What a difference a few years make…
Jun 22nd, 2009 by heidi
When I started my MA, I was pretty confident about my skills. After all, I’d had two years out of college in the Real World [tm] and I knew myself pretty well, right? I’d go in there and amaze them with my savoir faire and confidence.
Or not.
Doing my MA was primarily an exercise in learning how NOT to show how lacking in confidence I was. I spent most of my time feeling insecure and inadequate, which is by no means an uncommon thing amongst graduate students. I felt like every paper and every presentation was an opportunity for me to be inadequate; I was so desperate for my professors’ approval and felt so unequal to them, not in academic knowledge (of course I knew much less!) but in intrinsic value. I felt as if I had to prove myself to be an intelligent, creative, worthwhile person and was always convinced, walking out of meetings with them, that they thought me a complete idiot.
This degree feels different, somehow. I’m coming at it from a different angle…if I could live with not sleeping through the night for 18 months and wrangling a high-needs baby without killing him or myself in the process, academic work is nothing. I don’t mean to say that it’s ridiculously easy or that I’m filled with some kind of overconfident belief in my inherent genius and brilliance…just that a paper, in the grand scheme of things, and even getting a B instead of an A is not the end-all and be-all of my existence.
It’s a strange metamorphosis from the woman who couldn’t bear to look at her instructors’ comments on papers because she was so convinced that to see even the tiniest smidgen of red ink lettering must mean that they thought she was a complete and utter idiot. I got over that somewhat in graduate school but even then positively cringed at my professors’ comments, sure that if I wasn’t perfect, it meant that I was a complete and utter failure. Everyone seemed smarter than I was. Everyone seemed to be getting it while I wandered through a fog of confusion.
My attitude toward the MSLIS is very different than it was for the MA. It’s a means to an end, not a defining moment in my self worth. I want to do well. I intend to work as hard as I can to excel. That doesn’t mean that, if I can’t pull off another two years’ worth of a 4.0, I’m going to shatter into a fractured failure of a person. I work full-time, parent full-time, and I’m married. I have a life, a personality, and an innate value that is entirely separate from my academic successes. I know what an ivory tower academia is. I know how intrinsic playing the game is to so many academics (a lesson learned painfully and with many tears on my part). I know that someday I want to do my PhD and I know that, in the meantime, I need to do what I must to get a job that will be both interesting and financially viable.
I just wish I could go back and take the same attitude as an undergraduate and during my first graduate degree – I’d have been a far happier (and probably more successful) person. It’s a shame that the lessons learned through experience are just the kind that you can’t get in any other way…and it’s a shame it took me so long to really believe that I can get a B (even though I’d rather get As) and still have value as a human being.
Sometimes having that “rewind life” button would be awfully handy.
A grade of a B on a writing assignment in undergrad once sent me sobbing and in a depressive tailspin. I got a C in graduate school and it was no sweat. Lots of reasons for this, but I realized after I got my BA that no one but me and whomever printed my certificate would see the “cum laude” and “graduated with high honors” on my degree. All employers and others care about is that you have a degree, period. It made grad school much easier to manage and I still managed to graduate with my master’s cum laude.