Last night my PhD advisor (who is my secondary/back-up supervisor) invited her students and postdocs to her house. Her students are all Assyriologists (as is she) and all know each other. As a non-Assyriologist who had only met a few of the other students, I have no idea how I got on the invitation list but I was REALLY EXCITED to go. Visit a Cambridge professor's natural habitat? Cool!
My advisor has just moved into a "cottage" in a little town outside of Cambridge, called Waterbeach. I often cycle to Waterbeach along the river path just for fun (although my suggestion that my friend and I cycle to the party got rejected by a hailstorm) and it's a beautiful little place with narrow streets lined with rowhouses. My advisor's new house has a garden with a pond, and her ceilings are low and stairs crooked. There's a shelf full of nail polish jars in her kitchen, and every wall has a bookshelf. But instead of academic books, these shelves are absolutely full of novels, alphabetized by author's last name. For example, only A-C fit on the first floor, and the rest, she told me, are on her bedroom shelves or in boxes.
My advisor lit a wood fire for us, and we all chatted about new projects to digitize clay tablets with cuneiform writing on them (which is what everyone there studies). A few people independently promised me, smilingly, not to make jokes in Akkadian (the ancient language written on the tablets, whose jokes I obviously wouldn't get). I didn't know whether to feel welcomed by that or feel like this joke ban was killing their fun. We talked about the crazy things people do at academic conferences (last year's Assyriology meeting had an impromptu pole dance?!) and the dire job market. We talked about Germany, where my advisor has just spent a year and where several of her students are from, and France, which was having its national election yesterday, and the US, whose national election campaign promises more future comedy for European (and all other!) observers.
Funny that we study people who span literally 20 millenia (ancient Babylonians to my preparators), yet we as academics have a lot in common.
Monday, 23 April 2012
Monday, 26 March 2012
When it rains, it pours.
England is in a severe drought. They're already calling for "hosepipe bans" this summer (so you can't water your "garden" with running water from the "hosepipe" but instead have to use water you catch from your roof in a "water butt". Really!) and there are clips on the news showing fish being rescued from rivers whose water levels are too low for the fish to survive. (No one says what happens to the "rescued" fish... I wonder if there's a recent glut of fish and chips on the market?)
So I meant this title as a metaphor, in the sense that I got 5 job rejections in 7 days, followed by a few dark days of disappointment, followed by two of my articles being printed on the same day. ?!
It would be nice if these rollercoaster peaks and troughs could be spread out a bit across my usually boring life. But I'm just really glad they happened in that order. Having two shiny new journals on my desk made it feel worthwhile to get back to work even though no one wants to hire me. At least I can tell myself that I'm producing knowledge, if not income.
So I meant this title as a metaphor, in the sense that I got 5 job rejections in 7 days, followed by a few dark days of disappointment, followed by two of my articles being printed on the same day. ?!
It would be nice if these rollercoaster peaks and troughs could be spread out a bit across my usually boring life. But I'm just really glad they happened in that order. Having two shiny new journals on my desk made it feel worthwhile to get back to work even though no one wants to hire me. At least I can tell myself that I'm producing knowledge, if not income.
Saturday, 17 March 2012
Naked
Nakedness was an unexpected and unusual theme of this week.
