Procrastination

Must. Find. Discipline.

It's kind of strange how I manage to be the anthithesis of a procrastinator when it comes to classes and things that don't matter too much in the grand scheme of things, yet on much more vitally important matters, like grad school applications, I seem to have a slight problem motivating myself.

In fairness to myself, I have made significant progress in the past week. I went from having very littile done, beyond filling out some of the application information online, to developing a fairly detailed outline and write a full draft (1,008 words) of my statement of purpose. Heck, I've even managed to get comments on it from history grad student and assistant master extraordinaire Guy Ortolano and the incomparable U.S. historian and adviser Nancy MacLean, both of whom had high praise and similar recommendations for revision (principally that I remove my unintentional dissing of U.S. history and all wordiness). So really, I'm in good shape.

In fact, once I finish revising that esssay, I'll just need to tweak it a bit, maybe pare it down some, before uploading it and completing my application for Michigan, which is good, considering that the application is due December 1 and I realistically need to have it finished and mailed before I leave for Thanksgiving on Tuesday.

Likewise, I need to get my application for Berkeley done and submitted in the next few days. And, again, I've got the lion's share of the application done. Revising my personal statement is the main thing. Additionally, I need to write an essay of 8000 characters (that's a helpful guide to how long it should be, I know) to apply for fellowships at Berkeley. The essay prompt is fairly similar to the sort of things that need to go into the personal statement, except that it's explicit in saying it shouldn't duplicate the personal statement. Go figure. There's also a shorter blurb (2000 characters) I have to write to apply for a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship, just explaining what relevance the Czech language will have for my future career as a scholar of Czech history. That sounds really difficult.

But, actually doing all these things, revising my personal statement, writing the other two essays, requires a little determination on my part. Or rather, it means I can't continue to sit on the couch surfing the Internet and reading Al Franken's latest book. Plus, there are the other lesser, but still important tasks that accompany this. Chief among those being to tailor my senior thesis so that I use excerpts of the appropriate length for each school. (I can't tell you how maddening it is that every program requires a personal statement and writing sample, yet each one seems to settle upon a different length for how long it is. Maybe it's because they don't want people to write something once and send the same thing to half a dozen schools, as I'm more or less planning. But it's not like I'm going to write half a dozen essays when I'm going to be pleading the same case in each one, save for a small part where I tailor it to the program. Work with me, people!) All these things must be done, preferably by the end of the weekend, but they all require me to show more initiative than I've exhibited since finishing the draft of my personal statement late Monday night.

Anyway, stay posted for the tales of my application process. I'm just grateful that it all looks to be downhill from here, that I've gotten through the hardest part of it in drafting a personal statement and will just have to force myself to do the necessary tweaking of it for each application. Not to mention, I've also got all my recommenders lined up (and at least one of whom I know has already written and mailed the recommendations). So, I think I've got it all under control. I wish it didn't cost so bloody much ($380 total for six schools) to apply. Hopefully my work will pay off in spades as I'll have six schools banging down my door with generous offers of fellowships for me to give them the privilege of conferring a doctorate upon me.

Well, I can dream.

Update

Cursèd stupidity (or is it clumsy fingers) for accidentally clicking the Q key instead of the W key, thus quitting the browser (and losing the extremely lengthy blog entry I was finishing) instead of closing another tab.

Anyway, I don't much feel like recreating all that I've left behind. In part, I don't want to drudge up the feelings of animosity and spite toward my most recent employer that formed much of the post. And, mainly, I just don't feel like writing that much. At least, not that much that I've already written.

I should, however, give an update on my station, since there (still) hasn't been any report on that in a month.

Last Wednesday, I had an informational interview with Conifer Research, a startup market research firm in Evanston. No, market research isn't quite my cup of tea. I don't really want to help corporations peddle their wares. But, the job itself would be interesting and potentially useful to me. It's market research, but done as ethnography, easily the most interesting facet of anthropology for me. I've always sort of wanted to do ethnography, not necessarily as an anthropologist, but in the form of oral history or long-form journalism (a much, much, much earlier time, I admit). So this would be a chance to really learn the nuts and bolts of it. I wouldn't be doing the interviewing myself, at least not initially, but my job would be in large measure to look over tapes of the interviews and analyze them, coding the content and also drawing my own conclusions as to why people behave the way they do. (I wonder how often I'll be tempted to say "Because people are stupid.")

