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Following this summer’s spree of excellent posts on “required reading for graduate students,” as well as a more recent pair of excellent “advice to new faculty” posts, I’m itching to dispense advice, something I love to do but for which I have, well, little authority. (See Rochester’s admonishment above.) Now, a disclaimer: I am, generally, not to be listened to. That said, here is my advice to the only people for whom I have any: brainy, neurotic liberal arts college students, and especially frosh.
1. Stop being nervous about the social thing. Strike up a conversation with the cute hipster next to you in your horrifically daunting Nihilism 101 seminar. That funny, loud upperclassperson you met in your theatre workshop during orientation is walking directly towards you as you make your confused way across the quad? Smile, make eye contact, and say (audibly) hello. Every single person around you is either going through the exact same anxiety you are going through, or has been through it and understands what it’s like. So stop worrying.
2. Do not be afraid of your professors. (One good way to go about this is to read academic blogs.) They are not scary, and if they try to seem so, they are jerks. The beginning of their year is as stressful as the beginning of yours is. Many of them are (almost) as worried about what you think of them as you are about what they think of you. If you are interested in what these people have to say (and don’t be afraid, either, to find some of them totally uninteresting — it’s probably not just you), go to their office hours. That, friend, is why office hours exist — go!
3. Develop rituals. If you’re lucky enough to have a kitchen, make a practice of steaming some edamame to take with you to the library (don’t tell the librarians I told you to do this). Give yourself an extra fifteen minutes every morning to make a cup of tea and read the paper. Take late night walks around campus to re-energize your brain. Do your laundry every Tuesday afternoon. Whatever works. Structure your free time, and the “management” part will follow naturally — as will centeredness and mental health.
4. Put that joint down. If you absolutely must, you can pick it up again when your work is done. Down. Now.
5. Learn your way around the library or system of libraries and its resources NOW. Your future life as a writer of research papers will prove much easier and more efficient. Even if you’re not crazily studious, you’ll be amazed what it can yield — but those recordings of T. S. Eliot reading the Four Quartets are also for after your work is done.
6. Be naked as often as possible.
7. Do your work. On time would be good, too. Do it. You’ll thank me later.
8. But don’t make unnecessary sacrifices to your work. Get involved with that political action group. Attend a literary magazine’s meetings. Go hear Edward Said speak before he dies (mouse, you’re a despicable idiot). There will still be time for work, as long as you judge somewhat carefully.
9. Whenever you find yourself negotiating a new wing of your college’s bureaucracy, whether it be a trip to the housing office to find out what is UP with that enormous crack in your wall that causes your room to be flooded every other day, or a visit to the health clinic to exploit their relatively cheap services (do this also), ingratiate yourself. Smile and say hello and introduce yourself to whomever you encounter. Thank them — if they go above and beyond, thank them profusely. Try to strike up a conversation, if you’re there for a while. Administrative assistants in the dean’s office, nurse practitioners at the clinic, dining hall workers, Public Safety officers, all will remember your politeness and gratitude and be prepared to treat you well in future. You may need them as allies. Especially the AAs in the dean’s office. And besides, it just feels good to be nice.
10. Exploit, exploit, exploit. You or your parents or some foundation or the government are paying a lot of money for your college’s resources: milk the hell out of them. Figure out where the free safer sex supplies are kept and hoard them. Ask your professors, your advisor, your dean about fellowships, grants, scholarships, loan forgiveness opportunities and apply for them. Many departments have money or jobs available for summer study. Apply for them. Get thee to the health clinic. Want to start a neo-pop klezmer orchestra? I bet there’s money for it. Find it and apply for it.
11. Especially if you’re particularly studious, cerebral, bookish, etc, and not particularly athletic: pay attention to your body. Don’t forget to eat. (That sounds crazy, but it ain’t. Eat.) Find a mode of physical activity that works for you — take dance classes, see what’s on offer in P.E. (fencing!), find a cheap or free yoga class or group (it exists), sail, row, hike, climb trees (or buildings), get friends together for regular pick-up frizbee-throwing. Get in touch regularly with your limbs, your lungs, and your heart. If you start to feel even vaguely sick, get in bed and stay there. You will find intellectual stimuli you’ve never known before, and you will sometimes neglect your body, or completely forget you even have one, in favor of these stimuli. Pay attention to your body.
12. Time off is a viable option. Time off is a viable option. Time off is a viable option. Oh sweet jebus, I can’t say it enough: time off is a viable option. For any reason. Many schools are very supportive of it, but few will suggest it in time for you to consider it. Take careful stock of yourself as your semester, your year, progress. Are you prepared not only to do this college thing, but to do it in a way that is fulfilling for you, here, now? “No” can be a very good and very smart answer to this question. There is NO REASON WHATSOEVER to get college over with in four years or less. Leave, if you want to. Work for a while. If you have the resources (see also “exploit”), try to travel. Do a NOLS course. Work on a campaign. See what things that aren’t school feel like. Time off is a viable option.
13. Now stop screwing around and go do your work.
Sometimes, when I think about wanting to become an academic, I just simply start spluttering: “What… what the… just LOOK… I mean, fucking… what’s with, how can… pfffblahhh?!”
A rough translation, anyhow, of anxieties regarding publishing nightmares, job market nightmares, teaching nightmares, institutionishness nightmares — in short, too much responsibility with too little stability guaranteed in return. Just what, mouse, do you think you’re getting into?
And then on occasion one comes across things like this: the Rutgers faculty union has negotiated a serious, potentially seriously tenable long-term deal, with the serious possibility that other faculty unions might take the hint and emulate it. You know, the faintest glimmer of a hint of a notion of actual change in the stability department.
And little M.A. students everywhere smile their little smiles of relief and go back to more urgent, more localized fretting.
Way to go, Rutgers – faculty and administration alike.
(Thanks to Dean Dad for the heads-up.)
