more than one chapter written

Even though I only got little more than four hours of sleep last night, I am feeling happy and hyper.

It’s been a long tim since I’ve felt this way, but I remember it vaguely. Clark recognized it right away when we met up for lunch—the post-submittal glow/giddiness of finishing a major research project that was interesting, meaningful, and satisfying.

It’s strange how alienated I’ve become from the good feeling I get from academic research and writing. I think that my graduate program only nurtured this feeling in fits and starts; most of the “glow” during those years was from projects I pursued independently from the program.

By the second year of graduate school, I was questioning my desire to get a Ph.D. in my Old-School Discipline. I decided to finish my M.A., teach for a year, and use that year to figure out where (both in terms of discipline and university) I wanted to pursue my Ph.D.

My first year as a visiting professor, thinking and writing about my own work grinded pretty much to a halt. Why you ask? This Boice quote from Dr. Four Eyes’ thought-provoking post pretty much answers the question:

New faculty tend to spend most of their time preparing for teaching (even in research universities) …

In my first year, I become totally (over-)consumed with class planning and preparation. I thought about it all.the.freaking.time. When a class session didn’t go well, I obsessed over it. When it did, I just felt nervous that the next session would be a failure. Teaching didn’t come as easily to me as scholarship, and I really felt like I was not cut out to be a professor. And, as Boice puts it,

… and when they fail at teaching, they lose the self-efficacy they need to met challenges of research/scholarship ...

In the midst of preparing brand-new courses and refreshing course content for existing courses, it was hard for me to justify the “indulgence” of my own research interests. And the more I struggled with teaching, the more time I felt I needed to dedicate to being a better professor.

Furthermore, in the fall and winter of my first year as a visiting professor, I was applying to Ph.D. programs in a New Discipline that has considerable overlap with my M.A. studies. I got into a prestigious program in comebacknikki’s city, as well as a program on its way up in SoCal. In the Spring, they both flew me in for visits and even though they were good programs, I wasn’t excited. In hindsight, I know that some of this is because the my values/interests didn’t quite line up with New Discipline. By the end of that year, I was questioning my desire to be an academic at all. When Clark got funding for a solid graduate program far away from SoCal and comebacknikki’s city, I decided to chuck the Ph.D. programs altogether and find a “real job.”

I tried to continue doing academic research and writing, but I struggled. Working a 9-to-5 job, it was hard to find the time and mental space for intellectual work. Furthermore, Clark’s program wasn’t located in a big research university. Away from that vibrant learning environment, I struggled to do the minimal research and writing that my meager publishing agenda required. By the time we moved to Hilly Hamlet, I quit doing any kind of academic work altogether. I had promised a chapter for a book my M.A. committee chair is editing, but I hadn’t started working on it.

I’m still not sure what brought me back. This spring, I learned about a Ph.D. program on campus that has interesting areas of overlap with my areas of research interest. For the life of me, I can’t remember how I stumbled onto the program, but thank goodness I did. Though it’s not one of the university’s sexiest or most-flaunted programs, I’ve learned that it’s one of the top 10 programs in its field. The faculty members are sane, the structure of the program is exciting, and the collegiality of the department is heartening. I am currently applying to the program, and I hope to begin part-time this fall and full-time in fall 2007.

This led me to get in touch with my M.A. committee chair, who promised to write me a recommendation so long as I provided him the chapter I owed him, as the whole book is due to publisher this afternoon. I received this e-mail from him on Wednesday morning.

I worked steadily Wednesday night, most of the day and all evening and night last night, and from 4 to 10 a.m. this morning. And I feel great. I feel alive and invigorated, in a way that no other kind of work makes me feel. Finishing this chapter also closes an intellectual chapter for me; the chapter I’ve written is part of a book for students and scholars in New Discipline and M.A. committee chair is a professor of New Discipline. This chapter is a strong piece of scholarship that is valuable to New Discipline, but I feel that I’ve exhausted this discipline’s utility in terms of my own research area.

I am grateful that my research area will now have an intellectual home in Mysterious Discipline.

I feel better today than I have in years. It's about time.