Last weekend, one of my favorite friends invited me on her annual birthday trip to the nudists' colony on the River Cam, for a naked swim with a bunch of her friends. Whoa. Honestly I was more concerned about the temperature than about the nudity, but when her birthday turned out to be a gloriously sunny day, I got talked into it. Funny that when everyone's naked, it doesn't matter, and you forget about it! What a surprise. There were groups of naked old guys hanging out on the grass in the gated nudists' colony, with a shoulder-high shrub between them and the fully-clothed punters on the river. They said hello and offered to share their bottle of wine. (!) We declined and went straight for the water, which was, according to the nudists' official blackboard, 7 degrees C, 45F. OMG. It was not so much swimming as being shocked and gasping and desperately trying to not swallow the notoriously polluted water. We stayed in about three minutes, which the regulars on the grass said was about normal for this time of year. My friend was satisfied that she'd marked her 25th birthday with her usual annual swim, and I didn't have hypothermia, and none of us got the 24-hour vomiting bug that people who drink Cam water get, so overall it was a success? Funny how different things make different people happy... it was kind of idyllic to swim in a river and then to sit in the sunshine with your friends - and some strangers - for some peace and natural drying-off. And no wet swimsuit to deal with. :)
Today my college offered a life drawing class, which means drawing a naked model. I have a friend who does a lot of modeling for art classes like this, and talks about it as very calm and art-focused and not sexy. I didn't really believe her, but life drawing classes are a bit of trend in Cambridge lately and I really like to draw, and - let's face it - I was really curious. So ten of us sat in the Clare Hall meeting room this morning with a pile of paper and pencils, one art teacher, and one naked woman. My friend was right that it's amazing how quickly you forget that the angles and negative space you're drawing belong to a person. However, the teacher kept breaking the sort of unspoken denial of that fact by looking at our drawings and saying things like, "No, you've done her breast all wrong, it's got more of a peak to it" and "Measure the nose-to-bottom distance carefully"... but everyone kept their focus and there were no giggle outbursts (though I came close - when the model sneezed. Have you ever seen a naked woman sneeze? Apparently I hadn't! It is a whole-body experience.). But honestly, I'm not convinced that the class would have been different - besides being less awkward - if we'd drawn a bowl of fruit. Trying to get perspective right and measure proportions and sketch in shadows is really fun, whether you're drawing somebody's armpit or a coffee cup. Also, I suspect that there are rarely male models in drawing classes, and that doesn't seem right. If women are going to be objectified in the name of art, men should too. Although I wonder how the class's attendance rate would have been affected if we'd drawn a still-life instead of someone naked?
It's funny how few naked people I've seen. Not on TV, I mean, but in person. We always had individual locker rooms in high school. I don't remember being naked with my brothers, to swim or play in the bathtub or whatever. Is this an American prudism? Germans are well into nakedness, such that kids rarely wear anything at the beach and both their parents tend to wear only Speedos. The French and Spanish are similar. The Brits are more like us - they wear full wet suits at the beach, but more for reasons of temperature than modesty I suspect - but even they have a nudists' colony on the river Cam. Maybe my experiences with nudity this week are one more step in my Europeanification?
An unpleasant feeling of nakedness also happened this week, with the arrival of my first job rejection. Ouch. Sending an application detailing who you are as an employee, as a scholar, as a person, feels revealing, and makes you vulnerable. Then when that application is not wanted, you feel personally violated. Right? This could just be me, and everyone says it gets easier as you get more rejections (really?!), and of course the worst thing you can do is take rejections personally, but still... it's hard not to feel naked in front of a selection committee. And not in the interest of beauty, like art models, or the liberating joy of a German kid at the beach, but in the self-centered hope of getting your onlookers to hire you, despite your vulnerability. Strange. And awful. I'd rather jump in the Cam naked every day forever than face another slim envelope saying "thank you for your application but...".
Last weekend, one of my favorite friends invited me on her annual birthday trip to the nudists' colony on the River Cam, for a naked swim with a bunch of her friends. Whoa. Honestly I was more concerned about the temperature than about the nudity, but when her birthday turned out to be a gloriously sunny day, I got talked into it. Funny that when everyone's naked, it doesn't matter, and you forget about it! What a surprise. There were groups of naked old guys hanging out on the grass in the gated nudists' colony, with a shoulder-high shrub between them and the fully-clothed punters on the river. They said hello and offered to share their bottle of wine. (!) We declined and went straight for the water, which was, according to the nudists' official blackboard, 7 degrees C, 45F. OMG. It was not so much swimming as being shocked and gasping and desperately trying to not swallow the notoriously polluted water. We stayed in about three minutes, which the regulars on the grass said was about normal for this time of year. My friend was satisfied that she'd marked her 25th birthday with her usual annual swim, and I didn't have hypothermia, and none of us got the 24-hour vomiting bug that people who drink Cam water get, so overall it was a success? Funny how different things make different people happy... it was kind of idyllic to swim in a river and then to sit in the sunshine with your friends - and some strangers - for some peace and natural drying-off. And no wet swimsuit to deal with. :)
Today my college offered a life drawing class, which means drawing a naked model. I have a friend who does a lot of modeling for art classes like this, and talks about it as very calm and art-focused and not sexy. I didn't really believe her, but life drawing classes are a bit of trend in Cambridge lately and I really like to draw, and - let's face it - I was really curious. So ten of us sat in the Clare Hall meeting room this morning with a pile of paper and pencils, one art teacher, and one naked woman. My friend was right that it's amazing how quickly you forget that the angles and negative space you're drawing belong to a person. However, the teacher kept breaking the sort of unspoken denial of that fact by looking at our drawings and saying things like, "No, you've done her breast all wrong, it's got more of a peak to it" and "Measure the nose-to-bottom distance carefully"... but everyone kept their focus and there were no giggle outbursts (though I came close - when the model sneezed. Have you ever seen a naked woman sneeze? Apparently I hadn't! It is a whole-body experience.). But honestly, I'm not convinced that the class would have been different - besides being less awkward - if we'd drawn a bowl of fruit. Trying to get perspective right and measure proportions and sketch in shadows is really fun, whether you're drawing somebody's armpit or a coffee cup. Also, I suspect that there are rarely male models in drawing classes, and that doesn't seem right. If women are going to be objectified in the name of art, men should too. Although I wonder how the class's attendance rate would have been affected if we'd drawn a still-life instead of someone naked?
