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[verysneaky]

Yeah, flamglam, thanks for the reality check.

It is a PhD program, actually: I'm in the first year of it. (MA --> PhD) But you're right that whining is never the answer.

I hope that if you're continuing on to a PhD program in the near future, you'll find your own set of supportive and hard-driving advisors.

[bread_pirate_naan]

A number of your ideas about what these opportunities signify is a bit naive.

As you might have guessed, my politeness in regarding these things as opportunities was largely an attempt to stay positive and refrain from complaining about senior people in my department. I have to stand by the advice I've been given, and that you have critiqued, as being extremely reasonable given the culture of my department, which might be very different from the culture of yours. But I do appreciate the devil's advocacy.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I am not writing against every other post.  August Leo's list was not the same as I have as a student, but useful with regard to thinking about better time management.

The culture of your department is to assign responsibilities without consulting you. Yes, that's different.  A full courseload combined with a major research project is unheard of, not just in my program, but at my university and my MA granting institution.  (At any stage in the program, but in the first year, jaw dropping.)

IMO, reality checking people with more responsibilities than you have when you are the lowest status and newest member of your department is not good advice.  Same goes for playing dumb.  That only works with politics and gossip.  If you act dumb about activities on the department calendar, you look foolish, disorganized, and out of touch.  Whether or not you agree is not my problem.  It's as far from devil's advocacy as I could possibly get.  There's a difference between alternate perspectives and devil's advocacy, and it isn't small.   Someone will consider whether my perspective as an informed one.

The idea of faculty announcing presentations without consulting students is as far from the culture of my program as one can get.  As is the upside of playing dumb.  One of the things that is not necessarily unique about the expectations of my program, but of specific faculty in it, is the expectation to conduct activities and research on topics that are not the focus of one's primary research.  The culture of a department is not monolithic, and saying no to one person can shut down all future opportunities with one person, while inspiring great empathy from another.

Also, opportunities to present and lecture when generously funded are significantly less stressful than a schedule that involves a full course load and teaching responsibilities.  You have clear time management problems if you are not teaching and cannot accomplish a number of things efficiently.  The only intervening factor in that is the ill advised and extremely heavy course/thesis balance you have to negotiate.

If you will remember, last year (or last semester) someone showed up with similar problems produced by sitting on a national and university committee in their first year.

Take advantage of your opportunities.

Or someone like me will be happy to take them for you.

The Darwinism of the humanities is no joke.  Good luck to everyone out there.

[grasshopper]

Also, opportunities to present and lecture when generously funded are significantly less stressful than a schedule that involves a full course load and teaching responsibilities.  You have clear time management problems if you are not teaching and cannot accomplish a number of things efficiently.  The only intervening factor in that is the ill advised and extremely heavy course/thesis balance you have to negotiate.

That's no small intervening factor. Sort of mitigates the whole "you have crappy time management skills" thing, don't you think?

As s/he has no teaching responsibilities, and seeing as how his/her professors (who are in a much better position than you to judge these things) seem to think that s/he is fully capable of completing these additional research projects - then, perhaps it's not so ill-advised.

For what it's worth, it's not unheard of to be doing research while doing coursework. I've done it - in both the MA and the PhD. Everyone else in my PhD program has done it, too. None of us are dead yet, and most us are doing pretty well. You seem to be picking on this structure like it's some kind of offensive monstrosity. It's not.

It is in your interest to ask about the culture of your program from a more advanced student before you get too comfortable picking and choosing to suit your research agenda.   If there are tacit expectations in your program they are not going to be known by the fora.

[...]

If someone is delegating to you, find out if this is par for the course.  I do not recommend reality checking your faculty. 

This is excellent advice. And don't just ask one person. Ask many. Find out what's normal.

And watch the other students. Does everyone get asked to do extra work? Or just the good students? What is the usual response? Do you see people getting bypassed when the departmental goody bag is passed around? Are they the people who said no, and pissed people off? Or are they the people who said yes, and never got their own work done? 

[bread_pirate_naan]

Also, opportunities to present and lecture when generously funded are significantly less stressful than a schedule that involves a full course load and teaching responsibilities.  You have clear time management problems if you are not teaching and cannot accomplish a number of things efficiently.  The only intervening factor in that is the ill advised and extremely heavy course/thesis balance you have to negotiate.

That's no small intervening factor. Sort of mitigates the whole "you have crappy time management skills" thing, don't you think?

If you OP a thread called "Drowning first year," and are spending what amounts to a third of normal human waking hours on a single workshop, I'm going to feel comfortable assuming you are responsible for the predicament. As always, grassy, you are more than welcome to your own point of view. (While neither of us have a TT job, perspectival differences this great are not uncommon in the culture of PhD programs.)

As s/he has no teaching responsibilities, and seeing as how his/her professors (who are in a much better position than you to judge these things) seem to think that s/he is fully capable of completing these additional research projects - then, perhaps it's not so ill-advised.

