to be fair...
I guess there's a more profound reason I'm so resentful of my advisor essentially telling me my thesis is basically dead to him (see previous post--it is sort of a funny story, in my opinion), beyond that he doesn't believe in me. Honestly, that's fine. Looking at it objectively, I can't criticize him for telling me, essentially, I'm not giving enough time to the thing I'm also ranting about not mattering that much and not being worth that much of my time. So that's not the problem; in fact, dwelling on the substance of the remark, which has some truth to it, is obscuring the real problem. What bothers me about that conversation is a feature endemic to academia, at least as it seems to be practiced today: in a culture that values intelligence and performance as much as just about any field, people are too hung up on an ethos of PC egalitarianism that says you have to support everyone in everything they try to do. It's the college-age equivalent of "Everyone's special!!!!" and it's everywhere in the faculty-student dynamic. I have never once been discouraged from doing anything remotely academic at this school; the worst I have ever received is essentially the "I support you, but can't myself help you" brush-off I got when trying out that first thesis topic (see two or three posts ago).
So: Listen, PhDs, I'm twenty-one years old. I've been rejected before, by potential employers, women, volunteer organizations, for awards, sports teams, peer leadership votes, and dances. Telling me that an idea I have, a project I'm interested in, a course I want to take, or a topic for a paper really just sucks isn't going to shatter my fragile postadolescent self-confidence. Okay, sometimes, people can get touchy, like when I spurned your classes for a week when you rejected my Watson proposal, my baby. But that reaction is in many ways a product of a system that is so chock-full of encouragement and a feeling of entitlement that I felt like 1. my idea was great, like you, Prof. Mayes, told me not a week before the interview and 2. I was entitled to win something because I was just so great. Being unprepared for what was, honestly, a predictable result (the odds of getting one are terrible) is pretty stupid, and I definitely got goaded into it by the overwhelming positive feedback all the faculty here are so effusive in giving. And maybe I got a little pissy at the Dean's office when they refused to disclose why my proposal for summer research got shot down last spring. But that has more to do with the fact that the woman in charge still hasn't returned the simple email or phone message I left asking for either an explanation or a statement that the reasons for my rejection were entirely confidential. Instead, I was deflected to a faculty member, who also tried to evade giving me a direct answer. The real criminal here wasn't the rejection, it was the bureaucratic mentality that didn't want to tell me that I just wasn't good enough, or possibly that they had been tipped off not to accept me so that I'd take the program in Penn State, part of a last attempt to direct me toward math grad school--the sort of conspiracy theory that can only result from feeling lied to.
Thus: not everyone is going to be the best at something. Some people aren't cut out for some disciplines. You don't always have to dangle grad school as a tacit vote of confidence in my potential if I just stick with it. Honestly, I spent enough time being built up as a child, just as almost everyone else in my generation did, that I can stand/have stood to learn more from rejection than from the effusive but faint praise that washes over me, a rising tide of empty promises that has left me feeling a little bit adrift, directionless once I leave the safe harbor, the insular atmosphere of "you can do anything!" In other words, all those empty compliments make any real ones you have for me feel just as flimsy--encouraging me to do everything has left me feeling like nothing has stood out as *the one*, the subject/career/idea I can follow for the rest of my life. So thanks. At least I feel okay about my ability to write a sociology paper, right?
So: Listen, PhDs, I'm twenty-one years old. I've been rejected before, by potential employers, women, volunteer organizations, for awards, sports teams, peer leadership votes, and dances. Telling me that an idea I have, a project I'm interested in, a course I want to take, or a topic for a paper really just sucks isn't going to shatter my fragile postadolescent self-confidence. Okay, sometimes, people can get touchy, like when I spurned your classes for a week when you rejected my Watson proposal, my baby. But that reaction is in many ways a product of a system that is so chock-full of encouragement and a feeling of entitlement that I felt like 1. my idea was great, like you, Prof. Mayes, told me not a week before the interview and 2. I was entitled to win something because I was just so great. Being unprepared for what was, honestly, a predictable result (the odds of getting one are terrible) is pretty stupid, and I definitely got goaded into it by the overwhelming positive feedback all the faculty here are so effusive in giving. And maybe I got a little pissy at the Dean's office when they refused to disclose why my proposal for summer research got shot down last spring. But that has more to do with the fact that the woman in charge still hasn't returned the simple email or phone message I left asking for either an explanation or a statement that the reasons for my rejection were entirely confidential. Instead, I was deflected to a faculty member, who also tried to evade giving me a direct answer. The real criminal here wasn't the rejection, it was the bureaucratic mentality that didn't want to tell me that I just wasn't good enough, or possibly that they had been tipped off not to accept me so that I'd take the program in Penn State, part of a last attempt to direct me toward math grad school--the sort of conspiracy theory that can only result from feeling lied to.
Thus: not everyone is going to be the best at something. Some people aren't cut out for some disciplines. You don't always have to dangle grad school as a tacit vote of confidence in my potential if I just stick with it. Honestly, I spent enough time being built up as a child, just as almost everyone else in my generation did, that I can stand/have stood to learn more from rejection than from the effusive but faint praise that washes over me, a rising tide of empty promises that has left me feeling a little bit adrift, directionless once I leave the safe harbor, the insular atmosphere of "you can do anything!" In other words, all those empty compliments make any real ones you have for me feel just as flimsy--encouraging me to do everything has left me feeling like nothing has stood out as *the one*, the subject/career/idea I can follow for the rest of my life. So thanks. At least I feel okay about my ability to write a sociology paper, right?
posted by sam at
12:34 PM
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