It's funny how few naked people I've seen. Not on TV, I mean, but in person. We always had individual locker rooms in high school. I don't remember being naked with my brothers, to swim or play in the bathtub or whatever. Is this an American prudism? Germans are well into nakedness, such that kids rarely wear anything at the beach and both their parents tend to wear only Speedos. The French and Spanish are similar. The Brits are more like us - they wear full wet suits at the beach, but more for reasons of temperature than modesty I suspect - but even they have a nudists' colony on the river Cam. Maybe my experiences with nudity this week are one more step in my Europeanification?
An unpleasant feeling of nakedness also happened this week, with the arrival of my first job rejection. Ouch. Sending an application detailing who you are as an employee, as a scholar, as a person, feels revealing, and makes you vulnerable. Then when that application is not wanted, you feel personally violated. Right? This could just be me, and everyone says it gets easier as you get more rejections (really?!), and of course the worst thing you can do is take rejections personally, but still... it's hard not to feel naked in front of a selection committee. And not in the interest of beauty, like art models, or the liberating joy of a German kid at the beach, but in the self-centered hope of getting your onlookers to hire you, despite your vulnerability. Strange. And awful. I'd rather jump in the Cam naked every day forever than face another slim envelope saying "thank you for your application but...".
Tuesday, 21 February 2012
My supervisor
I ran into my supervisor today. As he was entering the University Library and I was leaving it, he stopped and teased me - "I didn't know sociologists went to the library!" (As a book historian and the lead editor of Darwin's letters, he spends a lot of time in the library, and - it's true - way more than I do!)
I suddenly felt very grateful for being his student. I have often felt that way - almost every time we have a meeting, really - but lately a lot of my friends have been complaining about their supervisors, for being distant, harsh, not "getting" the student's ideas, etc. How did I get so lucky? Let me count the ways that my supervisor could be terrible but is instead, somehow, amazing...
1. My supervisor is not in my field. He told me with a smile after my first six months as a PhD student that I now knew more about sociology of science than he did. Usually that's a crash course for disaster, but for us it worked, in part because it meant he had to listen. He usually couldn't suggest readings for me, but he could ask intelligent questions about my ideas and be a fabulous editor of my writing.
2. My supervisor doesn't answer email. Ever. He is a professor and runs the Darwin Correspondence Project - two full-time jobs, really - and he was also Head of Department for 2010-2011. That means he is impossible to track down, electronically or otherwise. He actually has a reputation in the department for "feigning incompetence", as our all-powerful administrator put it, with regards to email and other technologies, so that he is never assigned to do administrative work. Brilliant move by him, but how is all this not a train wreck of a supervisory situation for me?
Because when you do manage to arrange a meeting with him, you have his 100% full-on attention. He sometimes hasn't read the stuff you emailed him to read and so he'll send you away for a few minutes while he reads it (in about a page per second, it seems), and when you come back to his office he is guaranteed to be full of insightful comments. Magic. Also, another benefit of having an e-distant supervisor is that we are not friends. We don't share info about our personal lives. I don't send him the upset and ranting emails that some PhD students send their supervisors, because I know he won't respond and he most likely won't read them anyway. He doesn't have time to chat. And honestly, I think it's better emotionally and professionally for me (and maybe all of us) to NOT voice my occasional rants to my supervisor...
