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Rachel Has a Website

(this is it. welcome.)
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  • April 2019
    • Apr 10, 2019 72 Hours in Dublin Apr 10, 2019
  • July 2018
    • Jul 24, 2018 summer songs Jul 24, 2018
    • Jul 10, 2018 This Month in Menstruation: July/What Is Time, Anyway Edition Jul 10, 2018
  • February 2018
    • Feb 28, 2018 This Month in Menstruation: February (just under the wire!) Feb 28, 2018
  • January 2018
    • Jan 21, 2018 This Month in Menstruation: January 2018! Jan 21, 2018
    • Jan 9, 2018 Well-Reviewed and Warmly Recommended Jan 9, 2018
  • November 2017
    • Nov 20, 2017 #menstruationmonday, autumnal decay edition Nov 20, 2017
  • October 2017
    • Oct 25, 2017 Menstruation...Wednesday? Oct 25, 2017
  • September 2017
    • Sep 18, 2017 It's That Time of the Month Again! Sep 18, 2017
  • August 2017
    • Aug 7, 2017 What Day Is It? Why It's #menstruationmonday! Aug 7, 2017
  • June 2017
    • Jun 12, 2017 #menstruationmonday Jun 12, 2017
  • April 2017
    • Apr 30, 2017 Critical Menstruation Studies, Week 5: Stand Up, Fight Back Apr 30, 2017
    • Apr 23, 2017 Critical Menstruation Studies, Week 4: What If You Could Just Stop Menstruating? Apr 23, 2017
    • Apr 9, 2017 Critical Menstruation Studies, Week 3: #periodtwitter and a SURVEY! Apr 9, 2017
    • Apr 2, 2017 Critical Menstruation Studies, Week 2: Menstruators and Period Power (?) Apr 2, 2017
  • March 2017
    • Mar 26, 2017 Critical Menstruation Studies, Week 1: Binaries, Vocabulary, and Controversial Norwegian Sex Ed Videos Mar 26, 2017
    • Mar 22, 2017 denying / her wounds came from the same source as her power Mar 22, 2017
  • February 2017
    • Feb 17, 2017 What's Making Me Happy This Week/Five Things Friday Feb 17, 2017
  • January 2017
    • Jan 1, 2017 #top5 part 2 Jan 1, 2017
  • December 2016
    • Dec 25, 2016 2016 #topcats Dec 25, 2016
    • Dec 24, 2016 Listen to This: 2016 in Review Dec 24, 2016
    • Dec 21, 2016 2016 #top5, part 1: media Dec 21, 2016
    • Dec 16, 2016 How to See London and Paris in 96 Hours* Dec 16, 2016
  • November 2016
    • Nov 11, 2016 What's Making Me Happy This Week/Five Things Friday Nov 11, 2016
  • September 2016
    • Sep 12, 2016 Summer Reading Sep 12, 2016
  • June 2016
    • Jun 24, 2016 What's Making Me Happy This Week/Five Things Friday Jun 24, 2016
    • Jun 7, 2016 To Market, To Market Jun 7, 2016
  • April 2016
    • Apr 22, 2016 Listen to This - Spring Apr 22, 2016
  • March 2016
    • Mar 8, 2016 Chocolate-Hazelnut Pear Upside-Down Cake Mar 8, 2016
  • February 2016
    • Feb 29, 2016 The Handmaid's Guide to Cambridge Feb 29, 2016
  • January 2016
    • Jan 25, 2016 The Villain in Your History Jan 25, 2016
    • Jan 3, 2016 2015: The Year That Was (PART 2) Jan 3, 2016
  • December 2015
    • Dec 30, 2015 2015: The Year That Was (PART 1) Dec 30, 2015
  • September 2015
    • Sep 23, 2015 Back-to-School Blues: Notes from an Erstwhile Grad Student Sep 23, 2015
    • Sep 22, 2015 Undercover Sep 22, 2015
  • August 2015
    • Aug 11, 2015 Summer Fun: Cape Cod in 36 Hours Aug 11, 2015
  • July 2015
    • Jul 18, 2015 Stranger Than Fiction: A Review of the Welcome to Night Vale Novel Jul 18, 2015
  • June 2015
    • Jun 21, 2015 Savory Vegetable Pancakes with Cucumber-Yogurt Sauce, or: Maybe This Is Also a Cooking Blog? Jun 21, 2015
  • May 2015
    • May 10, 2015 Podcasts for Nerds May 10, 2015
  • April 2015
    • Apr 22, 2015 The Confessional Poetics of Taylor Swift, or: Does Too Much Knowledge Ruin Art? Apr 22, 2015
    • Apr 15, 2015 Bright Lights, Big City: NYC in 36 Hours Apr 15, 2015
  • March 2015
    • Mar 31, 2015 Cherry Bombe Jubilee: Kind of a Dud? Mar 31, 2015
photo: Jena Priebe, "The Secret Lives of Books" from the Bibliothecaphilia exhibit at Mass MoCA, August 2015

