You Don't Scare Me! (Yet)

Waiting for my PhD program is really beginning to turn into a strange experience. I spend my days reading some lighter history books, messing around online, updating this blog, and generally loafing about. But in the back of my mind I know I have to finish all the necessary paperwork to register at Princeton this fall and start down the course of a PhD- an experience I don't think I've actually heard a positive thing about.

Undergraduate work at UChicago was really harrowing at times, and there were bouts of anxiety, insomnia, and general discomfort, to be sure. But I am fully aware, at least nominally, about the stresses exerted by a PhD program. And I'm certain the prospect of living in a foreign country for a year will only add to the stressors to be had. Yet, I still don't think I fully get it. I mean, really get it. 


See, these PhD students are all people who love (or should love) studying, researching, and engaging with the field they are in. These are students who aspire to understand, in an intiment way, the literature and landscape of their chosen fields. And still they all seem so utterly destroyed by what they are doing that they can hardly be called human anymore. I'm on the chopping block, and still I may be in a little bit of denial.

Like I said, I know its going to be hard, just not how hard. My mental picture of my life, at least for the next two years, includes a home life with my girlfriend, drinking coffee, and reading things I'm interested in (and more things I'm not interested in) while attending classes and sitting at my desk during the day. My mental picture still has room for me to exist outside the classwork, though not outside the process of engaging with the ideas and concepts I need to master. I have the vision of me happy despite the trials of difficult coursework. But maybe I just don't get how much work there is. Maybe I don't fully comprehend that the work is, in the words of so many broken PhD students, isolating. I just don't understand what that is supposed to mean.

So, I am spending my summer reading what I want to read, going on trips, and generally just being an utter burden on society. All the while I speed on towards something I think I understand and am ready for, yet will potentially defy all my expectations. This is typically how things unfold, is it not? Add to this a prevailing sense that I am woefully unprepared to keep pace with my peers. I didn't major in Anthropology, and I haven't kept pace with the "current literature." I just happen to love the questions I can ask in the field and the answers that seem to come back. Maybe that love is enough to sustain me.