Thanks
Well, who knew it. Thank you, Dorothea, but a quick pronoun fix? I’m a girl.
How funny. I always figured it was obvious. Apparently not. And it’s startling how *weird* it is to hear the wrong pronoun attached to you. (Which reminds me of transgendered naming conventions — it’s hard to use a pronoun that doesn’t *look* right, and also to change — it takes me years to go from a full name to a nickname, if I can ever even make the switch.)
The job is a little less interesting than it sounds, but getting me a good grounding in things. It also pays *well*.
My department is indeed being kind. I’m not sure why; I don’t feel I deserve it. But I have my advisor, who will be helpful enough, and two people back at my undergrad institution who continue to be incredibly helpful.
I’m getting out early, and under less stress than I could have been. Which, because I am insane, feels like more of a failure than stickign it out until it killed me would be. My department, though a little crazy itself, tries to do the best for its students, more or less. It’s been responsive — we asked to have a student voice on faculty meetings, and they let us a bit, we asked for a better orientation for new students (as opposed to none), and they created one. The requirements aren’t crazy, there are no qualifying exams to put arcane material on (what came before c-command?), the faculty is, if not open-door, willing to make appointments for the near future. It’s small, which has all the good and bad features expected. It doesn’t hire many adjuncts, allowing graduate students to teach the full courses. (Good while you’re in the program.)
It has its limits, and it has a number of bad points.
But they’re just not so much crazy that it was them killing me.
The absolute worst is that now I feel renewed love for the field.
March 31st, 2004 at 7:43 pm
I saw that post, and wondered if I’d been mistaken about your gender; in the last month I learned that a blogger I read a lot was not male, but female, and it produced a really strange feeling in my head until I got used to it!
The second-guessing is terrible, isn’t it? Hang in there — things will get better! (I think it’s a good sign that you’re feeling renewed enthusiasm in the wake of your decision to leave — it suggests to me that the program was actually dampening your love of the subject rather than inspiring it. I hope you’ll find ways to have fun with it “outside”. :) )
March 31st, 2004 at 8:12 pm
Oops. Utterly my fault. Come to think of it, I don’t know hardly any female linguists. I have absolutely no idea why that is.
March 31st, 2004 at 9:23 pm
Rana:
Second-guessing is killing me. I sure hope you’re right that the program was dampening my spirit and not me — I think a problem (that I didn’t know would be one) is that suddenly I wasthrust into a place where no one does Austronesian linguistics. I get much more excited when I’m with other people who don’t need to have the whole thing explained every time. Not that that would likely have been enough, really.
Dorothea:
Don’t worry about it. I assumed the angel part was pretty female, though I guess the wolf bit isn’t. Not that it matters.
There are more male than female linguists, but I find the ratio is quite close to 50%. Both my advisors at my undergrad school were female; the two here are both male. I don’t know if that means anything.
April 1st, 2004 at 12:01 am
You know, I thought you were a guy, too. I don’t why I thought so. And I didn’t even realize I’d made that incorrect inference until I read your response to Dorthea. It might be the “wolf” part which seems kind of “guyish” to me. But maybe linguists have different sensibilities about language?
In any case, my guess is that you will be happily surprised by the so-called Real World. You’ve got a job! Great! It pays money! It’s related to your background! Wow! As for your renewed love of linguistics, I don’t know what to say, except don’t let it go.
April 1st, 2004 at 11:13 am
What susan said. It’s fine out here. And for what it’s worth, I left linguistics with a master’s over 25 years ago, I’ve never lost my love of the field, and the last couple of years (thanks to my blog-savvy stepson) I’ve been able to do something about it. Not to mention that my understanding of how language works has stood me in excellent stead in my professional editing career. Fear not!
April 1st, 2004 at 1:33 pm
Oh, and re: your job — What you’re actually doing at this point is far less important than that you’re doing it in a field of interest. Everybody starts out doing entry-level scutwork. The question is where it goes from there — and it often DOES go someplace.
April 2nd, 2004 at 3:50 pm
Yes, I’m looking forward to actually working. It may be put off as a full-time thing until next summer, depending on whether I decide to do any learning programming thing, but I will be working almost full-time anyways. I enjoy it, but it’s mostly from home, too.
But I’m sure I can do well with this, for both the experience and the recommendations (I’m always there to do a last minute job, even if it means 2 or 3 10 or 12 hour days).
Just because I like academia doesn’t mean I don’t like the real world. I’ve really liked many of the jobs I’ve had. I did translating of advertising, which was much fun — sadly, my boss lost that contract, and then no longer needed me. I would like something where I had to write, or edit, I think, also, but my French is not good enough.