Posts by Bessie McAdams

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Posts by Bessie McAdams

On Wallflowers and Conferences

August 13, 2012 | By Bessie McAdams, Ph.D. Student, English

There’s a myth floating around somewhere that graduate students are full of ourselves and that we assume we’re ready to take on seasoned professionals in our field at the first opportunity. While I’m sure this type of grad student exists (or used to and has since gone extinct), it has very much not been my experience. No, my experience has tended in the other direction—I tend to suffer from the Imposter Syndrome (is that a real thing? If not, I declare it a real thing right now!) and get twisted into pretzels of nervousness when I have to interact with…

Published in: Student Voices

Write write write

July 30, 2012 | By Bessie McAdams, Ph.D. Student, English

Here is what I tell my students about their writing: if it was easy, everyone would do it. This is, of course, a stupid thing to say. Everyone does do it. Very few people would recognize it about themselves, but everyone writes. You write e-mails, you write texts, you write Facebook updates, you write tweets, you write all the time. And yet nothing seems harder than facing a blank page with that blinking curser just waiting for you to fill it with Important Thoughts. Suddenly my students (and I don’t pretend to be exempt from this) forget that they write…

Published in: Student Voices

If You’re Bored, You Aren’t Looking

May 29, 2012 | By Bessie McAdams, Ph.D. Student, English

It’s true that Ann Arbor empties out when the undergrads evacuate for the summer. Sandwich shops that used to have half-hour waits at lunchtime are suddenly first-come-everybody-served. You can just waltz into a study carrel in Hatcher and enjoy the fact that you might have a whole floor to yourself. The halls of most buildings are dark until you walk through them—and even when the lights flicker on in front of you, they seem to be doing so against their will. It would be easy—especially for someone from a big city like me—to mistake the quiet for dullness. It does…

Published in: Student Voices

What Did YOU Do This Summer?

April 19, 2012 | By Bessie McAdams, Ph.D. Student, English

First of all, it’s important to remind you that I’m one of the people who’s just better suited to winter. I like sweaters, I like my nose being a bit cold, I like snuggling into my duvet at night, I like scarves, I like making tea after tea after tea, and I like snow a bit too much for my own good. I do not like summer. This started ages ago, back when “summer” just meant “time off from school.” I lived in the New York City area (and there’s a reason the Lovin Spoonful’s song “Summer in the City”…

Published in: Student Voices

What Are You (and) What Will You Do?

March 28, 2012 | By Bessie McAdams, Ph.D. Student, English

I have found that introductions to new people follow a pretty uniform trajectory. Question #1: What do you do? I answer: I’m a grad student in English Language and Literature. Then comes Question #2: So what kind of career do you want? That question may seem entirely reasonable to you, ye of other fields, but to an English Ph.D. student, it’s like asking the candidate for the presidency what job he wants right after he’s told you that he’s running for president. There’s only one career, really, for English Ph.D. students to look forward to: college professor. (This is not…

Published in: Student Voices

Kind Whenever Possible

February 16, 2012 | By Bessie McAdams, Ph.D. Student, English

Before I started graduate school, I was having a pretty rough time. I had come back from Japan suddenly the year before to help with a family emergency and spent the ensuing year doing “service” for an Americorps non-profit that I am not going to name here because I am about to start mudslinging. This non-profit was the worst job I ever had and that’s including the four months I spent in the freezer of a meat-packing factory. The idea behind the organization was like a bad joke: they wanted us to find kids aged 9-16 who wanted to start…

Published in: Student Voices

In Seed Time Learn, in Harvest Teach, in Winter Enjoy

January 18, 2012 | By Bessie McAdams, Ph.D. Student, English

Aomori-shi, Aomori-ken, Japan Confession time: Ann Arbor isn’t the coldest or the snowiest place I’ve lived. My sister likes to make fun of me for the machismo of this boast, but it’s true. I’ve seen colder and I’ve seen much snowier. I lived for a year in a prefecture in Japan called Aomori. The snow was so intense in the winter that I would have to shovel my small patch of sidewalk before I went to work in the morning, first thing upon returning, and then again before going to sleep. And it was up to my knees by each…

Published in: Student Voices

An Office Hour of One’s Own

December 9, 2011 | By Bessie McAdams, Ph.D. Student, English

Many of us don’t have the luxury of understanding office hour politics only from the point of view of the student’s chair. Many of us are called upon to switch chairs sometimes and to, unfortunately, deal with the other side of the story. Hard as it can be to enter such a space as the student—and it absolutely can seem monumentally intimidating when all the books are staring at you from the shelves and there’s a line out the hall—it’s also incredibly hard for the instructor. I have my office hours for an hour after each class every week. Sometimes,…

Published in: Student Voices

Faculty Connections: Graduate Foot In Mouth Syndrome (or “GFIMS”)

November 9, 2011 | By Bessie McAdams, Ph.D. Student, English

There’s a brand of awkward grad student to which I thoroughly subscribe: the kind that manages to get their foot stuck in their mouth in every office hour they ever attend. Maybe I didn’t practice enough as an undergrad (I always assumed that one didn’t visit office hours without a particular concern. My experience with teaching has since shown me the error of my ways). Maybe I watched Dead Poets Society too often and have the wrong understanding of what the faculty-to-student relationship could be. What I know for sure is this: I end up saying something absurd to faculty…

Published in: Student Voices

Balance: How Do I Negotiate Grad School and a Personal Life?

October 14, 2011 | By Bessie McAdams, Ph.D. Student, English

First off, I think we all need to take a good long look at the question. Where did we get this idea that doing what you want, what you wanted more than the hundreds of other applicants who applied for your position wanted, was different from your life as a person? Someone once asked me to list my greatest interests outside academia....and I drew a blank. I could have said, “burgers,” or “television” or something easy like that. But that wouldn’t have been true. My greatest interests are precisely why I applied to grad school and I’ve tried my absolute…

Published in: Student Voices

Meet the Bloggers: Bessie McAdams

September 15, 2011 | By Bessie McAdams, Ph.D. Student, English

In my family, it took a lot of ingenuity to be a black sheep. My parents could—under a certain light—be described as “post-hippies.” The photos of them in their twenties and thirties show a veritable cornucopia of flared jeans, fringe-vests, big sunglasses, and tie-dye. Even my father—who could compete with any fifties housewife for best Tupperware collection these days—took part in a couple of student revolutions back then. (Though he tended to stand by notable campus landmarks and hand out maps more than any of the more violent displays of displeasure.) My mother spent a good portion of the eighties…

Published in: Student Voices

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