photo: Jena Priebe, "The Secret Lives of Books" from the Bibliothecaphilia exhibit at Mass MoCA, August 2015

Back-to-School Blues: Notes from an Erstwhile Grad Student

September 23, 2015 in self reflective

For many of our younger years, the back-to-school season is one filled with turbulence and excitement. Even long after we've graduated and left the academic calendar behind, there's often a certain irrepressible, nostalgic frisson that comes on around the first weeks of September, alongside the clichéd images of fresh pencils and school buses. For me, the magic lasted longer than for most other people, since I went back to graduate school just two years after graduating from college. I started a masters program in English literature in 2009 and moved on to a PhD program just a year later. That meant that starting in fall 2010, not only did back-to-school mean back to classes for me, it also meant back to teaching. If you think fall is thrilling and nerve-wracking as a student, just try it as a brand-new teacher. 

Despite my intense nervousness, teaching was pretty much my favorite thing as soon as I started doing it. Between fall 2010 and spring 2013, I taught five classes that were entirely my own (and was the TA for one larger lecture class). I also finished all my PhD coursework, including classes on everything from Shakespeare to post-colonial poetry to film theory. I figured out that what I was most interested in was the way American women poets wrote about life and identity in the mid 20th century. I started to think about what I had to add to the conversation as a scholar, about what kind of teacher I wanted to be, about how to bring current, relevant, serious topics into my classroom alongside the unavoidable lessons on reading, writing, grammar, and literary theory. And then, after the semester ended in May, 2013...I left grad school.

The most straightforward explanation for why I left is that I failed a test. Not some metaphorical test of character (although it very much felt like one at the time), but a quite real, literal test: my PhD qualifying exam. These exams are based on a reading list that you are supposed to come up with in conversation with your committee (four professors with relevant backgrounds who can speak to your interests) and, at least in my former department, they are oral exams. After a two-hour ordeal, all four of your committee members have to agree that you pass. Mine did not. While at the time this felt like the whole world suddenly and unexpectedly dropping out from under me, with the benefit of hindsight, I can see that there were plenty of warning signs. I didn't work well with most of my committee and they didn't get personally invested in my project. None of them were a particularly good fit for me or my interests, either in terms of personality or research specialties. I had a hard time getting them excited about the things that excited me. I was also not very good at making myself interested in what they wanted to talk about, instead. It was all around kind of a disaster.

It's taken me more than two years to be able to think (and write) about it all that calmly. At the time I was in a panic. I seriously considered retaking the exam, which I can see now would have been a pretty useless project. I felt like I'd completely wasted four years of my life and failed at a job I'd really started to love. Of course now I understand that what I really failed at was meeting a very narrow, specific, specialized definition of "acceptable" knowledge set for me by four people who barely knew me and, to be honest, who probably cared very little. In lieu of a PhD (along with the massive debt, uncertain employment future, and psychic damage that would in all likelihood have come with it), I have kind, thoughtful evaluations from my students that tell me I was a good and helpful teacher. I have an insane amount of surprisingly useful information about English literature to deploy at trivia nights and in daily conversation. I have a new, successful professional life where I constantly find different and unexpected ways to use the knowledge and skills I gained in grad school. And I still have my thoughts about, ideas on, and passions for all the things I obsessed over for those four years. What I didn't have, until recently, was the mental and emotional wherewithal to actively think and write on those thoughts, ideas, and passions.

