Tag: Grad School

Combating Loneliness

This is a tough post for me to write, y’all. I have been cooped up for the last couple of months – working on my dissertation. I’ve got two chapters drafted, only four more to go, which is super exciting. In these last few months I have made a lot of progress, and I plan on making more.

I know this is one of the things that you can’t really plan for once you become ABD (all but dissertation), but when you’re not in coursework anymore, when you’re not stopping by the office to say hi to your colleagues or to do a spot of work before heading to teach or to class, it’s incredibly lonely. Some people thrive on that – when it’s just you and the screen all day long.

I am not one of those people.

I thought I could be, but I am most certainly not.

I spend my day obsessively making and drinking tea, researching, and writing. I’ve been trying to be better about getting out of my lovely apartment (much to the chagrin of my needy, needy cat), but I’ve been largely unsuccessful.

So… that’s why I’m writing this today. I want to be better. I want to find a way out of this little lonely hole that I’m putting myself into through intentional isolation. I don’t want to be isolated, or at least to feel that way. There have been days where I don’t see or talk to anyone pretty much all day (luckily my wonderful husband comes home from work in the evenings!) and it’s gnawing away at me, and making it harder for me to concentrate on my work.

This is my public promise to myself. I will try to treat myself how I would treat my friends and loved ones – by following my own advice. I will get out to the climbing gym to do what I love and what helps to keep me focused. I will make it a point to talk to someone, every day, even if it’s just a text or email. I will try to take care of me, and to care as much about my mental and physical health as I do about that never-as-much-as-I-want-it-to-be word count.

I will slip. I will have some days where I utterly fail. That will be OK. It’s the trying again that matters.

I’m also trying something new – I love living the quantified life (woo Fitbit and Garmin!) but I’m a little iffy on gamifying my life… but we’re giving it a go with SuperBetter. It’s a super positive app that wants to help you to make yourself better (by your own definition) in some way. It will give you little bits of encouragement along the way and is bright and colorful and happy and all of those things that I love in an app.

Wish me luck, I’m trying to screw my courage to the sticking place.

American History Timeline

Monticello – you know, where Thomas Jefferson lived.

Hello! This was a resource that I made for myself as I was both studying for and writing up my comprehensive exams. I wanted to get some of those really big key events in American history and see just how they overlap with other aspects of our shared past.

I hope it is as useful to you as it was to me (well, I did pass!) 😀

Trying Something New! And Posting!

So, this post is coming from my Microsoft Word program on my computer. I’m interested in seeing what it can do for me! I draft most of my posts in Word anyway, so this saves me the middleman of copy/pasting it to my blog to post. We’ll have to see how it goes!

 

I’ve been working on constructing my CV and Personal Statements for my grad school apps over the past few weeks. I’m finally getting to a point where I feel comfortable with them, where I will send them to the gracious individuals who have offered to write me letters of recommendation. J After that, I’ll be working on fixing up one of my papers to use as a writing sample (It’s probably going to be my paper on Anna of Denmark, of which I presented an excerpt in England). Then… application time! I’ve narrowed my choices down to a small number of schools, but at least the pool is larger than last year’s. One of the benefits of not being a student this time is that I’ve got more money to use for the application fees, GRE sending fees, and transcript sending fees. Lots of fees.

Hopefully this time it will pan out a bit better, and more in the “acceptance” letter range rather than the “rejection” letter range. We’ll have to see!

 

OK, well, I must be back to work now. I’ll be working on a post on the history of Rose of Versailles as well as a vlog series on which I am tinkering.

My Most Sincere Apologies, Dear Reader…

As may have been obvious if one compares the dates of this post and the last, there has been a bit of an unintended hiatus on Semper Eadem.  A bit of personal history  and explanation, if you’ll indulge me – I just moved from Marquette, Michigan, which is located in the beautiful Upper Peninsula of Michigan. My current location is Milwaukee, where I am working full-time and preparing applications for graduate schools.  In the course of moving, I found a fabulous little apartment close to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where my partner is pursuing his PhD and where I work, but there was one small snag… no Internet access.  We tried, for a month, to get the local Internet oligarchy to bestow us with the world outside of our own… but it took my partner’s and my own combined efforts to get any traction.  Finally, after hours of phone calls, unfulfilled promises, and angry tweeting to get Internet into our small studio.

So now, with some fantastic speedy interwebs access, I am returned to life online!