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robotnik2004I'd better talk about 1998, because I'm three years into my memories of grad school, and I've managed to say nothing about school itself. Here goes. In the first year of a History MA/PhD, you take courses and write papers. Except for the freaky Jack Palance intensity of your classmates, it's not very different from undergraduate junior or senior year. In the second year of the program, you take your comprehensive exam. At Harvard, this means reading a few hundred books and then getting quizzed on all of them in a single two-hour oral examination. The general exam seemed scary at the time, but it was actually a pretty luxurious year. All we had to do was read. Then, assuming you pass, you get a Masters degree and you're ABD. ABD = "All But Dissertation," and isn't that a cute little phrase. In the neurotic world of grad school, it feels like telling a starving man he has "Everything But Food," or a penniless vagrant she's "All But Money."
So I was ABD but I had absolutely no idea how to write a dissertation, or even where to begin. You might think they'd give some instruction on those issues in the first two years of grad school, but I must have been home that day watching community access TV if they did. Things have changed a lot since then, and my department has done a great job improving mentoring and professional development in recent years. But for a long time, as one junior professor told me, the philosophy there was to release the ABDs into the stacks of Widener like animals into the wild, and simply hope they lodged in some nourishing niche of the intellectual ecosystem. After marinating in the world's knowledge for three or four or (cough) seven years, an Historian might well emerge. (Hee. Sorry. I find the use of the article "an" before the world "historian" pretentious and amusing.)
As I said, I had no idea what to write about. I'd come to Harvard to study U.S. foreign policy, but a low grade on an early seminar paper scared me across the hall to domestic history. (Low in a relative sense: it was a half-breed A-/B+, that unloved spawn of Ivy League grade inflation.) So I sank deeper and deeper into Widener, casting about for a dissertation topic. After foreign policy (level 2 in the stacks), I thought I'd write about yellow journalism (basement level B), and the circulation wars between George Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. But I couldn't find an original angle on that. I wrote a couple of fun articles on nineteenth-century pseudoscience (basement level C—are you catching the symbolism?), but I didn't really want to write on something kooky and fun. Endlessly defending and justifying an offbeat topic is a great way to grind the fun right out of it.
The thing is, I was being way too picky. I wasn't looking for a workable dissertation topic, I was waiting for something big enough and important enough to be A Life's Work. And maybe I thought it would come to me in a single flash of inspiration—like a light bulb would flare on above my head and in its brilliance justify all the tribulations of grad school. That kind of pressure is a great way of preventing any bright ideas.
In January of third year, students in our department present their dissertation proposals at a kind of pseudo-conference. It's designed to catch students who are drifting or directionless after the general exams. Like me! Three weeks before the conference, I still had no idea what I was going to do. My family went to Hawaii that year over Christmas, and what I remember about that trip is that it was no fun. Which is remarkable, because on a list of Things That Are Fun, my family and Hawaii are both near the top. But all I could think about was that light bulb that wasn't going on above my head, the brilliant idea I didn't have. Right before flying back to Boston, I told my parents I was going to drop out of grad school. They encouraged me to tough it out. Perhaps suspecting I was being a bit of a perfectionist, they said I should "just slap something together." It doesn't have to be Your Life's Work, they said. "Bang out a dissertation in a few months, get your degree, and then decide what you want to do with your life." Which is about the same proportion of sage advice (I was being a perfectionist) and optimistic lunacy (a few months?) that I usually get from them. (If I don't say it enough: thanks, guys.)
I've already told the story of finding those old telephone journals in the bottom level of the science library stacks, and how they reminded me for all the world of Wired and Fast Company and the New Economy boom rags of the day. (See? The department's philosophy works. I was just loose in the wrong library.) What got me down to the science library in the first place was an issue of Time or Newsweek that I read on the plane back from Hawaii, a Y2K-approaches thing that listed the greatest inventions of the millennium. On the cover was, you guessed it, Edison's light bulb. Gah. God is a hacky screenplay writer.
