Those Pesky Life Decisions (part two)

My summer was great, how was yours?

In all seriousness, my summer was pretty fantastic. Although we didn’t go to England and I didn’t get to attend my graduation at Leicester, we did go to my cottage. My mother bought the place 42 years ago and we have steadily used it ever since. Glenn likes it there and, of course, I adore it. We packed up the cats and hit the road for Quebec, spending almost two weeks in the forest by a lake. It was the first time in a long while that I was not actively working on a project while there. Last year, both visits were spent heavily focused on my dissertation (which if I didn’t mention before, received distinction) and the previous year I was definitely doing other school work. This year, while I did do some research for work, it was leisurely and enjoyable and not the sole purpose for my seeking solitude.

There were visits with family and friends, old and new, dandling of babies on my knee, trips home to see Mom, long hacks on the horse and a couple of divine days spent at the beach. Sure, I was busy at work, what with an exhibition looming in September, and my stress level was rising, but I was able to mostly burn it off in positive activities such as rec-league softball and multiple birthday celebrations.

And then it was over.

Quite suddenly, it seemed, summer was over, the days were growing shorter and my deadlines were rushing at me and piling up at my feet. These responsibilities, mainly of a professional nature, left me with little time to work on the PhD applications I was planning on getting underway. As of today, I have managed only to secure one referral confirmation and have emailed one of the universities I will be applying to in order to set up a visit or interview with the department. That would be Dalhousie University, located in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for those following at home. Dal is a very good school and it offers a unique interdisciplinary PhD programme that would, I think, suit my purposes very well. As it happens, Glenn and I are going to Halifax in eight-days’ time to visit a friend and I am hoping to check out the campus and meet with the programme co-ordinator. Glenn adores Halifax. It’s his favourite city. Excluding an unscheduled stop-over on a flight to Holland some twenty-six years ago, I have no experience with it, but I’ve heard really wonderful things.

The other school to which I am assuredly applying is Queen’s University in Kingston, ON. They have a PhD in Cultural Studies that is interdisciplinary in its very nature and apparently similarly structured (or could be) to the programme at Dalhousie. The added feature of going to Queen’s is that I could possibly mesh my studies with the conservation/museum studies programme there, and potentially develop projects in conjunction with their incredible costume collection or the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. This is a stronger point in its favour than working with the costume history programme at Dalhousie. Anything that actively connects social history and material culture with museums is favourable.

To this date, I have not yet done anything about my application to Queen’s, but I will probably sort that out before we leave on vacation. Queen’s requires a letter of intent before you apply, which kind of frightens me. Queen’s has very high standards, and even though I am a professional museum curator and received my MA with Merit from one of the UK’s top-five rated universities (several years in a row), I still think of myself as a lazy underachiever. It’s safe to say that although I have periods of weak work-ethic, I am far from an underachiever and, indeed, take great pride in my work. Still, a PhD is a big deal and I can’t help thinking that because my MA was done by distance (which in my belief is actually harder than doing it on campus) it will seem somehow lesser of a degree. That’s right, I haven’t even sent them my letter of intent and I’m fretting already.

Even though the admissions office stresses that you do not need to submit a research proposal and that you merely need to state the area in which you plan on researching, I feel I’m at a great disadvantage because I do not know what I want to study, except the vagaries of wearable material culture from within a Canadian context, and the challenge of creating a balanced, representative collection. Or, sometimes I still think about returning to the work I was doing with Native beadwork in the Yukon (which could form part of this, I suppose), or perhaps the interplay of cultural strata and questions of form versus function in early Canada.

And then, when it all becomes so frightening that I find myself balking, I think about staying where I am and writing books about the museum collection here. Except there isn’t any money in the budget for it, so the chances of getting a publication of note under my belt while working for this institution are pretty unlikely. At that point in the thought process, I mostly just want to go home and curl up with my cats and a video game and switch off my brain all together.

Coming up in what will surely be part three of my Pesky Life Decision posts, I’ll talk about the application process as I’m slogging through it.