• Had on-campus interviews for teaching positions
• Completed my dissertation
• Defended my dissertation (and passing with flying colors!)
• Received encouraging words from my advisor
• Accepted a visiting position in a nearby state
• Won dissertation awards (including a very cool one)
• Finished teaching my last course at my current institution
• GRADUATED!!!!!!
• Located housing in my new city

I’ve been so blessed.  Faculty, friends, and family have been so wonderfully supportive over the last few months.  It’s funny how finishing my Ph.D. made so many people tell me how they really thought about me (my advisor, turns out, thinks I am a great writer and I should have no trouble getting my manuscript published!). Not meaning to brag, but it has been so edifying and enlightening.

2010 is going to be a year of great adjustments, not only for me as I start a new life as a professor at a new university, but also because other people in my life have got their own changes going on.  Maybe it’s the start of the new decade, but change is in the air!

Normally I don’t adapt well to change, so this is a bit overwhelming.  Anyone with advice about transitioning from grad school to a professorship, please feel free to share in the comments.

With these changes, it seems like a natural progression to stop posting on this blog.  There are a few reasons behind this.  I don’t have the time to do much more than navel-gazing (which can be too self indulgent on a permanent basis), I will be on the job market again next year, my time as a graduate student is finally over, and due to some personal things I am feeling particularly vulnerable and concerned about my privacy.*  I will continue to post comments on blogs and will probably stay with Twitter, although now I’m thinking about switching to just my personal account and setting it to private.**  If you don’t mind having this address clutter up your feed reader, feel free to keep me in there in case I change my mind, but if not, I appreciate each and every one of my readers who’ve shared in my successes and disappointments over the past few years.  You are a wonderful bunch of people and I wish you all the best!

*I had some troubling student interactions that have made me more cautious, plus things like Facebook’s wacked-out privacy fiasco of earlier in the year made me think more carefully about what I post online (it was nothing big, just…enlightening).

**If you want to know my personal Twitter name in case I combine the two accounts, drop me an email at historyenthusiast [AT] hotmail [DOT] com.

I don’t have any problem with professors like Tenured Radical trying to talk through the issue, but the comment threads are downright insulting (I’m not linking.  You all know where to look).  I tire of the argument made in several comments that if I can’t get a job–which remains to be seen–that this is entirely my own fault.  The system is screwed up, people.  This is not the fault of any one group (professors, administrators, students, etc.), but the last thing desperate job seekers need is to be told that if only we’d worked harder there would be a job available.

While I had a full course load and was teaching 90 students per semester, I managed to hold down a part-time public history job in order to make myself more marketable.  My CV also has internships, freelance writing projects, some editorial experience, and extensive teaching experience.  Aside from a short fellowship, this all coincided with teaching multiple sections for both semesters (and sometimes summers).  Two years ago when we hired two new assistant professors, I had more teaching experience than either of them had, and I was just barely ABD.  That experience doesn’t even include my time as a TA; my experience comes from being an instructor for the last four years.  I also have service experience on department committees, albeit as a (vocal) graduate representative.  The concept of looking for a history job outside of academia is not foreign to me or my colleagues, and I’ve put in applications for some positions in D.C. that feel like a good fit for my skill set.

This is not me tooting my own horn.  This is about how insulting it is to be told that I must do more to make myself desirable to employers.  No doubt there are entitled snowflakes who expected to be handed a job with little effort on their part.  That, however, is not me or my cohort.  Slaving over cover letters, writing samples, and trying to work on publications all while finishing a dissertation has been overwhelming.  This is nothing new, but the pressure on job seekers is even worse than it has been in past years.  Yes, everyone in academia has been through the hellish job market, but how can anyone deny that this current economic climate has made things even worse?  Those of you who have tenure-track jobs are not the enemy, and there is no need for you to feel guilty about having a stable income.  That is not how most graduate students want you to react, because defensiveness and misplaced guilt helps no one.

