So, I’ve decided to get back on the blogging wagon—though I’m not sure if blogging is a “wagon” in the sense of a “bandwagon,” or if I am referencing the metaphor of “falling off the wagon” in regard to my long blogging lapse. Either way, I’ve been chasing this ambiguously metaphorical wagon for some weeks now, and today I have finally caught up to it and leapt back on board.
Many of the things that are on my mind today can be summed up with the observation that I find myself at something of a crossroads with respect to my project of taking history classes and trying to work my way back into grad school. The current semester is teetering on the brink of ending: this week was the last week of classes, and although I still have to write an 8-10 page “take-home final” essay/paper this weekend :(, the class that I am currently/have been taking actually met for the last time this past Tuesday. I’m looking forward to being done with it and having my non-work time free to devote to other pursuits (especially with the weather getting so nice these days). However, the end of this semester also brings me to a point from which I’m not entirely sure how to proceed forward.
The main reason why I have been taking classes has been to forge relationships with professors who I might then be able to get to write recommendation letters for me when I decide to actually apply to the Ph.D program. I will need three such letters, and I have now taken three classes, each from a different professor/instructor—so in theory, I could now decide to go ahead and apply to the program. However, one thing that I’ve found over the past year and half is that when I’m taking a class, the demands that it makes on my time leave me with no time/motivation to think about or look into ideas for thesis/dissertation topics—and when I’m not taking a class, my need for a break after the months of stress and limited free time that I experienced while I WAS taking one has much the same effect. Even one class at a time, taking history classes while working full time is just plain hard.
So, in short, one reason why I hesitate to plunge on into applying to the program is that I’m no closer now than I have been at any other time in recent years to having even a tentative notion of what I want to do my Ph.D research on, and I’ve always felt that if I attempt grad school again, I want to go in with some kind of clue about that this time around. On top of that, there are the usual insecurities about whether I can even hack grad school or not (which have all been reawakened to varying degrees and at various times by the experience of taking classes over these past couple years). And of course, there’s also the financial feasibility issue. I’ve been operating all along on the assumption that when/if I manage to get accepted into the Ph.D. program, some kind of change in my work situation will be necessitated—and how exactly that will work out financially has never been clear. I know that everyone whom the history Ph.D. program accepts is given some kind of financial support, but I don’t know how much I could actually count on getting. My vague hope has always been that it would be such that we could get by with me switching to a part-time job of some kind. Of course, even if that does prove to be the case, the prospect of leaving my current job and trying to find something that would work out for me while I was in school is a daunting one with lots of scary implications.
I’ve also asked myself whether it wouldn’t be a better idea to take at least one more class before applying to the program, so that I can pick the best three of four professors to write recommendations for me (and/or have a backup in case any one of them is unable or unwilling for any reason). But this thought leads into another set of concerns. At present, the earliest that I could possibly enter the program would be the fall of 2010, because the history program only accepts fall admissions, and you have to apply by December 1st in order to be considered for admission the following year. So, if I were to decide to apply “immediately,” that would actually translate into getting my application in sometime in the next six months and then, if accepted, starting the program in the fall of next year. If I decide to take one more class first, and if I wanted a letter of recommendation from that class’s professor, I’d either have to ask for such a letter before the class was even over, or postpone my application an entire year. And even though going ahead with the application process now is intimidating and scary, putting it off a year—and thus putting off the possibility of actually starting the program until the fall of 2011—feels like putting it off for an awfully long time.
Maybe postponing a year is exactly what I should do—after all, that would give me some time to try to come up with at least a tentative topic to do my research on. But on that theory, I SHOULDN’T take any more classes in the interim, since that will tend to prevent me from making any progress toward figuring out a dissertation topic—but that, in turn, removes one of the reasons why I was thinking about postponing a year in the first place… It’s a catch-22. And then there’s the problem that the U is almost certainly going to cut back the “regents scholarship” (the program that allows me to take classes for free) so that I would start having to pay 25% of the tuition for each class, instead of being able to take them for free. In fact, the board of regents is voting on this callous, unjustifiable, staff-denigrating proposal this very day. This, of course, raises the question of whether I can even afford to take any more one-at-a-time classes prior to applying to the program—regardless of whether or not I ultimately decide that doing so would be the best course of action in other respects.
So, I have some thinking to do, and some difficult decisions to make. I don’t know if I’ll ever reach this goal of getting my degree—let alone the real goal of becoming a professor—and I constantly question whether beating myself into a wall working toward it is even the right thing to do. I haven’t yet convinced myself that it isn’t, though, so one way or another, I guess I’ll just keep struggling with it for the time being. That is, as soon as I figure out what the best way to go about that might be.