My presentation for the conference was still kind of a mess. ("The Culture of Technology and the Technology of Culture, 1880-1910." Geez Louise.) But I sounded convincing or at least enthusiastic about my new topic, and I opened my talk with a pretty good joke, which was one more joke than anybody else made, and that joke cracked up Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and everyone ended up remembering me as the hit of the conference. So I was golden. The rest, as they say, is history.
...
Shout out to my Robinson Hall cronies! There were some great great people in the years ahead and behind me, too, and also people doing the history of all them other countries, but I can't list everyone, so here's to the incoming Americanists of 1995. The diplomatic history guys, with their Robert McNamara brush cuts and Marine Corps work ethic and unfashionable love of Winston Churchill. I was sorry to leave them, but the domestic U.S. history gang, sloppier yet just as brilliant, became my real home. Lisa (not my Lisa), our social organizer and surrogate Mom. She feigned insecurity about her scholarship while all the time writing what turned out to be one of the best goddamn dissertations about the Civil War in the last twenty years. And Isa, everybody's best friend and/or secret crush, this super fun tomboy chick who just happened to be so smart and beautiful you'd snort with disbelief if she was in a book or movie. And Chandra, a brilliant unstoppable historian to put the rest of us to shame, the kind for whom it really is 1860, and the whole twentieth and twenty-first centuries are just a sort of foggy dream. (She wrote the other best damn Civil War dissertation—just don't drop it on your foot.) And Jon, technically a Latin Americanist, but a good friend to have in your corner. So pugnacious and intense that my girlfriend at the time (not Lisa), herself a PhD student at Brandeis and no intellectual slouch, had recurring nightmares about not being smart enough to hang out with him. And Dan, who is quite simply the King. Along with Steve, Dan is my best friend from Harvard, no question, and I owe him the world. We saw every bad movie of the late 1990s together. (Daylight, remember that one? Or The Great White Hype? Schwarzenegger's End of Days? How about Play It To The Bone—when we came out of that we even scared ourselves with what we had become.) We had a million unhealthy meals together and a million hilarious conversations. We endlessly, ruthlessly strategerized the hunt for jobs, for intellectual cred, and for women. If 1998 was the year I started to get the hang of any of those things, Dan was the reason. Thanks, Dan!
Don't forget: Doyle's, 3484 Washington Street in JP, tomorrow night at 7.
So I was ABD but I had absolutely no idea how to write a dissertation, or even where to begin. You might think they'd give some instruction on those issues in the first two years of grad school, but I must have been home that day watching community access TV if they did. Things have changed a lot since then, and my department has done a great job improving mentoring and professional development in recent years. But for a long time, as one junior professor told me, the philosophy there was to release the ABDs into the stacks of Widener like animals into the wild, and simply hope they lodged in some nourishing niche of the intellectual ecosystem. After marinating in the world's knowledge for three or four or (cough) seven years, an Historian might well emerge. (Hee. Sorry. I find the use of the article "an" before the world "historian" pretentious and amusing.)
As I said, I had no idea what to write about. I'd come to Harvard to study U.S. foreign policy, but a low grade on an early seminar paper scared me across the hall to domestic history. (Low in a relative sense: it was a half-breed A-/B+, that unloved spawn of Ivy League grade inflation.) So I sank deeper and deeper into Widener, casting about for a dissertation topic. After foreign policy (level 2 in the stacks), I thought I'd write about yellow journalism (basement level B), and the circulation wars between George Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. But I couldn't find an original angle on that. I wrote a couple of fun articles on nineteenth-century pseudoscience (basement level C—are you catching the symbolism?), but I didn't really want to write on something kooky and fun. Endlessly defending and justifying an offbeat topic is a great way to grind the fun right out of it.
The thing is, I was being way too picky. I wasn't looking for a workable dissertation topic, I was waiting for something big enough and important enough to be A Life's Work. And maybe I thought it would come to me in a single flash of inspiration—like a light bulb would flare on above my head and in its brilliance justify all the tribulations of grad school. That kind of pressure is a great way of preventing any bright ideas.
