In case you're having second thoughts; a letter to the future me
Please please remember why you made your decision.
It's not what you want. You don't want to spend the rest of your life begging others for grant money. You don't want to spend hours pouring through out-dated articles in order to source them. You don't want to stick to one kind of research so you can please faceless scientists that agree with you. You don't want to participate in a field where bones are viewed as objects and not subjects. You don't want to be cold, you don't want to become an embittered old lady by the time you're 40. You don't want to be Dr. Weiss.
You looked at every single graduate program for physical/evolutionary anthropology. You don't want to leave the country to study so you stuck to California, no matter the distance. There were a few that grabbed your interest but there was always something that just didn't feel right. For the most part, you were being honest with yourself. This isn't what you thought it would be and that pissed you off. No wonder people have never heard of anthropology, the graduate programs are a fucking joke. You would have to narrow it down and you love all of anthropology. You didn't want to fucking choose between interests!
Do you want to do applied anthropology? If that's what you want to do, you have to do cultural anthropology OR museum studies. Neither of them appeals to you. Do you remember those awful cultural anthro classes you took in college? Do you remember how redundant they were, how long-winded and how stupid they were? Why do you have to care about colonization? It's an embarrassment to our field, why must we know about the assholes that treated indigenous people as objects and not people? Because that's what we do, remember? We need to toe that line between study and exploitation and you wanted no part of that. This is not why you chose this major. This is not where your passion lies. What good is studying a civilization if you plan to do absolutely nothing with your knowledge? We're not supposed to interfere with a culture's development. If they're suffering, jot it down, that's your job as a scientist. What the actual fuck is the point then? Why the hell are we doing this?
Ethnographies are ridiculous. You spend your entire life studying one area of a culture so you can publish a book that absolutely no one reads. Are these books supposed to encourage others to do something about social injustice? Are those 20 year olds reading your ethnographies in college supposed to do something about xenophobia? What about you?! You're the one with the PhD and the travel miles to make a difference! What's the fucking point if all you're going to do is publish publish publish so you can make a name for yourself??
And no, you don't want to spend $60,000 a year on a graduate program that will teach you how to arrange artifacts so you can work in a museum. Yeaaaaaah no thank you, you can do that shit with absolutely no background on it.
You want to teach; you've wanted to teach since you were eleven years old and you tutored kindergarten kids. This is an interest that won't go away and you want to keep doing it in any way you can. This is why you volunteer; it satisfies a need in you that anthropology couldn't do. You don't want to teach elementary school, you don't want to teach middle school, and you don't want to teach high school. The only way you can teach at the college level is by getting a master's degree and that's why you went looking for one in the first place. You see yourself teaching evolution in ten years so that's what you want to do.
Education. Youth. Mexicans. Women. These are your interests and getting a master's degree on morphological changes in the knee cap has nothing to do with these. If grad school were cheap, sure, you would get several master's degrees in things you love, there's no harm in that. But you need to know that you're making an investment and quite frankly, you don't love it that much to stake your entire future on it. You really, really don't. You're already in debt with your undergrad education and until you pay that off, you're not comfortable adding another incredible amount to it just for the sake of indulging an interest. You can do what you love for free. You can do what you love for free.
Things will happen for you. You know that. You have never been a person that gives up so stop looking at this as giving up. You've never given up on anything, since you were a kid. If you wanted something, you earned it, and if you wanted nothing to do with something, you kicked it to the curb. That's what you do. That's what you're good at. You have exceptional self esteem and that's supposed to fucking carry you places, and it will. Do what feels right.
Don't let your worries keep you from doing what you love. Fuck the system, Leslie, they're a bunch of pompous white dudes that got their PhDs back when going to college cost a nickel. You want to do more than what they did. You have so many interests, so many desires, that to choose one is to make the mistake those guys made. That's why they're embittered. That's why they wanted to squelch your enthusiasm any chance they got. They wanted you to be realistic and you just laughed because negativity isn't in your nature, no matter how hard they wanted to push it out of you. It's okay. You're not going to let life kick the shit out of you. You're not going to let something you love turn you into someone you never wanted to be.
Because you've known what you wanted to be since you were twelve years old. You saw yourself in your minds' eye as someone who was well-adjusted and happy. It didn't matter where you were and it didn't matter who you were with. You were always helping people one way or another. You were always reading, always writing, always drawing, always thinking. And you're not going to let anyone change your mind. You know who you are and you know what you want.
