I woke up thinking about your queries about establishing relationships with advisors, AM. Good question. Good Enough Woman, your relationship with your advisor sounds ideal. I've spent the past year on the look out for my ideal advisor. [I've had a substitute advisor here because the professor origanally assigned to me had to leave for personal reasons. Since my "sub" is a Renaissance scholar, he will not be involved in my dissertation.] So that has been a little odd. I do visit him once a month to ask questions about where I should be, what classes I should take, etc. In the meantime, I've "adopted" a group of advisors for myself based on their interests and how they intersect with mine. I look up their bios, familiarize myself with their work, and schedule face time. I visit three professors I've had fairly frequently -- even if it's just for a few minutes -- to ask questions, run through ideas, and discuss paper topics. I've also forced myself to become more email savy. I write to professors when I can, and I notice that they are all very responsive via email. I've also noticed that some professors get very excited about topics that speak to their interests on some level. They all seem to be pretty hands-off to a certain degree, so I feel as though it's important to initiate as much contact as possible.
I found that one of the most interesting (and I guess surprising) aspects of yesterday's workshop panel was the idea that we have to take a lot of initiate with our orals committees, organizing the committees to suit our interests and accomodate our strengths. I'm not sure I had really thought about it, and frankly, I didn't realize we could have that much power/participation in the process.
A Story: I went to my Romantics professor and told him my ideas for my lists, and he was willing to be on either of two of them -- the critical theory spaces/places list or the Radical Romantics list. His words were, "I can do that." We discussed it further, and he told me that when I had decided what to do I should come up to him and say, "Radical Romantics, yes." In the meantime, he has already given me a list of seven books for two of my lists based on my interests. I don't know if any of that helps, but that's some of what I've been doing.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I'm not sure if I'm glad I don't have orals or if I feel disadvantaged without them. Either way, it's great for me to hear your overview so that I can take action to ensure I'm where I should be in terms "expertise." Does anyone ever have a list based on one author? Or is that too narrow? I want to make three lists that relate directly to my dissertation topic but that also broaden my c18 expertise. I think one of my lists might be something like "Passion and Plato: 1660-1760." I like thinking about these list titles. By the way, SafiaK, feel free to call me GEW for short. :)
It's interesting that in trying to think of lists, I'm realizing the ways in which I need to figure out how to weave together the threads of my dissertation topic. As I try to come up with lists, I realize that I'm not quite sure what I'm doing.
Single author lists: One of my lists was actually going to be just Spenser, but I got bogged down in some of the political allegory and had trouble finding a common thread I wanted to follow in all his work. So I switched to looking at female communities in Spenser (just FQ) and Shakespeare. I think our uni generally discourages single author dissertations as too limiting (esp. for teaching prospects), but my advisors were open to me doing a single author thesis given my particular teaching goals (i.e., not a research uni job or high-tier liberal arts).
At UMass, our orals committee is made up of four members: an advisor for each of the two areas, and two other faculty members of the departments choice (but the grad director was happy if we found people who were willing). Also, one member had to be on the graduate studies committee. Even though the department allows 2 hours for orals, mine was barely an hour. The committee (all relatively new profs) really regarded the exam as a chance to review my work and look ahead toward the dissertation. The best advice I got going in was to see it as a chance to discuss what you're interested in with four really smart, really well-educated people. Having folks on my committee that I'd love to have drinks with made it a much more comfortable conversation.
On Weaving Threads: One of the comments at my orals was that I was great at handling questions on particular works, but had trouble with some of the broader questions--how my work related to major issues Ren critics deal with (e.g., performativity, boy actors/gender issues), particularly ones that the committee members work with. One advisor said that falling short on the big picture questions is quite typical at the exam stage, and figuring those out is part of the work of the dissertation. So GEW, it sounds like you're in the right spot, and that making the lists is doing for you what it should.
SafiaK, I'm glad you've got good advisor leads. Having advisors you work well with make all the difference. I actually switched one area advisor from a famous Ren scholar who was notoriously difficult to work with (but who people did work with for the all-important letter of rec) in order to avoid certain tensions. I was certainly a lot less freaked out facing a room of friends.
Post a Comment