poco_puffs

housing crisis

sports nut

acute angle

Fall term doesn't start for another month at my school, but I am trying to get a head start on some of the reading for my Medieval Lit course where most of the texts are going to be in pure, unadulterated Middle English, which I can't read any faster than a six year old trying to pick through Tolstoy. I had started on one text in particular, which was listed specifically in the course description, by finding it online through the publishing company that I found out this prof. works with. This text, plus one other, was supposed to be offered in print form through the bookstore. When I went to buy the textbooks for the course, I couldn't find those specific pieces ANYWHERE in the textbooks. The question is this: Is it ever okay to email a professor a month before school starts to ask about texts for Fall? Is that just too dang early? Will they look up from sipping their margaritas in the hammock, and scoff at my asking such a presumptuous question as "Did you update the reading load? Should I not spend any more time on these particular bits of lit?" Adding to that, is it completely wrong or somewhat acceptable to ask for a rough draft of the reading list (humbly acknowledging that it might change)? Will I seem like a totally clueless, brown-nosing grad school noob and completely ruin my reputation before ever setting foot in the classroom? Or is it something that they're used to? I say this knowing that I probably won't always read ahead for my courses, but she made a point in the course description that they would be moving through the Middle English at a pretty good clip. I'd like some time to get into the swing of the language and warm up my brain before jumping full bore into Fall Term. I'll be taking the course with a bunch of bona fide Medievalist PhD students, so I don't want to be the one holding back the course and making a compleeete fool of myself.

Are you physically ready (moved in, geared up, whatever) to start school in the Fall? Because if you are, and you're already funded, then I say go for it. You've already crossed a huge hurdle even getting admitted, the people who read your application though you were worthy of coming into their program, and even if you just gave it one term or one year to see whether you can hack it-- well, it just seems like you climbed all the way up that big big ladder to the high diving board at the pool, no one is yelling at you "Get down! What the *(&@ are you thinking??" and you've already got your toes at the end of the board. Why not take the plunge? It sounds like you've got an early case of impostor syndrome that we all keep talking about. I've heard it goes away, especially when you realize that a lot of other people feel the same way, and the professors who are supporting you are doing just that-- supporting you, teaching you, giving you their time. There is already a truckload of uncertainty on the job market, whether you're coming out of high school, or a four-year degree, or your master's. There aren't any guarantees. If you got in with funding for a period of time, and an advanced degree might open a few more doors, take advantage of the bone that academia just threw to you and that you earned, even if it seems like the work you did in undergrad is nothing compared to grad.

hail mary

I've been scouring the University's main pages and my own department pages with no luck, but then today I checked the "Prospective Students" page and found the link I was looking for. I guess we're having a resource fair, some speeches, and then an Open House and Ice Cream Mingle. The international graduate students get a whole series of lectures, and I think I'll be crashing the one where graduate students talk about life in this city and balancing their schedules. It seems applicable to a far wider section of the student population than just the international students.

gladiator sandals

Are all the orientations going on right now for the schools that are starting at the end of August and the beginning of September? Fall term at my uni doesn't start until Sept. 27th, and the week before that is "The Week of Welcome," but I have absolutely no information on what will be happening. I know there's still about five weeks before school begins for me, but I'm getting antsy to know about my new email address, ID card, work schedule for my fellowship etc. If the "reception" during the visiting weekend is any indication for my school, it's gonna be department-provided snack trays with wine and beer brought in by students, although someone was saying it gets classier for certain occasions. I remember hearing that the department functions are pretty fun, and both professors and students have a good time. Something tells me I won't raise any eyebrows if I wear a cute little dress and a sweater.

last stand

I have to ask, especially since I couldn't find anything straight off, but what is the advantage of an Amazon Prime account? Is it primarily a shipping discount or other specials as well? I'm not sure if it's this way for all of the humanities, but as an English Lit person my "textbook" situation is a bit different. Depending on the course, I have to buy anywhere from six to ten books, sometimes even more, and in general they range anywhere from $5 to $20 apiece. When I've research buying them online in the past, the sheer effort to find and buy a few dozen small books is rarely worth the slight discount in shipping, so I end up buying them used at the university bookstore where they're all in one place. I've never been comfortable with online shopping in general, for clothes or books or anything in between, so maybe I'm just behind the game. Has anyone else with a textbook situation like this figured out an economical solution more convenient than Amazon or the university store?