Just fucking do it already. <3
It's not what you want. You don't want to spend the rest of your life begging others for grant money. You don't want to spend hours pouring through out-dated articles in order to source them. You don't want to stick to one kind of research so you can please faceless scientists that agree with you. You don't want to participate in a field where bones are viewed as objects and not subjects. You don't want to be cold, you don't want to become an embittered old lady by the time you're 40. You don't want to be Dr. Weiss.
You looked at every single graduate program for physical/evolutionary anthropology. You don't want to leave the country to study so you stuck to California, no matter the distance. There were a few that grabbed your interest but there was always something that just didn't feel right. For the most part, you were being honest with yourself. This isn't what you thought it would be and that pissed you off. No wonder people have never heard of anthropology, the graduate programs are a fucking joke. You would have to narrow it down and you love all of anthropology. You didn't want to fucking choose between interests!
Do you want to do applied anthropology? If that's what you want to do, you have to do cultural anthropology OR museum studies. Neither of them appeals to you. Do you remember those awful cultural anthro classes you took in college? Do you remember how redundant they were, how long-winded and how stupid they were? Why do you have to care about colonization? It's an embarrassment to our field, why must we know about the assholes that treated indigenous people as objects and not people? Because that's what we do, remember? We need to toe that line between study and exploitation and you wanted no part of that. This is not why you chose this major. This is not where your passion lies. What good is studying a civilization if you plan to do absolutely nothing with your knowledge? We're not supposed to interfere with a culture's development. If they're suffering, jot it down, that's your job as a scientist. What the actual fuck is the point then? Why the hell are we doing this?
Ethnographies are ridiculous. You spend your entire life studying one area of a culture so you can publish a book that absolutely no one reads. Are these books supposed to encourage others to do something about social injustice? Are those 20 year olds reading your ethnographies in college supposed to do something about xenophobia? What about you?! You're the one with the PhD and the travel miles to make a difference! What's the fucking point if all you're going to do is publish publish publish so you can make a name for yourself??
And no, you don't want to spend $60,000 a year on a graduate program that will teach you how to arrange artifacts so you can work in a museum. Yeaaaaaah no thank you, you can do that shit with absolutely no background on it.
You want to teach; you've wanted to teach since you were eleven years old and you tutored kindergarten kids. This is an interest that won't go away and you want to keep doing it in any way you can. This is why you volunteer; it satisfies a need in you that anthropology couldn't do. You don't want to teach elementary school, you don't want to teach middle school, and you don't want to teach high school. The only way you can teach at the college level is by getting a master's degree and that's why you went looking for one in the first place. You see yourself teaching evolution in ten years so that's what you want to do.
Education. Youth. Mexicans. Women. These are your interests and getting a master's degree on morphological changes in the knee cap has nothing to do with these. If grad school were cheap, sure, you would get several master's degrees in things you love, there's no harm in that. But you need to know that you're making an investment and quite frankly, you don't love it that much to stake your entire future on it. You really, really don't. You're already in debt with your undergrad education and until you pay that off, you're not comfortable adding another incredible amount to it just for the sake of indulging an interest. You can do what you love for free. You can do what you love for free.
Things will happen for you. You know that. You have never been a person that gives up so stop looking at this as giving up. You've never given up on anything, since you were a kid. If you wanted something, you earned it, and if you wanted nothing to do with something, you kicked it to the curb. That's what you do. That's what you're good at. You have exceptional self esteem and that's supposed to fucking carry you places, and it will. Do what feels right.
Don't let your worries keep you from doing what you love. Fuck the system, Leslie, they're a bunch of pompous white dudes that got their PhDs back when going to college cost a nickel. You want to do more than what they did. You have so many interests, so many desires, that to choose one is to make the mistake those guys made. That's why they're embittered. That's why they wanted to squelch your enthusiasm any chance they got. They wanted you to be realistic and you just laughed because negativity isn't in your nature, no matter how hard they wanted to push it out of you. It's okay. You're not going to let life kick the shit out of you. You're not going to let something you love turn you into someone you never wanted to be.
Because you've known what you wanted to be since you were twelve years old. You saw yourself in your minds' eye as someone who was well-adjusted and happy. It didn't matter where you were and it didn't matter who you were with. You were always helping people one way or another. You were always reading, always writing, always drawing, always thinking. And you're not going to let anyone change your mind. You know who you are and you know what you want.
Just fucking do it already. <3