Via Crooked Timber, I see that Tim Burke has a downer of a discussion on whether one should go to grad school.
Graduate school is not about learning. If you learn things, it’s only because you’ve already internalized the habit of learning, only because you make the effort on your own and in concert with fellow graduate students. You learn because that’s what you do now, that’s your life. Don’t go into it expecting to extend the kinds of heathily collaborative relationships you have had to date with your teachers and don’t go into it expecting to extend the kinds of educational nurturing you have had to date. Graduate school is not education. It is socialization. It is about learning to behave, about mastering a rhetorical and discursive etiquette as mind-blowingly arcane as table manners at a state dinner in 19th Century Western Europe.
He’s right on some of it, of course. While I’ve particularly come to appreciate my advisors during and after completion of the dissertation - they were productive in their guidance, not micromanaging - I can second that I learned just as much from my colleagues as I did from the formal setting of seminars, exams and office hours. That’s not to minimize our professors’ impact or to claim that grad school is not education: there’s a distinctly Brown ethos to my and my colleagues’ work after all. It’s just the form of graduate education is more oblique than undergraduate education. To phrase his directive differently, I’d say that people who should go to grad school are ones for whom academic research, life and culture are internalized enough so that it doesn’t feel like they’re doing hard work "mastering" a culture.
Reading over Tim’s post, my general reaction is to feel fortunate that I landed into a good program with a (mostly) congenial culture. Sure, the dissertation took longer than I would have liked, but it’s done now and I can concentrate on the reading I missed by being too immersed in the details of my research. Just last night I read Richard Maltby’s essay "’A brief romantic interlude’: Dick and Jane go to 3Â1/2 seconds of the Classical Hollywood Cinema" (in Post-Theory). It’s a marvelous essay, one of those that everyone interested in how Hollywood films work should read. It’s a reminder, too, of how film studies as a discipline seems to excel at essays, less so at full-length books.
Next on the docket: I finally get around to reading Deleuze.
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