In January of third year, students in our department present their dissertation proposals at a kind of pseudo-conference. It's designed to catch students who are drifting or directionless after the general exams. Like me! Three weeks before the conference, I still had no idea what I was going to do. My family went to Hawaii that year over Christmas, and what I remember about that trip is that it was no fun. Which is remarkable, because on a list of Things That Are Fun, my family and Hawaii are both near the top. But all I could think about was that light bulb that wasn't going on above my head, the brilliant idea I didn't have. Right before flying back to Boston, I told my parents I was going to drop out of grad school. They encouraged me to tough it out. Perhaps suspecting I was being a bit of a perfectionist, they said I should "just slap something together." It doesn't have to be Your Life's Work, they said. "Bang out a dissertation in a few months, get your degree, and then decide what you want to do with your life." Which is about the same proportion of sage advice (I was being a perfectionist) and optimistic lunacy (a few months?) that I usually get from them. (If I don't say it enough: thanks, guys.)
I've already told the story of finding those old telephone journals in the bottom level of the science library stacks, and how they reminded me for all the world of Wired and Fast Company and the New Economy boom rags of the day. (See? The department's philosophy works. I was just loose in the wrong library.) What got me down to the science library in the first place was an issue of Time or Newsweek that I read on the plane back from Hawaii, a Y2K-approaches thing that listed the greatest inventions of the millennium. On the cover was, you guessed it, Edison's light bulb. Gah. God is a hacky screenplay writer.
My presentation for the conference was still kind of a mess. ("The Culture of Technology and the Technology of Culture, 1880-1910." Geez Louise.) But I sounded convincing or at least enthusiastic about my new topic, and I opened my talk with a pretty good joke, which was one more joke than anybody else made, and that joke cracked up Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and everyone ended up remembering me as the hit of the conference. So I was golden. The rest, as they say, is history.
...
Shout out to my Robinson Hall cronies! There were some great great people in the years ahead and behind me, too, and also people doing the history of all them other countries, but I can't list everyone, so here's to the incoming Americanists of 1995. The diplomatic history guys, with their Robert McNamara brush cuts and Marine Corps work ethic and unfashionable love of Winston Churchill. I was sorry to leave them, but the domestic U.S. history gang, sloppier yet just as brilliant, became my real home. Lisa (not my Lisa), our social organizer and surrogate Mom. She feigned insecurity about her scholarship while all the time writing what turned out to be one of the best goddamn dissertations about the Civil War in the last twenty years. And Isa, everybody's best friend and/or secret crush, this super fun tomboy chick who just happened to be so smart and beautiful you'd snort with disbelief if she was in a book or movie. And Chandra, a brilliant unstoppable historian to put the rest of us to shame, the kind for whom it really is 1860, and the whole twentieth and twenty-first centuries are just a sort of foggy dream. (She wrote the other best damn Civil War dissertation—just don't drop it on your foot.) And Jon, technically a Latin Americanist, but a good friend to have in your corner. So pugnacious and intense that my girlfriend at the time (not Lisa), herself a PhD student at Brandeis and no intellectual slouch, had recurring nightmares about not being smart enough to hang out with him. And Dan, who is quite simply the King. Along with Steve, Dan is my best friend from Harvard, no question, and I owe him the world. We saw every bad movie of the late 1990s together. (Daylight, remember that one? Or The Great White Hype? Schwarzenegger's End of Days? How about Play It To The Bone—when we came out of that we even scared ourselves with what we had become.) We had a million unhealthy meals together and a million hilarious conversations. We endlessly, ruthlessly strategerized the hunt for jobs, for intellectual cred, and for women. If 1998 was the year I started to get the hang of any of those things, Dan was the reason. Thanks, Dan!
Don't forget: Doyle's, 3484 Washington Street in JP, tomorrow night at 7.
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no subject
Date: 2005-06-17 04:37 pm (UTC)I just realized I'm not entirely sure I've ever been to JP. Or if I have, I'm not sure I knew it.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-17 04:46 pm (UTC)Option 2: drive
Option 3: take the T (it's on the Orange Line)
The link there is to Google Maps, which could get you started, but let me know if you're driving or taking the T and I can send you directions.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-18 01:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-18 03:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-18 03:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-17 04:55 pm (UTC)There was a flashback for me. :)
no subject
Date: 2005-06-17 05:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-17 08:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-17 10:39 pm (UTC)