3. My supervisor is super famous and successful and goes on TV fairly often to talk about his work. (Which maybe explains #2... too much fan mail!) Isn't he therefore a jerk?
Absolutely not. Never. He is the nicest person you can imagine - full of the homegrown friendliness of his Wisconsin roots. He smiles all the time, which should be off-putting but he makes it charming (perhaps so that you'll forget that he's ignored all your desperate emails?). As I said, he gives you all his attention during meetings. No chat, but also no complaining (or maybe minimal complaining) about his own workload, which happens often to other students I know. He cracks jokes and uses outrageous metaphors while verbally ripping apart your crappy chapter, to keep you smiling and in a favorable mood despite the (almost always well-deserved) criticism.
So how did I get so lucky? And it's not just me, of course. He has shared his wisdom through kind teaching with countless PhD students, though his style seems to work best with those who are self-motivated, don't rely on him to listen to their rants or reply to emails, and have a sense of humor.
Other crucial reasons that my supervisor is awesome? He is cross-eyed, sleeps during seminars, and picks his fingernails til they're bloody - JUST LIKE ME.
I suddenly felt very grateful for being his student. I have often felt that way - almost every time we have a meeting, really - but lately a lot of my friends have been complaining about their supervisors, for being distant, harsh, not "getting" the student's ideas, etc. How did I get so lucky? Let me count the ways that my supervisor could be terrible but is instead, somehow, amazing...
1. My supervisor is not in my field. He told me with a smile after my first six months as a PhD student that I now knew more about sociology of science than he did. Usually that's a crash course for disaster, but for us it worked, in part because it meant he had to listen. He usually couldn't suggest readings for me, but he could ask intelligent questions about my ideas and be a fabulous editor of my writing.
2. My supervisor doesn't answer email. Ever. He is a professor and runs the Darwin Correspondence Project - two full-time jobs, really - and he was also Head of Department for 2010-2011. That means he is impossible to track down, electronically or otherwise. He actually has a reputation in the department for "feigning incompetence", as our all-powerful administrator put it, with regards to email and other technologies, so that he is never assigned to do administrative work. Brilliant move by him, but how is all this not a train wreck of a supervisory situation for me?
Because when you do manage to arrange a meeting with him, you have his 100% full-on attention. He sometimes hasn't read the stuff you emailed him to read and so he'll send you away for a few minutes while he reads it (in about a page per second, it seems), and when you come back to his office he is guaranteed to be full of insightful comments. Magic. Also, another benefit of having an e-distant supervisor is that we are not friends. We don't share info about our personal lives. I don't send him the upset and ranting emails that some PhD students send their supervisors, because I know he won't respond and he most likely won't read them anyway. He doesn't have time to chat. And honestly, I think it's better emotionally and professionally for me (and maybe all of us) to NOT voice my occasional rants to my supervisor...
3. My supervisor is super famous and successful and goes on TV fairly often to talk about his work. (Which maybe explains #2... too much fan mail!) Isn't he therefore a jerk?
Absolutely not. Never. He is the nicest person you can imagine - full of the homegrown friendliness of his Wisconsin roots. He smiles all the time, which should be off-putting but he makes it charming (perhaps so that you'll forget that he's ignored all your desperate emails?). As I said, he gives you all his attention during meetings. No chat, but also no complaining (or maybe minimal complaining) about his own workload, which happens often to other students I know. He cracks jokes and uses outrageous metaphors while verbally ripping apart your crappy chapter, to keep you smiling and in a favorable mood despite the (almost always well-deserved) criticism.
So how did I get so lucky? And it's not just me, of course. He has shared his wisdom through kind teaching with countless PhD students, though his style seems to work best with those who are self-motivated, don't rely on him to listen to their rants or reply to emails, and have a sense of humor.
Other crucial reasons that my supervisor is awesome? He is cross-eyed, sleeps during seminars, and picks his fingernails til they're bloody - JUST LIKE ME.
Wednesday, 15 February 2012
With a little help from my friends...
