Why bother?

Posted on | March 17, 2010 | 11 Comments

This semester I teach Arguing the Point: Research in Gender and Cultural Studies. It’s a graduate course for students writing a thesis for the first time and those new to our discipline. The classes are a mixture of themed discussion and practical workshops. A final “After 5″ hour focuses on research skills.

Tonight I’m spending the last hour talking about motivation, discipline and time management.

What motivates you to write a thesis? How do you plan a year – or 3 years – of your life as represented in print? How do you stay disciplined enough to realise your original motivation? If you aren’t used to writing regularly, are there ways to learn? What if something goes wrong?

I also want students to think about changes in their personal life and relationships that might need to be considered in achieving these goals. In Honours year particularly, Australian students face a terrifying jump in expectations (whether real or perceived) to be able to succeed at the level they might be familiar. The private toll this can take is a major factor that our teaching should address.

The bigger question I want to ask arising from this is, to borrow from Jonathan Franzen, Why Bother? What do we tell ourselves we are doing as scholars to justify the peculiar requirements of the academic lifestyle? Is there a formula for being a happy scholar? What habits would you advise for those embarking on a thesis?

Category: Academia, Teaching

Comments

11 Responses to “Why bother?”

  1. Terry
    March 17th, 2010 @ 11:00 am

    You can have the fire alarm go off in the last hour, as happened with my class this week. That would allow them to deal with the last hour at a pub in Newtown.

  2. Jane G.
    March 17th, 2010 @ 1:08 pm

    Anyone appalled by the requirements of the academic life should consider the alternative.

  3. melgregg
    March 17th, 2010 @ 1:25 pm

    That is certainly my answer to the motivation question Jane!!

  4. Nick Caldwell
    March 17th, 2010 @ 1:32 pm

    “Anyone appalled by the requirements of the academic life should consider the alternative.”

    Yes, I did, and taking the alternative engendered the greatest sense of freedom I’ve ever felt.

  5. Tama
    March 17th, 2010 @ 1:49 pm

    With the standard disclaimers about never ever doing it for the money, I guess I’d encourage new postgrads to think about what the want their candidature to *do* for them? Is it just about the research? Is it about using the research in a particular industry? (In which case, make sure the industry wants/respects/will read it.) Is it about becoming an academic? (As your blog eloquently shows, no easy path, but a small % of grads will probably at least try this path. They should be aware that they need to teaching, publishing and grant-writing are all skills they’ll need to demonstrate before getting a job, so try and bundle these skills together during candidature). Lastly, if generic skills etc really matter, then find out EVERYTHING that their university offers for free (foundations of uni teaching courses, skills training on software, ‘how to get published’ units, whatever) and take advantage. Some of the things that are mandatory for new academics (like foundations of L&T courses) are actually more rewarding if taken during candidature, adding in a more social element to what is often a very lonely 3, 4 or 5 years of thinking and writing).

  6. glen
    March 17th, 2010 @ 2:09 pm

    Are humanities graduates ever going to be doing it for the money?

  7. Kristian
    March 17th, 2010 @ 2:13 pm

    Glen: If I could, I would!

  8. Pen
    March 17th, 2010 @ 3:12 pm

    Hi Mel,

    I took this course when I was doing Honours! It’s a fantastic unit and it helped me a lot.

    I think one good thing to learn when you’re embarking on an honours thesis is that you’re there because you are good enough to be there. I remember feeling a bit like a fraud at times (during my PhD thesis too), so it could be helpful to remind students that they wouldn’t be allowed to enrol in Hons if they weren’t capable students.

    There are lots of factors that contribute to de-motivation, but I think lack of confidence in your own skills as a researcher/writer/thinker can often be a major one.

    There are definitely ways to learn to write regularly. eg. exercises like word targets for the day. With my thesis I’d often approach a section by writing it as if I was writing a blog post or an email to a friend – it helped get some of the ideas out and onto the screen, without the anxiety that can come with trying to write something perfectly or with an academic audience (or supervisor) in mind.

  9. Kristian
    March 17th, 2010 @ 3:37 pm

    @Penelly:

    As you probably noticed from my post I’m having all kinds of troubles with this stuff lately. I think you’re spot on about the confidence thing – one of the most motivating things that happened to me so far was when one of the members of the dept said “They wouldn’t have let you do it if they didn’t think you could”. And also with the blog post thing! I know this method would work if I could be bothered to use it, and I’d be blogging more often! So double win :) In fact. You know what? I’m going to start today! YAY. Motivation is me.

    Sorry to hijack the post Mel :)

  10. Alex TAHMINDJIS
    March 18th, 2010 @ 6:53 pm

    Easy answer: sport. Take up a regular form of exercise and give it priority and prominence in every day’s work. Book it ahead, ideally with a training partner, and do not miss it. It keeps one’s sanity as it increases serotonin and works on the neurophysiology stuff. Secret: I was in the gym when my wide delivered our son! We all felt better.

  11. Kyja
    April 9th, 2010 @ 12:09 am

    I think the hard thing is that advice itself can become a really demotivating factor. And this was largely my own fault, because I became a bit of a PhD advice junkie, but I was very lucky that someone pointed out that what I was doing was gathering a huge set of stringent expectations to heap on top of a pretty fraught and uncertain process.
    So much well meaning advice seems to say that you really need to work in one particular way, or be prepared to give X, or put in Y, *otherwise* you really should just give up and do something else.
    So, the message comes across as quite preachy and something like ‘be prepared to sacrifice and prostrate yourself at the altar of academia, because I had to, and if you don’t you cannot possibly make it’.
    This injunction to question whether you really want it and why becomes quite crippling. Because if I think about a lot of those things, I don’t meet the guidelines, or whatever expectations each self-help type program on doing a PhD sets out, and I fuck up quite frequently on whatever goals I set myself.
    So, the main thing I have going to motivate me is sheer stubbornness, and perhaps that I’m doing this simply because ‘I wanted to’ rather than purely about the job at the end, etc.
    Yeah, in concrete terms, I think the best thing to be told (at least for a student like me) is that you will screw up and not meet your goals much more frequently than you first imagined, and that that’s OK as long as you learn from this and keep picking yourself up .
    And the second thing would be to offer a range of possible ways or models to attack the process of writing a thesis, because at least then you can try something new if you fail and not feel that you really need to conform to being a certain type of student to get through it.
    -Sorry, I really didn’t mean to write such a huge comment.

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