Life Decisions and a Very Nice Holiday

If you're a friend on my livejournal, you know the gist of my academic intentions up to this point. If not, well, allow me to summarise.

I had an awesome time in Halifax and fell in love with it. I also had the opportunity to meet with faculty in two departments: Interdisciplinary PhD and History. I hadn't initially planned to visit the History Department, as I had no intention of applying to it. Unfortunately, every part of my visit to the InterDiscPhD co-ordinator made me uncomfortable. Firstly, they have no department headquarters. Dalhousie actually took away their building. They have no office space, which means no space for grad students to work. They don't really assist much in the locating of research or TA jobs. The application process is unfathomably complex and they basically want you to have a fully fleshed out PhD research proposal before you begin. Because of the nature of the programme, it's not unheard of for students with particularly narrow focuses to get stranded upon the retirement/death/transfer of one of their faculty advisors. Plus, the co-ordinator didn't tell me where to meet her, or even remember that I was meeting her. I had to wait half an hour while she was on the phone, after trudging from place to place and asking directions multiple times trying to find where she was located. And then she told me she'd thought she'd cancelled my appointment because she was recovering from being ill. Oh man, every possible negative vibe a person could get, I got. I was happy she was so honest about the programme's shortfalls, but I came away from the meeting wondering if I was cut out for doctoral studies at all. It was really disheartening.

In discussion with Deanna (with whom Glenn and I were staying) and Glenn, I began to rethink just what I was looking for in further education and realised that perhaps it wasn't me who was not cut out for it, but that particular programme that wasn't suitable for me. I decided to contact the Department of History and see whether the PhD co-ordinator could meet with me on such short notice. So, I began my visit with a negative experience at Dalhousie and ended my week with an amazing one. I really liked the history co-ordinator. He was approachable, genial and humourous. He clearly articulated the diversity of the programme and the parameters for getting accepted to it. We talked about my interests and they definitely mesh with the larger interests of the faculty and we both got genuinely excited talking about some of my particular areas of knowledge. While I wouldn't be able to do a project-based thesis, they're very strict on that, there's certainly no reason why I couldn't work with material culture and artefacts during my research. Perhaps the best part of the programme, in my mind, is that there is no coursework. The whole four years is devoted to the research and working toward the thesis. I think that's brilliant. The big catch was that I had to apply to SSHRC for funding before my Dalhousie application could even be considered and the SSHRC deadline was a month later.

I tried very hard to meet the deadline. I even managed to get referees on short notice. What I couldn't get on short notice (and short of cash) were the necessary transcripts from my various schools. Leicester, in particular, required me to send a cheque and then wait for the cheque to clear (up to one month), before transcripts could be mailed. Even had I gotten it together immediately after returning from vacation, I still couldn't have made the deadline. I made the difficult decision to delay my application by a year in order to make sure I could have everything I needed and not be rushed. It gives me an extra year to try to get some conference presentations under my belt and fight for a publication at the museum. I'm short on both and they will look at my academic participation at that level in judging my application, both for SSHRC and for school. In fact, this weekend, I am writing some proposals to upcoming conferences to see if I can get myself out there. Exciting.

Halifax was amazing. We pretty much ate and drank ourselves around the town and surrounding country. We took the train from London to Halifax, which took a day and a half and was totally worth it. Waking up at dawn in Eastern Quebec with the Laurentians crimson with changing colours and eating delicious breakfast in the dining car made the whole trip. It didn't hurt that the guy sitting behind us was a guitar wholesaler, either. Well, that part was good for Glenn, at any rate. I got a bit tired of the steady stream of big-eyed oohing over tobacco-burst Les Paul copies... I don't even know what I just typed there. That was from memory, not true understanding. Anyway, we visited many very old cemeteries and historic sites (Citadel Hill, for instance, Pier 21, etc.) and got to enjoy Annapolis Royal on the 300th anniversary of its founding (even though it was actually about 100 years older than that). We ate traditional foods like Rappie Pie and oatcakes and drank delicious microbrewed beer. Glenn took me for a more-or-less-anniversary dinner at McKelvie's (Delicious Fishes Dishes) where he was utterly revolted by my devouring of a lobster. We visited Peggy's Cove and the Swiss Air 111 memorial. AND, I even got to see the grave of Prime Minister Tupper ! I did a project on him when I was 10. He was one of Canada's shortest serving PMs, but he's a hero in Nova Scotia. I have a bizillion beautiful photos, which perhaps I'll manage to upload somewhere at some point. Mainly, life's been very hectic since August and I never have the time. Anyway, our holiday was amazing and the weather was gorgeous.

So that's a brief update on life.

Okay, here's one photo - Tupper's grave !



Is that a patriotic flag flying or what? Timing is everything.

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.