It's a bit after midnight in the middle of the week. I've just finished making an ungodly amount of broccoli cheddar soup that I will likely be working my way through for the rest of the year.

While the soup was simmering, I was reading through a book I just got from the school library that was recommended by my Theory TA (and personal touchstone). It's the kind of book I'll have to read with my notebook at hand because just the introduction has me stupidly excited and a little sad that I'm getting sleepy.

I can't be too sad, though, because I want to be rested for my morning meeting with a researcher who I accosted at a faculty-doc student mixer early in the semester and then spoke with more when she gave a talk about her emerging research agenda. Whether she knows it or not (and she's bright so I suspect she's got an idea), I've decided we need to collaborate and be friends. We have similar backgrounds, similar research interests (though she's pretty firmly in HIV whereas I have been less so in recent years), and she just exudes an excitement about the work that fills any room she enters.

Yeah, I'm excited.

Great book, exciting meeting, yummy (though slightly salty but that's ok because I'll be freezing it) soup, and the beginning seeds of a dissertation idea (Including a recent decision to commit to primary data collection).

This is it; I'm living the dream. Yes, there's the drudgery of midterms and memorization but there's also the love of new ideas and thinking about big concepts and so much potential.

It really can be a great life if you let it (especially if it sneaks up on you).

Mental note: remember this feeling when things are looking bleak.

After a month-long absence (immediately after committing myself to writing once a week BTW), I'm not sure which I'd rather write about - the pain of midterms or the notion of finding a voice that I've been thinking about for a little while now. 

Let's start with something concrete like midterms and see how things go...

So... they happened. I survived (barely) and even went on a lovely and much-needed fall break to see friends and family while also managing to sleep more than I had in months. Thinking back on them, I somehow feel like they shouldn't have been as painful as they were. I mean, I've done midterms before, more of them at once in fact, and had things not be so draining. 

But in all fairness, this is also the first time I've done them at the same time I'm working at the breakneck speed of a doctoral student. The pace is just kind of incessant. I was commenting to someone (right before midterms now that I think about it) that I essentially hit the ground running Monday mornings and then sprinted to Fridays, at the end of which I was exhausted and spent the weekend rebuilding the reserves needed to do it all over again the next week. But add on top of that big ticket items like a methods midterm or theory paper and I'll accept that it might've been a lot for a lowly mortal.

What makes it so busy? It is and isn't the coursework. As any current or former grad student can attest to, there are fewer classes but there's typically more outside work. Our readings are voluminous, the amount of material being crammed into our brains is vast, and the rate at which we are asked to translate that into our own work is pretty insane. Then there is the inevitable assistantship (for most of us in the cohort it is research) that brings with it an entirely different (but hopefully related) set of tasks, readings, and skills. And the manuscripts which I can pretty comfortably say everyone is feeling pressured to work on to start to build our own portfolio. Publish or perish and whatnot. On top of which we're being asked to think about career trajectories, personal and professional epistemologies, strategizing coursework, brainstorming dissertation ideas, networking with faculty, and managing the countless other big philosophical and life questions. Heaven forbid you be thinking about personal relationships or starting a family in addition to all of that. 

Alright, fine, maybe writing it out helps me process why it was such a draining midterm season. Thanks for that, Dear Reader. 

I think that's all I've got for now. I'm currently thinking about Freire, empowerment vs. liberation vs. revolution vs. critical thought vs. problem posing, what that means for the courses I should take next semester, and what that says about what I'll eventually consider my voice as a researcher (or academic???). That's the finding voice stuff I alluded to at the beginning and have (just now) decided to save for another day.