April 05, 2006

“It’s Like Aerobics for The Brain”

Kim Liao is writing a thesis about plays of Samuel Beckett and how different directors (including Beckett himself) have done productions. It’s the last quarter of her senior year, and Kim is trying to get herself into gear to take what has been an enormous amount of research and analysis and put it into writing. Here’s her reflection upon how working on her thesis has helped her to develop, and it’s quite moving:

I want to give myself the best possible opportunities to work on the thesis between now and May, to feel that I put my best effort in. With my new being-revised-in-progress calendar, I plan to have an entire rough draft by April 15, so that I can spend a full month revising. This quarter has given me some confidence that all of that will be possible. After pounds of paper in Xeroxes, many books bought with my summer stipend and more checked out from the library, I feel both armed and prepared to finish this task. Although I am still struggling through the end of Chapter 2, I know that I have written a lot.

And it has been a really formative, intimate experience — I have learned to depend on myself, and to allow myself the indulgence of time to really explore the options about why I’m writing. A project of this scope gives a very deep view of a personal academic project that I never could have gotten from classes. And now, classes offer me a chance to reflect on how far I’ve come. I remember when a 5-page or 10-page paper for a class was a very big deal.

It’s funny — I look up from my futon and see my Beckett bookshelf — I’ve been looking at my shelf of Beckett books every day for probably about six months. It’s funny for me to think about the thesis ending. It’s funny to think of all the things I’ve read, of all the things I always meant to read, and of all the things I’ll never touch, and how this research has changed me. How I’ve changed myself through the process of research, and of writing. It’s been like aerobics for the brain. It’s so hard for me to adequately express what this thesis represents for me. While I was uncertain about my plans for next fall, it represented any and all of my projects for the future over which I had some control — but the pressure quickly got too intense. A friend of mine said the other day, “It’s just a paper. ” And while he was right, and when I work myself into a frenzy over it, I should remember that, but when I sit back and reflect on the progress I’ve made, and what I want to do next, it is so much more than a paper. It is an experiment, the biggest challenge to me as a thinker and as a writer at this moment in time. It is a capstone experience that I can really feel I have spent my undergraduate career working towards. Now I just need to get a bit more sleep and calm the anxiety, and I’ll be all set.

Posted by hilton at 11:34 AM | Comments (0)

March 31, 2006

Getting Absorbed in Your Topic

Somewhere on the way to finishing a thesis, you may pause and wonder at how much you've changed as a result. There's a certain satisfying feeling of getting swallowed up by ideas and issues. You can master something -- but it also masters you. Kendra Berenson, writing a thesis on the philosophy of John Dewey for the Interdisciplinary Program in Humanities, describes just such a feeling of getting absorbed. This is what she writes:

Sometimes I lament the loss of the wide-eyed curiosity that made me transcribe every word spoken in every class in my notebook and the enthusiasm for learning everything that generated a page long list of classes I had to take at the beginning of each quarter. I miss the way that my mind hopped from one new idea to another, skipping in glee with all the possibilities for future study. I wanted to be an expert on every single book that we read in SLE [Structured Liberal Education] and my other freshman courses. I still take great pleasure in most of my classes and immerse myself in reading and discussions, but I have perceived a certain mellowness in myself, a steadier rhythm in my thinking. Knowing so much more about cultural history, social theory, and philosophy than I did before Stanford, I also have a more realistic idea of what it takes to truly know a field. As my last quarter as an undergraduate approaches I am gathering in what I have learned and letting go of all the classes that I won’t get to take here.

With this gradual sobering of my buoyant and prismatic intellectual enthusiasm I have come to appreciate a subtler source of nourishment — the satisfaction of focused and prolonged study in one area. Though I was always attuned to the idea that such in depth study was beneficial, it has taken a real reckoning to bring myself to turn away from my prior more fanciful, fragmented exploration into the darker, more tortuous realm of the honors thesis. There I found myself adrift, captain of the biggest boat I’d ever seen with no knowledge of how to steer. The thesis is spoken of as a culminating academic experience, yet it felt like a brand new endeavor, of a very different nature than anything I had embarked on before. I felt completely unprepared. Yet with each stroke of my paddle, I saw that I had the power to carve out the river around me. And, as I began to focus my research, the boat shrank to a more maneuverable size. The waters still rock me and the journey ahead is long, but I have my sea legs now.

Though my study list for my major in Interdisciplinary Studies has changed considerably since I constructed it at the end of sophomore year, one sentence from my statement of purpose still rings true: “Secondly, I am interested in the human need for meaning and how this is manifest in the search for and creation of meaning. ” Though I did not see how the work of John Dewey connected to my original study plan when I chose to study his philosophy of education, I have arrived in my thesis at the very questions I proposed a few years ago. I have had to turn away from many tempting paths of inquiry and activity, but I have gained access to new windows for looking at the world. Dewey has shaped how I see my own experiences (I am studying his philosophy of experience) and my current and future work as an educator. Several times a week I introduce a thought in a conversation with, “As Dewey would say... ” My thesis companions — studying Beckett, Steiner, and the mikvah (Jewish ritual baths) — and I tease each other and ourselves for the way we inevitably veer towards our theses in thought and conversation. Yet it is no laughing matter. For another couple months, Dewey will permeate my experience on many levels. His words sift through my mind and I build bridges of meaning, scribbling and typing, declaring with each word my acceptance of this worthy ordeal.

Kendra Joy Berenson

Posted by hilton at 08:09 PM | Comments (0)