That advice had the nicest tone I've come across for pieces like this. I'm wigging out about starting school again, especially after not doing ANYTHING but sitting around my apartment for months, so it's good to have some nice grounded stuff that acknowledges the anxiety that will come and then pass in time.

wasting disease

Edit: I posted something in response to one of the pairs earlier. I fail at this game

I agree with this to an almost pathological degree. I lived with my older sister's family (husband, daughter, dog etc) for a few summers. Her sweet, loving, damnable dog destroyed one of my books, and my sister called my cell phone while I was on the hour-long bus ride back home. She had thrown the book away immediately, and couldn't even tell me which title it was and couldn't understand my near-hysteria at not knowing whether the dog had chewed up one of my favorite, precious books.

I have a nice collection of books after double majoring in English and History as an undergrad, and I kept virtually every single one because I always planned on grad school and eventually teaching. I also held onto a lot of non-major textbooks, like the Geology text that had great overviews of Earth and climate science, and the Psychology textbook that had explanations of all the basic theories and terms. I figure those function as more reliable references, with better illustrations and tables, than most websites and Wikipedia. I don't crack them open as often as my "major" reference books, but it's still comforting to have them. I do have a fetish for a well-stocked and well-organized bookshelf. If someone asks me a question, I revel in the ability to go to my shelves, find the right book, and open it up to the right page or chapter. In the interest of cutting down on the volume of books I own, especially under pressure from my boyfriend/roommate, I have donated quite a few books to charity. Most of *those* were novels that I can easily find at the library, or will never read again, or reference works that I will either never reference or be able to look up elsewhere. As it stands right now, my two 6' shelf units are full, and I have a table full of novels and off-topic reference books that want boxed up. Getting the whole collection to the new city in the recent move was a trial and a half, but re-organizing them was like catching up with good friends.

I agree with this. The way my professors and a member of an adcomm that accepted me expressed the idea is that you could find an obscure source piece for your writing sample, but it won't translate as well to the potentially very wide variety of readers who will be going over it to assess your scholarship potential. A fresh take on a canonical work, on the other hand, means that they will probably be more familiar with both the work itself and previous scholarship, thus making them more comfortable in an assessment and highlighting your ability to elbow your way into an existing argument. I reworked a close-reading paper on Bleak House for my writing sample, and it lacked practically any theoretical backbone at all, but I took a somewhat unusual approach to class and gender in the novel through the lens of medicine. My undergrad professor told me she had read the book well over a dozen times in the last 40 years, but never read some of my highlighted passages in the way that I... well, highlighted them. Something as historically, metaphorically, linguistically and otherwise rich as Gawain is just ripe for you to bring a new eye and a new pen to the discussion! I'm excited for you, and I mean that wholeheartedly. Also, re: Strong Flat White, that was one of the best pump-up speeches ever, and after a long day on the internets you helped renew my faith in technologically-expressed humanity.

There have been times where my back and shoulders get very tense and off-kilter, mostly from sitting around or standing on my feet for too long, and I've done a modified version of Tai Chi that gets things moving more gently than yoga. I've tried yoga when I'm that tense, and it's almost too rough on my system to start out being super-bendy. I'm thinking if my old injuries are bothering me this much in my mid-twenties, I really need to find a maintenance routine that keeps things moving as I get older-- watching my parents freeze up in the last few decades has been a tough preview of what aches may come.

Rachaelski: I've worried about the running, myself. My body went through a rough adjustment phase when I started, and one of my knees felt like an airbag had gone off behind my kneecap. Things are fine now, but I still worry about the wear on my joints. I've known plenty of runners, especially those who use the toe-first form, who manage to keep their knees and lower legs in working order after years and hundreds of miles, but knowing my history with joint injuries already it makes me worry. Biking is a good option, especially in this city, but traffic and accidents truly unnerve me since an accident I had a few years ago where I broke my shoulder. Swimming isn't an option either, since I can't swim! Gyms get over-crowded, especially on the much-loved ellipticals and stationary bikes. So running it is... for now. $5 a session yoga though! I wish I could find something that cheap around here! Has anyone ever here ever tried Tai Chi? I'm only somewhat interested in it for the posture and joint health/fluidity, and moreso for the focus and control.