I have done what I need to do in terms of marketing myself as more than just an out-of-touch academic.  So, no.  I’m not resting on my laurels and waiting for a handout, thank you very much.  All I ask is for some sympathy when I need to vent.

Photograph courtesy of Preservation Virginia.

In 2009, an archaeological dig at the Jamestowne site in Virginia uncovered a slate tablet with faint inscriptions, a tablet now dubbed the “American Rosetta Stone.” Using advanced imaging techniques, researchers at the Smithsonian have uncovered Elizabethan script and other drawings that some believe are phonetic notations to help English colonists pronounce and understand the Algonquian language spoken in Powhatan’s kingdom.  According to Heather Wolfe, a curator at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.,

Much of the cursive writing on the slate appears to be written in secretary hand, the main form of cursive handwriting taught in England during the early 16th and 17th centuries.  “Many of the letter forms are different from the forms used today. You need special training to understand them,” Wolfe said.  So far, the words “Abraham” and “book” appear to be visible, and she has been able to identify some individual letters.

And, in an even more interesting turn, the lead archaeologist at the site–Bill Kelso–believes that two of these faint symbols are very similar to symbols found in Thomas Hariot’s 1585 phonetic alphabet, which formed the basis of his Algonquian dictionary that was destroyed in the London Fire of 1666.  Hariot, who had participated in the failed first colony at Roanoke, developed the 36-letter alphabet that (thankfully) survives in manuscript form.  “‘When I found out about it,’ Kelso said, ‘the probability that the European explorers likely showed up at Jamestown with bilingual dictionaries, ready to communicate with the Indians, made perfect sense,’ he said.”  Kelso has theorized that the tablet, which was found in a well dug in 1609, belonged to William Strachey, who had legal training and who served as the colony’s first secretary.  Scholars and scientists will continue to analyze the tablet and uncover its other mysteries.

So, as has been the custom among bloggers in past years, instead of sharing a detailed list of specific goals (pay off debts, exercise more, etc.), I present a theme: 2010 will be the year of HOLISTIC LIVING.  Meaning, instead of considering myself to be a history machine whose sole purpose is to work–and to feel guilty about not working, even in the dead of night when I really am supposed to be sleeping–I am going to adopt the Jesuit understanding of education and think more carefully about my development as a whole person.  That means making more time to just sit and contemplate life, eating healthier food, and just generally remembering that I am a human being first, and my identity as a historian is further down the list (after my roles as daughter, sister, friend, etc.).

I really envy my friend T. who treats grad school like a regular 9-to-5 job.  She doesn’t work on weekends because that is her chance to spend time with her husband and her friends.  Her outlook on life is not so wrapped up in her grad school identity that she worries nonstop about the minutiae that can take up so much head space.  In many ways we are exact opposites: I stress out over things that are inconsequential in the long run, and she is a free spirit who goes with the flow.  I’m not saying that I idolize her or anything that extreme, but her outlook on the graduate school experience is really much healthier than mine is.

Those of you who are contemplating graduate school, know this: you can’t make graduate school the center of your life and force out everything else.  Some people will tell you that if you want to rope a tenure-track position at a leading university, the only way to succeed is to make your education and professional development the be-all, end-all, of your existence.  But, let me tell you that this only leads to burnout.  When I was doing study abroad in Europe we had a wonderful philosophy that we lived by.  Our motto was “Work Hard, Play Hard.”  We worked our butts off (it was an exceedingly challenging program) but we had a ton of fun doing it.  Graduate school can be stressful and it does require a serious committment of your time and resources, but don’t let it consume you.