(Sorry for all the song titles lately, but they're all just so RELEVANT!)
Yesterday I submitted my fourth postdoc application, and it was the hardest of them all. Why?! Shouldn't this get EASIER (and hopefully better) with practice? Writing that research proposal - to compare fossil preparators and their work practices in Germany with the ones I studied in the US and UK, because Germans have official training programs and Americans and Brits don't - was brutal. First I got conflicting feedback from my supervisor and advisor, so I wrote a compromise proposal, which won the disapproval of my most reliable and most attentive source of job advice (my mom). Then I changed lots more things and totally lost my ability to read this proposal because I'd been reading it in different forms for like a month.
So I sent it to my friends. Those wonderful sources of support and encouragement, my fellow PhD students, who are just as clueless about job applications as I am but are good at grammar, came through for me in the last 12 hours before this application was due.
I didn't need - couldn't take - any more advice, I just needed some confidence that my proposal made sense and had correct verb tenses and punctuation. My first reader-friend, bless her, was smart enough to ignore my pleas for only grammar-checking and sent back my page-long proposal absolutely covered in Tracked Changes. Turns out she was a former editor at Nature (as in, the top academic science journal! Wow!). But she was worried about hurting my feelings, so she called me first to discuss her suggestions and denounce Track Changes for seeming too final when actually her changes were just ideas... and of course her changes were right-on and insightful and good. So I changed things AGAIN. And again couldn't read the final product effectively, and had to call on the kindness of yet another PhD pal. This time my email was more clearly worded about I CAN'T CHANGE ANYTHING MAJOR and she must have sensed my rising panic about the deadline, so she pointed out some actual mistakes (and added in some Britishisms, e.g., "program" -> "programme", which was funny and which I did not include...) and inadvertently gave me permission to send it. Finally.
Who knows if that proposal is actually any good, but the process of writing it cemented my belief that knowledge is social and that doing things in groups is VERY DIFFICULT and extremely worthwhile. My proposal is SO MUCH BETTER after all these revisions, at least according to me. And honestly, that confidence is all that matters when you're submitting an application that has a lottery ticket's chances of even being carefully read, let alone earning an interview...
Yesterday I submitted my fourth postdoc application, and it was the hardest of them all. Why?! Shouldn't this get EASIER (and hopefully better) with practice? Writing that research proposal - to compare fossil preparators and their work practices in Germany with the ones I studied in the US and UK, because Germans have official training programs and Americans and Brits don't - was brutal. First I got conflicting feedback from my supervisor and advisor, so I wrote a compromise proposal, which won the disapproval of my most reliable and most attentive source of job advice (my mom). Then I changed lots more things and totally lost my ability to read this proposal because I'd been reading it in different forms for like a month.
So I sent it to my friends. Those wonderful sources of support and encouragement, my fellow PhD students, who are just as clueless about job applications as I am but are good at grammar, came through for me in the last 12 hours before this application was due.
I didn't need - couldn't take - any more advice, I just needed some confidence that my proposal made sense and had correct verb tenses and punctuation. My first reader-friend, bless her, was smart enough to ignore my pleas for only grammar-checking and sent back my page-long proposal absolutely covered in Tracked Changes. Turns out she was a former editor at Nature (as in, the top academic science journal! Wow!). But she was worried about hurting my feelings, so she called me first to discuss her suggestions and denounce Track Changes for seeming too final when actually her changes were just ideas... and of course her changes were right-on and insightful and good. So I changed things AGAIN. And again couldn't read the final product effectively, and had to call on the kindness of yet another PhD pal. This time my email was more clearly worded about I CAN'T CHANGE ANYTHING MAJOR and she must have sensed my rising panic about the deadline, so she pointed out some actual mistakes (and added in some Britishisms, e.g., "program" -> "programme", which was funny and which I did not include...) and inadvertently gave me permission to send it. Finally.
Who knows if that proposal is actually any good, but the process of writing it cemented my belief that knowledge is social and that doing things in groups is VERY DIFFICULT and extremely worthwhile. My proposal is SO MUCH BETTER after all these revisions, at least according to me. And honestly, that confidence is all that matters when you're submitting an application that has a lottery ticket's chances of even being carefully read, let alone earning an interview...
