Kimberly Hirsh

I’ve been a bit stuck with my dissertation, and only partly due to parenting and chronic illness. I wasn’t quite sure what had me stuck before. I thought it was a need to develop a solid workflow. John Martin told me about a really cool writing tool called Gingko. It overwhelmed me at first because I could stand to see all those columns on screens at once, but once I found the keyboard shortcut for writing in fullscreen, I decided I would try using it to write my dissertation.

I started to get a new “tree” ready, and looked at another dissertation to help me model my structure.

But as I did that I realized…

Usually, a person’s dissertation proposal can become a significant chunk of the dissertation itself, with some expansion.

My dissertation proposal as originally written does not represent my dissertation as executed anymore.

I need to re-write my proposal, but for me.

Me, browsing Rebecca Schuman’s (@pankisseskafka) website after reading about her in Katie Rose Guest Pryal’s (@krgpryal) book, THE FREELANCE ACADEMIC: Wait, the mother of Quit Lit and the writer of THE 90s ARE OLD is the same person? 😍 #JustGoAheadNow

I’m out on timelines and feeds for a while, folks. Taking some time to be really intentional about my input.

I’ve been pulled deep into Dark Academia’s orbit, because it is the aesthetic I’ve been unknowingly building my whole life, and because of this I watched DEAD POETS SOCIETY for the first time in a very long time last night.

Sometimes I’ll watch a movie that I haven’t watched in a long time and realize that it is one of the threads woven into the fabric of my very being. It’s true of LABYRINTH. It’s true of Tim Burton’s BATMAN. And it’s true of DEAD POETS SOCIETY.

I don’t know when I first saw this movie, only that in the ten years between its release and my high school graduation, it came to hold a special place in my heart. It was a constant cultural presence.

On the day our textbooks were issued in AP English, our teacher pointed out that there was an essay introduction not unlike that written by the apocryphal J. Evans Pritchard, PhD. He said that we would not be ripping it out of the book, but that we should ignore it.

To keep from having the dull inflected practice of the Latin teacher’s declension lesson in the movie, my Latin teacher had us stand on the desks as we shouted verb endings. When I became a Latin teacher, I did the same thing. In my first year of teaching, my students O Captain My Captained me after I assigned DPS for them to watch on a day that I was out sick. I thought, “Well, I have achieved a teacher’s dream in my first year, guess it’s time to retire.”

When I started this viewing, I thought, “Surely it won’t be as amazing as years of distance have made it seem,” but it is. (Is it without flaw? Of course not. And yet, still stunning.)

No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.

Mr. Keating said this and I held my breath. Here he had articulated something that lives at the very core of who I am.

I don’t want to spoil too much, though I feel like a 31 year old movie should be past the statute of limitations, but I’ll say this: a student dies in the film. And when the prep school administrator is speaking to the other students about this death in an assembly, here is what he says:

“He was a fine student. One of our best. He will be greatly missed.”

I got a little ragey. A fine student? I got a little horrified, as that’s kind of been my identity for much of my life. I got a little…

WHAT IS IT ALL FOR?

Why are people fine students, and why is THAT the thing you would remark on? This same character was kind, joyful, welcoming, compassionate. Isn’t that more important than being a fine student?

Looking at it from a realistic perspective, the administrator probably didn’t know the student well enough to know anything about him except that he was a fine student.

But in the moment, that’s not what mattered to me. I looked at myself and I asked myself, “Why? What was I a fine student for?” This character, I think he was a fine student out of duty, a sense of obligation to his family. When I talked to W. about it, he pointed out that I enjoy learning more broadly, and that there is value in learning. But I tossed back, “But you can learn a lot without being a fine student.”

I guess this is what it took for me to crack after devoting almost my entirely life to education in one way or another, especially my professional life. Here I am approaching the end of a PhD, and asking myself WHY DO WE EVEN SCHOOL?

There are reasons, and I’ve also been reading about unschooling, and I’m not going to break with school.

I just want to be sure it’s not the only remarkable thing in my or my family’s life.

Finished reading: MEXICAN GOTHIC by Silvia Moreno-Garcia 📚

📽️ Just finished watching DEAD POETS SOCIETY for the first time in years and now I’m having an existential crisis because I don’t want my eulogy or epitaph to be “She was a fine student.” How’s your Sunday going?

My three-almost-four-year-old just said, “When I’m lonesome, my fear grows.”

World, we had a Pandemic Parenting morning and even though the sources of stress were resolved by 9:30 am, I’m still worn down by it here at 6:07 pm.

Got a ring light, tripod, and bluetooth shutter so of course I had to have a little photo booth fun.

For the first few years of my doctoral program, I defined myself as a “doctoral student” and “research assistant.” This seemed like an appropriate designation, despite my experience as an education and information professional, because I was taking classes. I kept calling myself that as I was working on my comprehensive literature review, because there didn’t seem to be anything better to call myself than that. It was very exciting when I got to change my email signature to “Doctoral Candidate” in December, because now I was someone who had met all the requirements for a doctoral degree except for the dissertation. But I kept the designation of “research assistant.”

This summer, though, I started thinking about how that designation doesn’t really communicate much to anyone not steeped in academia. And also that it doesn’t say anything about what I do. So as of this school year, I started referring to myself as a “doctoral researcher.” This fits much better. I am doing what researchers do: I am running my own study as PI (my dissertation study) and I work in a lab with two other researchers, designing interview protocols, collecting and analyzing data, and writing reports based on the data. There is no part of my work that is really the work of a student. While I am technically assisting the PI of a research lab, the work I do is not so much assistive as collaborative. So.

I am a doctoral researcher.

For more thoughts on the distinction between a doctoral student and a doctoral researcher, see Pat Thomson’s blog post, “what’s with the name doctoral student?”

Image by Dariusz Sankowski from Pixabay.