So, it has been a while since I've written anything for this blog. The last month or so, involving packing up and leaving Seattle, driving for three days to Arizona and then my pre-week of orientations and other trainings and finally, my first week of graduate school, really was (free) time consuming. Today I wanted to pause, reflect and 'fill my tanks', as an anthropologist is really no good unless his/her soul is rested and heart is open. I read another anthropology blog, Savage Minds, written by mostly graduate students, post-docs and younger professors. A recent post from Rex, a Savage Minds blogger on August 23, 2013 was about 'filling your tanks', intellectual tanks that is. What does this mean? More importantly, what does this mean to graduate students? While I resist the urge to spout volumes about my newly minted life and identity, and in defense I think the first week is just as important and mind-opening as the last, I will share what I know now, after just 2 orientations, 4 online training modules, 1 academic lunch, 1 meeting with my advisor, 1 TA session and just 2 actual graduate classes, because I will never be able to return to this naivety, to this land of freshly fallen snow.
First, as my schedule depicts above, my classes are just a small portion of my actual responsibilities/endeavors. I knew this going in, of course, and I think most graduate students in a research-based academic field will agree with me here, it is the reason why I choose graduate school over any number of alternatives. Our tanks need filling specifically because of this structure of never ending 'things' to do that go above and beyond simply earning the degree, which was a big motivator for getting an undergraduate degree. Undergrad was very fulfilling; there is just something priceless about the beginning years of one's anthropological trajectory, a time of reading the classics and just getting ridiculously excited over them and learning of sub-disciplines and bodies of research that you would have never imagined existed (neo-liberalism in emotional pedagogy anyone?), as Rex points out. It is also a time of few resources and connections, not always being taken seriously and a pervasive and haunting sense that you are still at least a decade away from actually becoming what you now know you have to become unless you want to live an empty and meaningless life. So, when you finally do make it to graduate school, and for me that was exactly 6 years after first contact, 'filling the tanks' means not letting the enormity of a fully academic life swallow you whole. As Rex declared so refreshingly, simply reading a little outside of your sub-discipline can be enough to replenish and renew intellectual energy. There sometimes surfaces a great guilt from reading outside your sub-discipline of anthropology, partly because it is so broad a field of study that topics, theories and methodologies can sometimes separate two specializations dramatically and partly because sub-disciplines are ever-expanding and interdisciplinary work is applauded. For me, that reading right now is An Anthropologist at Work, edited by Margaret Mead about the life and writings of Ruth Benedict. While part auto-biography and part auto-ethnography, it doesn't represent a research interest but rather allows the reader a way to reflect upon their own life and writings. It's a big book and a little slow going but I picked it up to plod through when I learned Ruth Benedict was a poet as well. It has been a while since I've written any poetry but it could, perhaps, be my way of 'filling the tanks'. That and this blog, which I started to build up my writing skills specifically for the graduate school application process and will continue it to 'deal' with the consequences of being a successful applicant.
References
Rex, “Fill the Tanks,” Savage Minds, August 23, 2013, http://backupminds.wordpress.com/2013/08/23/fill-the-tanks/.
Ruth Benedict, An Anthropologist at Work, trans. Margaret Mead, Cambridge, 1959.