Friday, 10 February 2012
"It's always better when we're together..."
Jack Johnson's song "It's always better when we're together" was playing in the hipster cafe near Sloane Square in London, where I met my friend Becky to study today. I love that song, and it was the wedding theme song for my friends Zarah and Robert. It also became the theme of today...
I'm cat- and flat-sitting in my friend's posh flat near Greenwich this week, to prevent the cat being lonely. But that means that yours truly is at risk of being lonely... I have like three friends in London (and one is obviously away since I'm staying in her flat). So I've been hanging out with Becky in her fav study spaces around London. Great fun!
But Becky was busy every evening, and after one night of watching BBC TV and one night of skyping and working, I had run out of evening entertainment. So I went to the movies - by myself, to see a silly and not-cultural movie. I was pretty embarrassed about the whole thing, and all the more so when the theme of the movie turned out to be how important it is to do things TOGETHER, with other people:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZBe7_lE9lE
Yikes. After the movie (which I really enjoyed, despite its badly-timed moral!), I trekked across Greenwich's labyrinth of 18th-century, badly lit streets and then across Blackheath, a giant open field of scariness, to the flat, clutching my "London A to Z" map. It was dark and lonely, and I was hungry and tired. So obviously my mind wandered to muggers and rapists and - worse - the legendary ghost of a horseman who roams Blackheath at night. So it seemed only to be expected when the hedge next to me started to rustle. I ignored the crashing for a bit and then tried to nonchalantly run across the street to avoid the mugger/rapist/ghost in the hedge, but a BEAUTIFUL BUSHY-TAILED LONG-NOSED FOX beat me to it. Ahh! Awesome!! The most English of all possible nighttime wanderers, besides maybe a hedgehog...
I would have liked a companion tonight, if only to witness the gorgeous fox as well as make the walk less scary, and, although I complain about sharing a house with three other people (who are all very nice), I would like another human in this flat (although the cat is very friendly). It's great to have the quiet and to find things in the same places you put them and to have only your dishes piled in the sink... but it's just not very fun. Maybe my days of student house-sharing are not as numbered as I thought... and maybe I'll be a little more appreciative of my housemates.
I'm cat- and flat-sitting in my friend's posh flat near Greenwich this week, to prevent the cat being lonely. But that means that yours truly is at risk of being lonely... I have like three friends in London (and one is obviously away since I'm staying in her flat). So I've been hanging out with Becky in her fav study spaces around London. Great fun!
But Becky was busy every evening, and after one night of watching BBC TV and one night of skyping and working, I had run out of evening entertainment. So I went to the movies - by myself, to see a silly and not-cultural movie. I was pretty embarrassed about the whole thing, and all the more so when the theme of the movie turned out to be how important it is to do things TOGETHER, with other people:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZBe7_lE9lE
Yikes. After the movie (which I really enjoyed, despite its badly-timed moral!), I trekked across Greenwich's labyrinth of 18th-century, badly lit streets and then across Blackheath, a giant open field of scariness, to the flat, clutching my "London A to Z" map. It was dark and lonely, and I was hungry and tired. So obviously my mind wandered to muggers and rapists and - worse - the legendary ghost of a horseman who roams Blackheath at night. So it seemed only to be expected when the hedge next to me started to rustle. I ignored the crashing for a bit and then tried to nonchalantly run across the street to avoid the mugger/rapist/ghost in the hedge, but a BEAUTIFUL BUSHY-TAILED LONG-NOSED FOX beat me to it. Ahh! Awesome!! The most English of all possible nighttime wanderers, besides maybe a hedgehog...
I would have liked a companion tonight, if only to witness the gorgeous fox as well as make the walk less scary, and, although I complain about sharing a house with three other people (who are all very nice), I would like another human in this flat (although the cat is very friendly). It's great to have the quiet and to find things in the same places you put them and to have only your dishes piled in the sink... but it's just not very fun. Maybe my days of student house-sharing are not as numbered as I thought... and maybe I'll be a little more appreciative of my housemates.
Thursday, 26 January 2012
Week of wonders
This week has been epic. Maybe even this whole month has been a whirlwind of being busy and thinking hard and getting shit done. Yay!
