Collegiate Differences

While entertaining blog entries are a nice side effect, the real reason I am here is to finish what I started many moons ago: getting an education. I started in August of 1985, and hopefully in May of 2013, I will be finished. Granted, I was out of school for a few years as I had forgotten to really think about what I wanted to do with my life once out of college. As much as Monmouth did bestow on me a wonderfully flexible liberal arts education, they did not really prepare me for the brutal fact that no one was looking to hand me a job. My senior year I was corned by Mark Willhardt and Rob Hale, and they told me that grad school might be the best choice for me.

Originally, I was going to be a fiction writer, but, well, my fiction is terrible. Also, I am unmotivated, so writing without a deadline was never something I could do. It seems my creative gene needs a kick in the pants, and life after college provided fewer kicks than I had hoped. I tried to get some of my college writing published and was unanimously rejected. After two years of unsuccessfully trying to get published and unsuccessful applications to MFA programs, I tried to get into some MA programs. My second round, I applied to Southern Illinois University, was accepted and did rather well.

Determined not to make the same mistakes twice, I applied to grad schools early, 10 total, and was accepted by two: here at Aberystwyth and at University of Washington. Neither one offered much in the way of compensation, but the price tag on Washington was more prohibitive than Aberystwyth, so here I came.

Not that I mind, actually. I have attended three different institutes of higher education, and is like nothing that I have ever attended. I went to the small school in rural Illinois (Monmouth College, in scenic Monmouth, Illinois), and was attended to as one would imagine at a small school: the professors all knew me by name, they all took great strides to help me academically, there were tons of engaging conversations to be had at any time. That said, Monmouth does not open doors. No one has heard of the college, and while the faculty is amazing, few have regional recognition, to say nothing of national recognition.

Southern Illinois was a different experience entirely. First, it was HUGE, the second biggest university in the state behind the venerable University of Illinois - Champaign-Urbana. The faculty was massive, and several of which were publishing regularly (many had books out, or were in the midst of publishing books). My adviser had two book length studies of Stephen Crane published while he operated trains in Iowa. He was mentioned in the acknowledgment pages of several reputable books, and taught one of the first graduate level classes on comic books. That said, I had to fight tooth and nail to get noticed at that school. The professors had their own concerns, and a department of roughly 5,000 undergraduates and nearly 100 postgraduates to worry about. I was a small fish in the ocean. I felt, often, that my needs were not high on the list of priorities (I could understand why), so in many regards I felt that I was unprepared for my PhD at that school.

Aberystwyth lands somewhere in the middle: its bigger than Monnouth and much smaller than SIU. The faculty is large, but the department is smaller. There are not many PhD students (I have met two, and they mentioned about four or five others), so my supervisor is well acquainted with my project, with my writing style, with my expectations for the program and what I want to do afterward. Will is focused on not only making me a better scholar and writer, but ensuring I know how to publish my work, get accepted to conferences, and get a job at the end. Though, without classes, teaching assignments or an office, I feel really isolated from the rest of the learning community, and have riddled my friends (read: Erika) with tons of academic problems they neither understand fully or care about.

Probably the biggest problem with this program is that it requires a certain amount of motivation that I lack. I am trying to keep on my studies, but lying around not doing anything sounds really enjoyable whenever I pick up a dense book about narrative theory or comic studies. That said, I am actually interested in my project, so I can usually rustle up some get-up-and-go if I sit around long enough. Hopefully, though, as Aberystwyth becomes routine, I can manage to get more work done. I begin drafting my introduction soon, and should have the first portion of my dissertation done by March, maybe late March.

If anyone has ever considered European academia, particularly British academia, I highly suggest it, especially late in academic career. There is a pragmatism here that is lacking in the States, but I don't feel the focus on getting a job later in life detracts from the education I am receiving.

Then again, I have been here a month, so I could be totally misconstruing the situation.