I can affirm that the OSU English department is very small in scale and not really a "destination." In spite of that, there are some true gems in the faculty, and they have done a great job of hiring passionate young professors to fill the ranks. I spoke with one of the young guns in the department a few years ago, before I started the application process, and he made the point that OSU is great from a teaching/working perspective-- there is a great sense of teamwork, people aren't overloaded with students or courses, publishing and editing still happens at a pretty good clip, and there isn't that stress of "We must be the BEST." I can only hope to be so lucky to teach in a department like that someday, whether it be small or large. Something I know that I'll have to get used to at my new school is the fact that their English department IS a destination. It's not the underfunded underdog, like it was at my old school. Instead of 200 English majors at the whole university there are whole armies of them, and dozens of graduate teaching fellows, and reading groups out the yin-yang. I'll have to re-align my sense of under-represented persecution, since I won't be such an academic outcast anymore

Yeah, the student lounge provided at my undergraduate English Department had leather couches and whatnot, but no windows and a no food/drink policy. As a result of some exploration, I found several other student lounges with.. oh... windows, computers, comfy couches, vending machines, air conditioning etc. My favorite was the lobby of the very well-funded engineering building (their alumni actually made money with their degrees). They had these CRAZY comfortable leather chairs and couches, an awesome coffee shop that made the best sandwiches on campus, all with light pouring in from the two sides of the building that were nothing but windows. I got loaaaads of reading done in that environment, and I caught countless history professors from the neighboring building taking advantage of a building that had functioning climate control and post-Cold War amenities.

I don't think I'll get an office until the second year at my program, and I'm a bit worried from some of the examples I saw in my building. I don't know if they were representative of all of them, but it was probably a 10x12 space shared by two to four people per office. My biggest concern is the fact that none of the grad student offices appear to have windows at all, and I'm a window person. My brain needs a brief shutdown period every 30 minutes or so, and looking out a window for a minute or two really does the trick without breaking me from my rhythm. I guess in the end I'll probably just do my office hours in the office, and find somewhere else on campus to fulfill my well-lit, tree-gazing needs.

Minor nitpick for the benefit of future applicants, but there's an important distinction to make between University of Oregon and Oregon State University. UO has the great English program with Medieval and Folklore programs within the department, and OSU is more of an agricultural, forestry, engineering, business school. I only make the point because I'm going from OSU, which has a rather minimal English program and no MA/PhD program for English students, to UO, which is much sunnier territory. I, for one, am terrible with all other state schools. It causes no end of consternation when I talk with my boyfriend's father about sports teams, and I'm sure it will cause problems at conferences later in my career.

True that I'm not a morning person, but my preference for running at night result from a burst of antsy energy and anxiety I get around 8-10 pm. I'm a pretty low energy person in general, and that's really my only time where my body WANTS to get moving. I think what I'll end up doing is try to move my whole schedule earlier, and maybe I can push it to earlier in the evening. I took up yoga at the tail end of my undergraduate, and it was great for my anxiety, my posture, my various aches and creaks, and all sorts of other things. I can only see the stress and the hunched over studying increasing in the next several years, so that is something in my own personal regimen that I need to hold onto. Hell, the breathing and inner focus alone helped with work stress and frustrating moments galore, and I see it coming in handy before presentations and social functions.

I'm wondering the same thing, especially since the gym at my grad university has a reputation for being extremely over-crowded. The running habit I was building up in my hometown has gone by the wayside because of the stress and hassle of moving, and now that I'm settling in I've realized that my neighborhood isn't the best for evening and night runs, which are kind of my thing. I'll be biking too and from school quite a bit, most likely, but I'm also harboring this fantasy that I'll get a troop of other antsy, frustrated grad students together for games of tag or skipping. I miss all the ways of keeping fit that are only socially acceptable when you're 10 or younger