On Monday I gave a talk at my favorite seminar, the Cabinet, which I ran for a year and which is attended by all the people I most respect in HPS. It was my first talk on my PhD research, and it was on a chapter that's still an Ugly First Draft (though a really cool topic with awesome quotes from preparators and great photos). Also, I wanted to TALK it, not read it.
Clearly this was a lot to ask, especially in front of an audience who pretty much all knew me, which could have meant either that they didn't hold back and destroyed my argument with merciless questions, "friendly fire" style, OR that they would be laid-back and super nice. In the end I think they were a combination of the two - tough and wide-ranging and very insightful questions, but said with a smile and a sense of competing with each other to get to ask their question. Really - there's ALWAYS a pause of about 20 seconds before anyone asks a question after a Cabinet talk (I know - when I was the Chair, I sweated buckets during those 20 seconds every week hoping desperately that someone would ask a question) but as soon as I shut up there were like 5 hands in the air. Phew! AND people stayed late because there were so many questions - we finished 20 minutes after Cabinet officially finishes. And that NEVER happens. A compliment, definitely, but man, was I brain-dead when I finally got to leave. :) AND - the biggest compliment of all and one that I had never even hoped for - my beloved supervisor, who sleeps through every talk regardless of its quality or his level of interest or the amount of caffeine in his blood, STAYED AWAKE THROUGH THE WHOLE 35-MIN TALK AND THE 45-MIN QUESTIONS. Wow! My ego about tripled in size when my friend told me that. (I hadn't dared to look at him the whole time because I knew it would hurt my feelings to see him asleep...)
So the careful writing and editing and practicing were all worth it for the glorious interest and compliments of my colleagues, even though I wasn't hungry and didn't sleep for about three days before the talk. Strange, that never happens to me. It was so bad that Tobias learned a new English word - "cranky". That part of the talk prep process was perhaps not worth it...
In addition to the Cabinet talk, I turned in four job applications this month, with the crucial help of my supervisor and my mom in editing CVs and cover letters and research proposals. I also edited one of my old MPhil essays to be published in a little informal booklet for the Whipple Museum, celebrated the vivas of two of my favorite HPS PhD students (Drs Susannah and Katie), and marked 11 student essays. And I got off the plane 19 days ago... no wonder I've been cranky.
Other huge wins this week - New Hall/Clare Hall women's football team beat Downing College 4-2. It was SO FUN to slide around in the mud, sometimes connecting with the ball but mostly not, in the pouring rain while the other team of mostly posh undergrads cheered each other on with cries of "Don't let the rain dampen your spirits, girls!" and "Go [insert posh girl's name, e.g., Dora, Caroline, Sophie, Annabelle...]!" Hilarious. And we - the unposh, mostly graduate, mostly out-of-shape, and many never-played-football-before team - actually somehow won!
Then yesterday I got an email from a researcher whose survey I took about students' reading habits (where, when, how long each day, with technology or not, etc...) saying that I'd won the survey prize! I always thought those "chance to win a prize if you take this survey" claims were mythical, but I actually will get a shiny new Kindle! Awesome!!
And today, finally, I was chosen to be interviewed and in a photo shoot for Clare Hall, for an article about the telephone fundraising campaign we did a year ago. The whole thing was pretty surreal, in part because I have not-so-good memories of being a telemarketer for Clare Hall and had to be careful what I said on record, and in part because the photo shoot was not a smiling pose of the group of us, but a literally surrealist shot of us carefully arranged between birch trees in the college gardens, holding retro rotary-dial telephones and pretending to talk on them. ?! It was also cold and and the photographer would yell things like "step 10 centimeters to my right, please!" (I have no idea how far that is, by the way) and fuss with the light exposure while we shivered (because he wouldn't let us wear coats in the shot. Obviously.). I was not impressed with the whole process, but my face (and its turquoise rotary phone prop...) will be in the glossy magazine received by all the Cambridge alumni! Another addition to my ego.
Even after all these successes, I'm still feeling more dazed than celebratory. Hopefully I can shake it off and get my ego under control before it gets destroyed by the first wave of job rejections in a few months. Until then, I really hope I can relax in time to turn 26 and a half tomorrow. :)
I hope you all have a week of successes too, but without the crankiness or the daze or the gigantic ego!!
