privilege and guilt
I had an interesting conversation with a classmate of mine today. We're in three of the same classes, so we have similar workloads and are working on the same papers today. We talked about our tendency to not do all the readings and to put our work off till the last minute and simpy submit what we managed to get done, without edits and without much effort beyond just scrambling to get it done.
And we talked about our guilt. We both acknowledge that incredible opportunity we've been given in attending this university. He spoke particularly about people back home who could only dream of going to college, let alone getting to pursue graduate study at Harvard. I talked about the people who didn't get in who had stellar qualifications and solid plans for study when I simply wrote a long version of "I like studying religion and would like to do more of it" in my statement of purpose. And we acknowledged feeling guilty for just doing enough to get by and get through the program when we could make it so much more.
We talked about how the statement "I want to go on for a Ph.D" is problematic when one approaches papers with an attitude of "what do I need to do to meet the page limit" instead of "what fascinates me about this reading/perspective/issue and how can I explore it in this paper."
And now I'm sitting in the library pondering that conversation and skimming the reading so I can write another paper. I got to the library two hours ago and am just now beginning to outline. I have some serious kinks in my academic system that I need to work out.
And we talked about our guilt. We both acknowledge that incredible opportunity we've been given in attending this university. He spoke particularly about people back home who could only dream of going to college, let alone getting to pursue graduate study at Harvard. I talked about the people who didn't get in who had stellar qualifications and solid plans for study when I simply wrote a long version of "I like studying religion and would like to do more of it" in my statement of purpose. And we acknowledged feeling guilty for just doing enough to get by and get through the program when we could make it so much more.
We talked about how the statement "I want to go on for a Ph.D" is problematic when one approaches papers with an attitude of "what do I need to do to meet the page limit" instead of "what fascinates me about this reading/perspective/issue and how can I explore it in this paper."
And now I'm sitting in the library pondering that conversation and skimming the reading so I can write another paper. I got to the library two hours ago and am just now beginning to outline. I have some serious kinks in my academic system that I need to work out.