First and foremost, I really enjoyed reading Carmen Kynard’s pieces, so I’ll just start there. In her post A Week in the Life of a Black Feminist: Days 5 and 6 there were several concepts that I really resonated with. For example, her intellectual inspiration was fascinating and impactful. I think that universities tote this idea of inspiring knowledge, but I agree with Kynard’s point that we end up being silo-ed and join the Old Boys Club and know a lot about very little (our scholarly research interest). But, I loved the idea of just taking some time for yourself and filling yourself inspirationally with ideas and topics outside of academia.
While it’s not quite the same, I have been trying to do something similar for the past four months, and honestly I found it having a large impact on me. To be honest, I was an angry grad student my first year and a half in my PhD. Many of my frustrations were similar to those GTA’s in Gruber’s piece. I felt a lack of agency, a lack of stimulation in my scholarly interests, and I was honestly dealing with a lot of personal changes as well. All of those coupled with how much time I was pouring into my scholarly pursuits and how much I was neglecting my personal relationships; health; intellectual interests; and self interests started to take a toll.
But, I found that taking some time for myself to workout; meeting regularly with a counselor to deal with some of those changes/issues; actually start cooking (and in the process remembered how much I enjoy cooking); pursuing interests outside of my academic studies (whhhhaattt??) such as volunteering, meeting new people, reading for fun, and investing in relationships were some of the best choices I made to better my outlook. I think that like Kynard, a lot of my scholarly interests co-align with personal interests. A lot of my scholarly interests deal with community relations, intercultural perspectives, and communicating with people. The difference was in my first year was that I was disconnecting myself from everyone to read about how to communicate with people. It seems a little backwards when I reflect about it. I do think there is is still room to improve, and I love that Kynard gives herself a day to try something new in the city to revitalize this part of her life. I do want to try something similar and maybe go to OKC or Tulsa for more events like those, but I think I would have to limit myself to 1-2 a month because of two limitations: time & financial resources. I love that Kynard has the ability to work M-R, but I think that there are many who don’t have that flexibility in their teaching. Additionally, while there are a few events in Stillwater, many of the more culturally diverse events are in the two main metropolitan areas (and several cost money). Even with these two small road blocks, I think it is very manageable to go once or twice a month, so that is my new goal for the rest of the semester.
…. Total topic change….. 🙂
I also resonated with Gruber’s piece. I love how she opened herself and actually created change for GTA’s in her field. I think there were tangible tasks that showed how we could make change even at a small level. A thought that kept coming back to me was due to the fact that she was recently accepted into this role, I think she had a lot more ability to change the program with a lot less to lose. For example, if she had been the current WPA for a few years, and instructors and GTA’s were having issues with the readings and the structure of the FYC program, it would have been a much different, humbling experience to change everything like she did. I found that this point was glossed over a bit, but I think that if a current WPA undertook the dramatic changes she did, it would be a powerful move. I think we just need to also reflect that she did have the momentum to change it since she didn’t have a ton of buy-in to the current program.
Katie Rieger, Portfolio 