On Monday I gave a talk at my favorite seminar, the Cabinet, which I ran for a year and which is attended by all the people I most respect in HPS. It was my first talk on my PhD research, and it was on a chapter that's still an Ugly First Draft (though a really cool topic with awesome quotes from preparators and great photos). Also, I wanted to TALK it, not read it.
Clearly this was a lot to ask, especially in front of an audience who pretty much all knew me, which could have meant either that they didn't hold back and destroyed my argument with merciless questions, "friendly fire" style, OR that they would be laid-back and super nice. In the end I think they were a combination of the two - tough and wide-ranging and very insightful questions, but said with a smile and a sense of competing with each other to get to ask their question. Really - there's ALWAYS a pause of about 20 seconds before anyone asks a question after a Cabinet talk (I know - when I was the Chair, I sweated buckets during those 20 seconds every week hoping desperately that someone would ask a question) but as soon as I shut up there were like 5 hands in the air. Phew! AND people stayed late because there were so many questions - we finished 20 minutes after Cabinet officially finishes. And that NEVER happens. A compliment, definitely, but man, was I brain-dead when I finally got to leave. :) AND - the biggest compliment of all and one that I had never even hoped for - my beloved supervisor, who sleeps through every talk regardless of its quality or his level of interest or the amount of caffeine in his blood, STAYED AWAKE THROUGH THE WHOLE 35-MIN TALK AND THE 45-MIN QUESTIONS. Wow! My ego about tripled in size when my friend told me that. (I hadn't dared to look at him the whole time because I knew it would hurt my feelings to see him asleep...)
So the careful writing and editing and practicing were all worth it for the glorious interest and compliments of my colleagues, even though I wasn't hungry and didn't sleep for about three days before the talk. Strange, that never happens to me. It was so bad that Tobias learned a new English word - "cranky". That part of the talk prep process was perhaps not worth it...
In addition to the Cabinet talk, I turned in four job applications this month, with the crucial help of my supervisor and my mom in editing CVs and cover letters and research proposals. I also edited one of my old MPhil essays to be published in a little informal booklet for the Whipple Museum, celebrated the vivas of two of my favorite HPS PhD students (Drs Susannah and Katie), and marked 11 student essays. And I got off the plane 19 days ago... no wonder I've been cranky.
Other huge wins this week - New Hall/Clare Hall women's football team beat Downing College 4-2. It was SO FUN to slide around in the mud, sometimes connecting with the ball but mostly not, in the pouring rain while the other team of mostly posh undergrads cheered each other on with cries of "Don't let the rain dampen your spirits, girls!" and "Go [insert posh girl's name, e.g., Dora, Caroline, Sophie, Annabelle...]!" Hilarious. And we - the unposh, mostly graduate, mostly out-of-shape, and many never-played-football-before team - actually somehow won!
Then yesterday I got an email from a researcher whose survey I took about students' reading habits (where, when, how long each day, with technology or not, etc...) saying that I'd won the survey prize! I always thought those "chance to win a prize if you take this survey" claims were mythical, but I actually will get a shiny new Kindle! Awesome!!
And today, finally, I was chosen to be interviewed and in a photo shoot for Clare Hall, for an article about the telephone fundraising campaign we did a year ago. The whole thing was pretty surreal, in part because I have not-so-good memories of being a telemarketer for Clare Hall and had to be careful what I said on record, and in part because the photo shoot was not a smiling pose of the group of us, but a literally surrealist shot of us carefully arranged between birch trees in the college gardens, holding retro rotary-dial telephones and pretending to talk on them. ?! It was also cold and and the photographer would yell things like "step 10 centimeters to my right, please!" (I have no idea how far that is, by the way) and fuss with the light exposure while we shivered (because he wouldn't let us wear coats in the shot. Obviously.). I was not impressed with the whole process, but my face (and its turquoise rotary phone prop...) will be in the glossy magazine received by all the Cambridge alumni! Another addition to my ego.
Even after all these successes, I'm still feeling more dazed than celebratory. Hopefully I can shake it off and get my ego under control before it gets destroyed by the first wave of job rejections in a few months. Until then, I really hope I can relax in time to turn 26 and a half tomorrow. :)
I hope you all have a week of successes too, but without the crankiness or the daze or the gigantic ego!!
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