First year of grad school complete.

Finally, a little time to rest. Even though I started an intensive German class only three days after I finished my term papers. Still, it is relatively light work compared three grad courses and assistantship tasks.

Some basics: my first semester I studied Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Kant’s moral philosophy, and took a field seminar in Comparative Politics. My grades were great, and I learned a lot. Second semester, I studied Aristotle’s Politics, Rousseau’s Emile, and took a course on Muslim immigration in Europe. Grades not so great, but not terrible. Grades aren’t supposed to matter here. It’s true that they don’t matter in the sense that you don’t focus all of your work toward merely getting a good grade; you have to think more broadly about learning and shaping yourself for future expectations. But grades do matter in the sense that they are valuable feedback on how you’re progressing. My grades right now are telling me: you’re getting it, but not blowing us away. That is pretty much consistent with how I feel I am doing.

I know I was curious when I was just beginning to think about grad school what it would be like: I’d heard all sorts of stories from people, like that they had only four hours of free time a week, etc. The following goes for me personally; your mileage may vary.

I haven’t found that I’m working 12 hours a day nonstop all semester, but definitely there are times when there aren’t enough hours in the day to get all the work done. But generally, there is time to spend a few hours taking the subway somewhere where you can relax and do a little reading or writing. You can get errands and chores done, etc. But this is all relevant to my situation only, given the structure of my program and my abilities. I know now why I couldn’t get straight answers out of current graduate students about what I could expect: it differs so much from student to student and program to program. Even at my school, the philosophy students have to start teaching courses their second year, which keeps them much busier than us polsci students. And the amount of time required for the assistantship varies from assignment to assignment and throughout the semester. If pressed, I’d say that the easiest possible day for me would be about four hours to get just standard reading assignments done; assuming there is a) no class that day, which would take up another 2+ hours, b) no heavy work required for the assistantship at that time, c) no outside lectures or talks to attend, and d) no papers or presentations coming up. And if you’re lucky enough to only have four hours of schoolwork for an entire day, that’s the day you have to be getting other things out of the way, like the dishes and the laundry. If there’s class, you still have four hours of reading, plus two or three hours of class. If there’s also a paper due soon: reading, class, then another four or more hours of writing. You can see how much the work can vary from day to day.

I’ve found that time and effort are necessary but not sufficient for success. During the final weeks of the semester, I spent literally every available hour I had on my term papers, and two of them came up short anyhow, in no small part because of luck: all the roads I went down in my research went nowhere, until time finally ran out and I had to churn out some superficial text. Hopefully in the future I can tune my heuristics better and not be dragged down so many lengthy and wasteful dead ends.

The first year was hard, but satisfying. It didn’t turn out exactly as I’d hoped, of course. I think that getting the not-so-good grades means I’m finally being pushed to my limits, which is good, because that’s the only way to truly improve. My background puts me at disadvantages that mean I have to work extra hard to stay afloat in this totally new environment. Hopefully as I get rolling on my second year I’ll have things under better control.