My interview there, which was pretty informal, went extremely well. I think I did great, and I seemed to keep mentioning interests and experiences and skills that meshed well with what the firm does, so I feel pretty confident. Though I wasn't interviewing for a specific position, they did sort of have me in mind as a candidate to work on a project coming up soon. I'm not sure the company or organization commissioning it, but I know it has something to do with video games and big video game events. So, it could be interesting. And, perhaps best of all, it looks like the project start date will be sometime after the holidays, which means I could easily go home for a few weeks for the holidays. Additionally, I should potentially find out soon if they're going to offer me the position. Basically, very soon they should get a definitive start date, at which point they'll make calls to the people they want to staff the project, which hopefully means I'll be hearing from them next week.

The main drawback of this job is that it's more contract work. It's undoubtedly going to be better than the last one I had in that the contract will be several months and there's also a good chance I'd be retained for subsequent projects. But, being on contract means having nothing in the way of benefits. So, even though I should be making rather good money, I won't have healthcare, vacation time or any legal rights. But, even though they said occasionally the require long hours around deadlines, they do try to compensate for that, which is better than what I've had previously. And I might be able to afford a really cheap HMO or some form of healthcare that will cover me in the event of an emergency and maybe allow me to see a doctor on occasion without footing the whole bill. Plus, it's not a permanent situation. And it might even work out really well for me if I get in to grad school (more on that later) and end up leaving Chicago in the summer.

Yesterday I had another interview, this one formal, at Mercy Home, an orphanage in the West Loop. The position is for a staff writer in their development department, which means writing letters thanking donors or soliciting contributions. Not the most interesting job, save for a certain wrinkle. Since the letters go out over the signature of the organization's president, I'd be writing in the voice of a folksy Irish priest. Yeah, I thought that was pretty funny, too.

That interview also went really well. Both of the people who interviewed me remarked at the beginning that I had a very impressive resume (thank you very much), and our conversations went quite well. I think I'm eminently qualified for the position, and I think they probably feel more or less the same way. Plus, the guy who interviewed me second, I discovered, is an original PARCer! Small world, eh? So that gave us a certain rapport.

I feel pretty good about how I did, but I can't really estimate my chances at the position very well since they're interviewing other people this week and next and I don't know how many people they're considering or what qualifications the other applicants might have. But I certainly didn't hurt my chances yesterday. The only thing that could potentially weigh against me, but I don't think it'd come into play till the very end, and possibly not even then, is that they're looking for someone to stay for at least a year and I told them that I'm applying to grad school and thus I couldn't make any promises that I'd be around beyond the summer. Of course, as I explained, in an ideal scenario I'd get accepted to grad school (with funding) and find a job I like pretty well in the meantime, and could defer my admission (and funding) for a year to work, save money and be around everyone here. Plus, there are just to many variables and unknowns to know whether I'd be leaving in the summer.

But, though this job probably wouldn't pay quite so well, it's full time with excellent benefits. So that's a definite plus.

The other major news, which I've hinted at above, is that I'm applying to graduate school this year. As in now. As in, I need to have two applications done and mailed in by the end of this month. My experience in the working world has persuaded me to embark on the road to academia, and to start my journey ASAP. So, Berkeley, Stanford, Columbia, Michigan, Indiana and Washington, look out! And please, for the love of a folksy Irish priest, fund me.

Yup. So I should really get on that. Realistically, I need to have the applications all completed and in the mail before I leave for Thanksgiving, which is just less than two weeks away. And I also need to solicit some recommendations and get feedback on my statement of purpose well before then, which means getting a good draft of that hammered out in the next day or two. So, yeah, I should try to be productive this weekend. Which means more writing of a non-blog variety. But I thought these pages deserved a little attention.

Lost

Scott wrote a very long entry but now it is gone. Curses!

Colleen