My Anthropology Year in Review.

This was my first year of not having to take classes. Instead, I interned for three quarters in the Social Science Core undergraduate course Self, Culture and Society. An intern is a graduate student who is being trained to teach the course. When I come back from the field I’ll be expected to teach the full course myself. There is a lot of competition for these internships, because unlike other universities where there are more undergrads than grad students and thus plenty of work for grad students as TAs, the University of Chicago has more grad students than undergrads, and thus presents fewer opportunities for grad students to get any teaching experience.

Self, Culture and Society is, essentially, an introduction to the ways in which the social sciences have engaged with ideas of, you guessed it, the self, culture, and society. So, we read people like Adam Smith, Marx, Durkheim, Freud, and Foucault. Each quarter I interned with a different professor, and I basically sat there and listened while they taught, occasionally interjecting usually unwelcome comments and looking a little like a strange, older undergraduate. I was supposed to teach one class each quarter, but in the Winter quarter I had to teach several classes when the professor became unavailable suddenly. This meant that I had to teach, on very short notice, Theodore Adorno’s essay The Fetish Character of Music and the Regression in Listening. I’m not sure the kids got much from that particular class. I actually received a horrifically bad evaluation from one student, but I reckon one bad review out of sixty or so isn’t too bad. Anyway, I really enjoyed teaching, which is good because I hear it’s a big part of being a professor…

In April we learned that both Amy and I had won Fulbright-Hayes Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad grants. This means that we each get the money necessary to go away and do our research. It was a phenomenal feeling to realize that the work we’d been training to do for so long was actually going to happen. It’s hard to express this aspect of graduate school to people. That you’d get into a Ph.D. program, take classes for years, and then not be able to do your dissertation work and thus graduate seems pretty strange, but it’s a very real possibility. I know intelligent and hardworking graduate students with interesting research topics who, for whatever reason, have been unable to secure funding. They have to reapply with new and improved proposals, which takes a year, and there’s no guarantee that the new proposal will be funded either. I know of a few grad students who couldn’t get funding and had to leave their programmes. I mean, I know that no time spent learning is wasted, but feckin’ hell, I’d go mental if all the work I’d done for four years, not to mention the money I’d spent, had been for naught. Nightmare!

In the Summer I won, miraculously, a Provost’s Summer Fellowship, which allowed me to pay rent. In the Autumn I prepared for and took my qualify exams, which I’ve written about already. I also managed to take care of a couple of long-standing incompletes that had been with me for a while, and began an intensive French class to help me pass my language exam, which will be in February.

In sum, it was a very successful year. I got some teaching experience, which is hard to come by here. I secured funding for my dissertation research, as did Amy, which is a huge weight off our shoulders. Finally, I passed my exams, and with only minor psychological damage. I think I finally realized the extent to which graduate school is all about competition and ambition. But hey, I’m not complaining. Even though it can be stressful and hard, it can also be, as in the case of teaching those classes, incredibly rewarding. I feel very, very lucky to be doing what I’m doing. As the man said, sure it’s indoor work with no heavy lifting.