VS hasn't disclosed her funding situation, and the subject line is "Drowning first year."  Unfortunately, at this point that reality takes precedence over possibilities that may be transpiring in other parallel dimensions.  

I'll let the MAs matriculating and others consider whether they think they want to try a similar approach.  It is entirely possible that no one is supervising in that regard.  That circumstance appears no more or less common as programs where a first year's every course is decided with virtually no free choice of courses or course load.

For what it's worth, it's not unheard of to be doing research while doing coursework. I've done it - in both the MA and the PhD. Everyone else in my PhD program has done it, too. None of us are dead yet, and most us are doing pretty well. You seem to be picking on this structure like it's some kind of offensive monstrosity. It's not.

You seem to think I'm not entitled to my own opinions.

One major difference between ABD and PhD student is the lack of coursework.  Many MA programs run on similar principles for the thesis.  Those are the major research projects I was referring to, and yes, I do think the format with which you are comfortable is undesirable.

[verysneaky]

If you OP a thread called "Drowning first year," and are spending what amounts to a third of normal human waking hours on a single workshop, I'm going to feel comfortable assuming you are responsible for the predicament.

BPN. Twenty to thirty hours a week is not a third of normal human waking hours unless you sleep thirteen hours a night. Moreover, everybody in this class is spending twenty to thirty hours a week on it. It's an identification, localization, and dating workshop, taught by a world-class practitioner, held in the Special Collections of a museum or library. The prerequisites included the knowledge of three foreign languages. It's notorious throughout the department for being all-consuming.

What's going on here is that none of my profs know about the things other profs are requesting: why should they? All of them know that I recently had an article accepted for publication, so all of them have told me to strive to make my final paper for them into a publishable paper. Of course it is not going to occur to any one of them that the others would have expressed the same expectations, and that three publishable papers in one semester is an overload. It's nothing so clear-cut as a department-wide expectation that I should check everything off my list. It's just an inevitable outcome of the structure of coursework: I have four bosses rather than one. The advice to set boundaries and think through my research agenda is very germane to my situation, I think.

Before posting this thread, I did ask around among my professors and peers to make sure that I was not the origin of this problem, and all of them told me that the demands I was facing were unusually high for the department and that I should cut myself some slack.

I'm not teaching now (I do have a plum fellowship, but will start teaching next year). Even so, my current load feels heavier than it did in my master's, when I was teaching quite a bit in addition to full-time coursework.

In general, I have no problem with publishing and presenting while in coursework. I have been publishing and presenting throughout the year, and until recently, it was challenging but doable. I gave a conference paper out-of-state in Feb, turned in a set of proofs for an article over spring break, and revised another project intended for publication and unrelated to coursework in March (with the intention to finalize and submit it this summer). It's the volume of extracurricular research currently being asked of me, combined with an enormously taxing curricular semester, that is causing me to struggle.

I feel like this post is longer than it needs to be. Somehow the last couple of posts have put me on the defensive.  Sorry for the length. Thanks to those who gave useful advice.

[bread_pirate_naan]

Before posting this thread, I did ask around among my professors and peers to make sure that I was not the origin of this problem, and all of them told me that the demands I was facing were unusually high for the department and that I should cut myself some slack.

Wow. 

[verysneaky]

BPN, I'm sorry; I don't understand what you're driving at. Did you have a question? What was particularly awe-inspiring about that statement?

I'm also PMing you.

[verysneaky]

Actually: scratch the PM. Three things:

1) If you have a question about the statement you quoted, please feel free to ask it, and I will be happy to answer eventually.
2) If you're interested in having a dialogue, please adopt the tone of professional respect that is customary on these fora.
3) In any case, this thread has degenerated from a source of really helpful advice from senior people to...well, something else, and I think I should let it cool off.

I'll look back in a couple of days once I'm less angry and BPN has perhaps gotten bored. Thanks again to all who offered such thoughtful and thorough replies upthread: I have bookmarked them and will return to them!

[bread_pirate_naan]

What was particularly awe-inspiring about that statement?

You framed your question in your OP in terms quite strongly opposed to what multiple people in your program told you:
1) Am I being unreasonable: should I just woman up and take all this on?
2) all of them told me that the demands I was facing were unusually high for the department and that I should cut myself some slack.

This is arresting. The reason why you got a "wow" is because, what else can one say to a person who tests or sets up others like that? Very sneaky, indeed.  If you had bothered to disclose the complete circumstances, not only would I not have replied, you would not have put Grassy in the unpleasant position of agreeing with my advice.  I am impressed flamglam called like it is.  Duly noted. Clue bearing, low post count grad=flamglam.

For those of you playing the home game, 30 hours a week is one third of a 90 hour work week.  That's a schedule of more than 12 hours a day (closer to 13), 7 days a week. 

