Identity
I’ve never really felt like a grad student. Until this morning…
I’m finishing up my work in the archives when I get a text from Sara complaining about the myriad of first years with their orientation balloons. I emerge from the basement and look around in horror as the solace of my previous empty library is shattered by the mewling and puking of new students on their library tours. I glance with scorn at the noisy groups taking the exact tour that Sara and I took just one year ago.
I walk over to the loans desk to put a hold on a book I really have no right putting a hold on. There’s a weekly loan copy available, but I mention the word ‘thesis’ and the hold is placed. Sorry, other person probably also working on a thesis. See you in three weeks when you pull the same maneuver.
I leave the library, skirting the throngs of new students and the inevitable Socialist pamphleteers that the students’ presence has engendered. (New students are like standing water, should I be willing to compare MelbUni Socialists to mosquitoes, which I am.)
I ride to John Medley, expertly avoiding people on the too narrow path. Parking my bike, I listen to an enthusiastic American uni guide cheerfully mispronounce the names of her charges. One girl looks in my direction. I’m far overdressed for the weather, wearing both a long-sleeved shirt and a scarf. ‘It’s incredibly cold in the archives,’ I hope my bored glance communicates. ‘I’m willing to suffer the slings and arrows of uni fashionistas like yourself for the importance of my incredibly important research. It’s important.’
Scarf = grad student
I realize finally how I look as I enter the bathroom on the fifth floor. That bored look is really just exhaustion from staying up last night to type notes from a book into my bibliography database.
Exhaustion + Scarf = grad student.
The person I’m looking for isn’t around, so I head back downstairs, cursing my inability to get a mobile signal in John Medley. I have to ask the girl whose name was being mispronounced to move so I can wheel my bike and its tiger-striped handlebars past her. The corking is kind of coming off; I look like I’m living on a ’student’ budget.
Poor + Exhaustion + Scarf = Grad Student
Anyway, after that I wisely head away from campus, avoiding ‘O’ week. The emails and texts I get over the next 30 minutes indicate that pretty much everyone else is doing the same.
We are so cool now that we’ve been here a year. We don’t need orientation, though there are still times when I wind up stuck inexplicably in the Engineering section and not near the ERC as I’d planned. Whatever, my scarf says it’s just because I’m overtired.
ps - Despite what my handlebar corking might imply, I actually have some money coming in with a research job. I spent yesterday and part of today looking through 1949 newspapers during a coal mining strike. I was looking for government-sponsored ads, which were amazing enough, but some of the ads and stories they were running are hilarious.
For instance, did you know that ’scalp starvation’ is the cause of 9 out of 10 cases of baldness? Silvikrin has ‘14 organic elements’ to prevent this totally crap explanation…
Watson and Crick, 1953…
I’ll post some of them when I get a chance.
Sphere: Related Content
March 1st, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Aah! Finally, someone who feels at least 1/5th of my pain.
I have been at Melbourne Uni for FIVE years now (six if you count my year off) and have spent the last week in the silent study area of the law library STUDYING SILENTLY whilst flocks of JD (post-grad law) students GABBED their way through their introductory research challenge.
This week has cemented my opinion that the only thing more annoying than eager, naive, gormless, giggling, fluoro-clad 18-year-old first years are eager, self-righteous, self-congratulatory, be-spectacled, argumentative, NOISY, gormless mature-age first years who think they are going to study law and save the world.
I’m looking forward to the day when they get shushed and then ejected by the librarians, receive their first but certainly not last H2B, and are forced to study corporations law (which will make them realise that 95% of the areas of law are based around making money, not helping people).
March 3rd, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Amen, sister.
The library was worse today. You know where is the best place to co-listen to your ipod with a friend whilst chatting about the song and loudly tapping your foot? The silent area with the couches.