While I was in grad school I had a built-in community of like-minded people to talk to, but that's something I've struggled with since leaving the ivory tower. At first, in fact, I pretty much rejected any type of thinking or reading or discussion that reminded me at all of school—it was just too painful. My confidence had been completely shattered and my support network was gone. I comforted myself by insisting on the insularity and irrelevance of academia, on its archaic systems and unavoidable moribund decline. But I missed it. I missed seminars and discussion sections and composing essays. And I knew I had things to say, even if I couldn't say them the way I was apparently supposed to. The Boston/Cambridge area where I live is both a great place and an awful place to be in my position: Awful because no matter where I go, I'm basically on a campus, surrounded by people doing what I thought I'd be doing—maybe struggling at it, yes, but making it work. Hell, I walk within a few hundred feet of my old office every day on my commute to work. But the density of intellectual and academic life in this area also makes it easy to access a wide variety of programs and resources to on my own, to create my own curriculum and reengage with these things on my own terms.

So, recently, I have been trying to find other ways to access those old, Academic Rachel feelings in my new, grad-school-dropout life.  I go to book clubs, lectures, and readings. I'm starting new projects and getting involved in causes that matter to me. I read things, and make my friends read them, and then make my friends talk to me about the things we read. And I even write. This blog has been the first part of a return to writing, and now I am very pleased to say that something I wrote on this blog has become my very first published essay. Yes, it's in an online journal. Yes, it's in large part about Taylor Swift. Yes, I'm pretty sure my exam committee would hate it. But I don't hate it. It's about poetry and it's about feminism and it's about American culture and maybe some parts of it are even funny and it's me. It's not the way I imagined my first published essay would look, but I have a pretty active imagination, and I only see good things ahead. So I'm here to tell you, there is life after leaving grad school—even a life of the mind. I'd love to hear from other grad-school drop-outs, academic nonconformists, ivory tower escapees and "failures" of all kinds—what are the misadventures that have brought you where you are today?

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Tags: books, grad school, tay tay
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February in photos. Not an ideal month but with some highlights that can’t be denied, including a dreamy fab five galentines in NYC and a very chilly trip (never too cold for creemees tho) to always-stunning VT to meet my tiny amazing new niece
February reads, least favorite (bottom) to most favorite (top). The Tana French was a reread in anticipation of her new one coming out this week(!!!). Also excited to get to the next book in Adriana Herrera’s Las Leonas, which I understand to b
January in photos—a pretty quiet month, it turns out, but sometimes it was sunny and I went on long walks and found delicious things to eat, so that’s basically all I ask for in this life.
January reads, least favorite (bottom) to most favorite (top). Making good on my resolution to try more nonfiction, although I definitely don’t have the brain for serious critical theory that I once did 🫥 #amreading
And with that, the 2023 season comes to an end. December behind the scenes—festive decor (scaled to new house), messiah sing, fancy baking, two days walking around nyc, and cats (always cats).
December reads, least favorite (bottom) to most favorite (top). Squeaked by my 60-book goal for 2023 (final count is 65-ish). Anyone have reading resolutions for the new year? #amreading
A joyous kittyversary to all—it’s lucky number 13!!?! Congratulations to Chessie and Carol for absolutely killing it this year, including their total mastery of the brand-new concept of Stairs. With apologies to all other cats, mine are o
November, director’s cut. If you look closely you can spot a cat and also a peek at me losing nanowrimo lol
November reads, least favorite (bottom) to most favorite (top). Only the bottom one is truly bad. Are there still good thrillers out there or is just a spectrum from entertaining trash to offensive trash?? BONUS: I also read a very 🥵🔥 😳series of r

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