly, I could have stood for three. I love lectures, it’s like watching TV but more stimulating. So the assessment was 500 words on three different topics. I chose:
Karl Popper- would he think your subject is scientific? (If your wondering, good old Mr Popper slates the unscientific nature of many social sciences, so sociology is a psudo-science, and to be honest I don’t think he would be particularly thrilled by my philosophical perspective. After all, I doubt you can falsify affect.)
Something about Marx’s ideas on how society evolves. (I’m not a massive Marx fan, but it seemed doable in 500 words)
and
How has feminism changed the way your field understands knowledge. Which I found quite fun. A couple of the other PhD students are ardent feminists and I quite enjoy playfully winding them up. So now I feel like I have a little more knowledge with which to back up my playful prodding.
Obviously I’ve paraphrased the questions a little bit, not that I expect next years PhD students to read through this blog, but just in case they do I’ve vague-d it up a bit. I did feel that 500 words was a bit limited as an assessment, but who am I to criticize?
Can you guess what THE most important thing I learned from this entire process was? I learned that I was not on the HASS mailing list, so I’ve been missing HASS emails. Oops!
A serious plus point about the module was having group discussions run by a music student come psycho geography fan, a lovely French lady called Elodie. She was really fun to work with and mediated the group so well! Talking to her really helped me identify more literature I should be reading.
In other news, I took one half of my “how to teach” class. It was supposed to be a two day thing, but alas the guy who was giving the class was poorly on day two. I did pick up some handy hints, I found that having done some teaching and found my strengths and weaknesses it was more useful than it would have been had I had no experience.
On the non uni-personal life stuff, I had a lovely Christmas and New Year, Christmas was quiet, we don’t really celebrate it in our house. New Year was nice. In my family we traditionally go to the beach for a bit of a wander around and to grab some chips during the day on NYE, which is by far my favourite family tradition. On NYE proper I went to a house party and met lots of new people, which is by far my favourite thing about parties! Also, I’ve ALMOST finished decorating my bedroom. I’m can’t wait to move in! I will post pictures soon. I nearly forgot to mention that I went to a friends wedding. It was amazing. The bride and groom looked lovely, and they had a cake made out of cheese as a gluten free alternative to wedding cake! On the same day as the wedding the boy I had been dating decided we should make our relationship “official”. Nothing has changed other than our facebook status’, the internet exacerbates the awkwardness of human relationships sometimes, don’t you think?
Well, this is getting to be another self-indulgently long post isn’t it?
Next time I’ll tell you about how I’m progressing with uni, and tribal belly dancing. Fellow Sociology PhD Emily and I have taken it up. We’re hilariously bad!