[tenured_feminist]

I guess what confuses me here is the MA thesis. Perhaps this is a disciplinary thing, but it sounds to me like you're taking at least three seminars right now, possibly four, and one of your classes is methods boot camp. In most programs with which I am familiar, an MA thesis is written as an independent project and students are strongly encouraged not to start work on them during a term when they are taking multiple research seminar; i.e., do it only once most of the coursework is completed. What I'd say is that unless your MA thesis must be completed immediately for funding reasons or because you are getting a lot of transfer credit from previous MA work, throw it in a drawer until you have more time.

I also would say that, in my experience, you may be misunderstanding what your profs are saying about your final seminar papers. I usually tell my students to shoot for something publishable at the beginning of the term, but that is not a vague admonition to do something really, really good. It's rather a specific instruction to pick a topic and approach that are compatible with writing a tightly focused piece that addresses a particular problem in the literature effectively and thoroughly and (in a class with empirical components) incorporates a do-able piece of empirical research. If I say it to someone mid-semester, what I mean is that the student has picked a good topic and is executing it well so far. "Try to make this publishable" does not mean that it should be good enough to go in your discipline's flagship journal the day you turn it in for a grade. It means that it's looking good and you should try to get it in the kind of shape that, with my final set of comments in hand, you can do one more quick go-through and then send it out somewhere or take it to a conference next fall and then send it out.

One possibility would be to try to do well with all three papers and then talk with your advisor once the term is over to figure out which of these three papers is your best bet for a well placed publication. Then send it out over the summer. Too many students leave the very good seminar paper in the drawer instead of continuing to advance with it.

If the demands of this semester are "extraordinarily high" based on conversations with faculty and grad students, then work on prioritizing better. Say no to the least important things, put off the less important things, and focus on the things that will enable you 1) to complete your degree in excellent and timely fashion and 2) to build your CV well for the job market. Most sane faculty members will understand and approve of grad students who explicitly set priorities in this way, as long as they are not violating longstanding departmental norms (i.e., "the first-year grad students always attend the job talks here") and they are showing concrete evidence that the priority-setting is helping them to achieve good results on the ground.

[reener06]

You may also want to suggest, when asked to do X or Y presentation that is within the department or university, that you are really busy, but someone else in your program might be available/is a good pick. This does three things: reduces your workload, reduces any bad feelings from other students toward you for being asked all the time, and shows your collegiality. The latter point can show up in LORs and more generally, might be discussed in a positive manner casually in the department and even at conferences.

FWIW, I've found that I need to limit my presentations w/i and w/o the department. Elementary schools often want presentations, and then w/i the university these are sometimes requested. It's ok to say no--they will find someone else, and if you don't need it for your CV, say no. Also, limit yourself to one conference paper per year. These are incredibly time-consuming and the rewards are few; however, at this stage in your career it's a nice way to get your name out there a bit.

[verysneaky]

Thanks, Reener, for a great suggestion re: how to turn something down while building connections.

I guess what confuses me here is the MA thesis. Perhaps this is a disciplinary thing, but it sounds to me like you're taking at least three seminars right now, possibly four, and one of your classes is methods boot camp. In most programs with which I am familiar, an MA thesis is written as an independent project and students are strongly encouraged not to start work on them during a term when they are taking multiple research seminar; i.e., do it only once most of the coursework is completed. What I'd say is that unless your MA thesis must be completed immediately for funding reasons or because you are getting a lot of transfer credit from previous MA work, throw it in a drawer until you have more time.

My program is a little weird: we are all absolutely required to do the MA thesis in the first year, while in coursework. There is no flexibility with regard to the deadline at all.* Most people take a much easier spring courseload than the one I am taking. (Currently I have four courses: two research seminars, a methods bootcamp, and a thesis.) I kind of inflicted it on myself, but the methods bootcamp looked really innocuous in the catalog...it even had an undergrad course number. Live and learn. If I had it to do over again, I would sign up for much easier courses, but there's nothing to be done about it now but stay afloat.

I also would say that, in my experience, you may be misunderstanding what your profs are saying about your final seminar papers. . .

Yes, this point (and the explanation that followed it) was a very helpful reality check, and I've taken it to heart. Thanks.

If the demands of this semester are "extraordinarily high" based on conversations with faculty and grad students, then work on prioritizing better.

I agree with you and several people upthread (in particular hegemony, I believe) that this is a skill I need to pick up as quickly as possible.

I also think that another big take-away is that I need to build a stronger relationship with my advisor, who is difficult in some ways but wonderful in others. I got myself into trouble by trying to make too many decisions on my own.



*I suspect that this is because our MA did not used to lead directly into the PhD: instead, a group of MAs competed for a small number of PhD spots. We still have a larger terminal MA program as well as a smaller MA/PhD program, although there's no longer competition among the two groups (students are admitted at the outset either to the MA/PhD or to the terminal MA degree). So, to a greater extent than at most places, the MA year is structured as a one-year terminal research degree, and the program tries to squeeze a lot into a little bit of time.