I sound bitter, I’m sure, but I only have one more semester left of graduate school so I’m entitled to a little navel gazing, especially if this advice can help those of you who are thinking about graduate school or are new to the world of graduate education.  Lest I end on a negative note, I have grown so, SO much as a scholar that I almost don’t recognize myself when I think about my writing and critical-thinking abilities as a first-year graduate student.  Lately I’ve been reminding myself that when I meet strangers and they ask what I do for a living, instead of saying “I’m a grad student,” I really should say that “I’m a historian.”  My program here in College Town has its downfalls, as every program does, but it has challenged me to grow leaps and bounds, making me the intellectual that I am today.  Sappy, perhaps, but undeniably true.

So, instead of whining about all the things in 2009 that stunk royally, I am going to focus on the positive and share some of the exciting moments of this past year, both significant and mundane:

-  Won a summer fellowship.

-  Wrote 2 dissertation chapters on that fellowship.

-  Had family move nearby.

-  Elle stopped being so hyper and finally allowed me to cuddle with her.  She also has stopped turning over the trashcans and partaking in other destructive behavior (…mostly).

-  Obtained two interviews for tenure-track positions.

-  Rediscovered my love of nail polish.

-  Joined Twitter.

-  Traveled to one of my favoritest historical sites EVER.

-  Took on more leadership roles in the department.

-  Started doing yoga, though I’m not particularly consistent.

-  Purchased a shiny new MacBook, that I absolutely ADORE.

-  Rediscovered the joys of cheesy pop music.

-  Presented at my first national conference.

Most likely I’m forgetting something important, but you get the drift.  The list isn’t particularly exciting, but at this point in my graduate experience I need to focus on the positives, not the negatives.  So, what are some of the achievements or special moments you’ve had in 2009?  Please share in the comments.

Between the job market, grading, the holiday, and now being sick, I don’t even have the energy to feel guilty about not reaching my goal.  Tomorrow will be more productive, hopefully.  At this point, though, I’d rather chew off my own arm than sit down to write.  That sounds overly dramatic, but it is true.  One lesson to be learned, though, is that there are good writing days and bad writing days, so when I have a bad writing day (or week…) I can rest assured that a good day will come along soon.  This process is all about baby steps.

I will post tomorrow about the final word count, so goodnight and sweet dreams to you all.  I have a date with a hot bath and some NyQuil.

My goal is to write 10,000 words of the dissertation during the month of December.  Right now I am working on: 1) adding additional material to Chapter 1, 2) writing all of Chapter 4, and 3) inserting miscellaneous sections into the introduction and conclusion.  Here’s my progress so far:

Introduction: 82 additional words

Chapter 1: 2,507 additional words (this chapter is now mostly done)

Chapter 4: 889 total words (I had none prior to this month)

We’ll see how the rest of the month pans out.  I am completely behind on grading, but making progress on my dissertation is keeping me motivated to keep pluggin’ through this semester.  Thank God it is now mid-November!

1.  Most of these Google hits must be coming from history colleagues or search committees, because the pages that have risen to the top of the list are my professional profiles on sites like Academia.edu.  The first few pages are entirely about me, which is a change from the last few years, when another person with my name usually had entries interspersed with mine.

2.  Whoever is searching for me is also clicking on my course websites that I created on a blogging platform because I detest Blackboard.  Maybe search committees are getting even better insight into my teaching than I thought?  Of course, it could just be that my students haven’t bookmarked the site and just find it through Google.  Who knows.

3.  There are some personal things popping up as well, at the very top of the second page.  Nothing bad, but my parent’s wedding anniversary announcement from this year is really high on the list, and it includes their very cute wedding photo.  Now search committees will find out about how my parents looked in the 1970s!  Oh, the wonders of the internet.

4.  My Rate My Professors profile has moved up, which thankfully only says good things.  I sincerely hope that search committees don’t put too much credence in those, though.

5.  A book review that I published is showing up on Encyclopedia Britannica, which really struck me as odd.  Since when did they start reprinting book reviews from academic journals?

ETA: Actually, there are few “not” me’s that do show up on the first page with Twitter accounts and the like.  I’m still pretty pleased, though, that my online profile is presenting a solidly useful cross section of my academic life.