Eleanor has taken a real shining to Berkeley, whose face graces my copy of his Principles & Three Dialogues. She carries him around and, the other day, insisted on shoving him between her legs while she was airing out after a diaper change. The poor Bishop! (Except he was an Anglican bishop so it’s Ok. They’re allowed to do that).

“Barkey” gets a louder shout out than either Mama or Dada. We’ll have to try other philosophers. My copy of the First Critique has Kant on the cover. But we probably shouldn’t go there.

I am very occasionally mistaken for a student by older faculty and staff members here but I’m still not fooling the students. And twice this term I’ve had interactions with students that have made me feel old. First: This past week, I met with a student who complained that she was tired from having stayed up to go the Harry Potter premier. That’s fine — all kinds of adults enjoy the Harry Potter films. “So you’re into Harry Potter?” I casually inquired. “Oh yeah. I was 10 when the first one came out so this is a big deal to me.” She’s a senior. The kids that grew up with Harry Potter are graduating college, people.

Second: When I applied to graduate school (waaaay back in 2001! So last decade.), letters of reference needed to be printed out, along with their accompanying forms and sent to the schools by regular mail. This required printing out the forms that needed to be filled in; discerning whether the schools wanted the letter sent directly to them or sent in as part of the entire application; addressing and stamping tons of envelopes; and leaving heaps of forms and detailed instructions in the mailboxes of my letter writers. “I’m sure my students would appreciate detailed instructions on how best to deal with all this,” I said to myself. Here’s what I sent:

“Hey J and N. You have both been very good about keeping me informed about where you’re applying and what the deadlines are. One thing you want to be sure to do is figure out the *procedure* for submitting letters for rec. for each school. Many, I assume, have a form they want your letter writers to fill out. And then some will want your letters writers to send the letters directly to the departments, while others might want us to give you the letters in sealed envelopes. Some might not care either way.

So, there’s no huge hurry, but sometime before the end of term, here’s what you should do for each letter writer:

1) Send a spreadsheet with schools you’re applying to, the due dates for the apps and a brief description of what is needed for the letter (i.e. “Fill out form, mail directly to department” or “Fill out form, return letter to candidate in sealed/signed envelope”). If the school doesn’t say how they want the letters sent, then it’s probably best for us to return the letters to you in signed/sealed envelopes.

2) For schools that want us to send the letters directly to them, it would be great if you could address the envelopes for us. I will leave stack of Carleton College envelopes in my mail box for you to use. We will of course mail them.

3) *Print out* and leave in our mailboxes the forms that we need to fill out for each school.

I think that’s it. If you have any questions let me know. You will make your letter writers very happy by doing 1 – 3!

Daniel”

Here’s what I got back from one of the students:

“I’ve started the apps for five of the schools and thus far all of them have had both electronic and paper submission options for the letters of recommendation. From what I’ve read about the for the electronic method, I enter my recommenders’ names and contact info on the online application, and the school will send emails out.”

Sigh. I like how he nicely informs me how the “electronic method” works, as though he too is learning about this new fangled e-mail system: “From what I’ve read…”.

*Extra points** for guessing where the title of this post comes from. No googling!

**In addition to the regular points you get for reading the blog.

Now, however, I can’t do that. These days, when people around here ask me what I do, I say that I “teach at Carleton”. It occured to me the other day, however, that I have an even more pretentious and offensive response than “Oh, I don’t work” at my fingertips: “I’m a philosopher.” The italics indicate relish in the utterance.

Emily has threatened to divorce me if I follow through. She just doesn’t understand us philosophers.

Flush with success, we headed back to the casino on night two, this time with Susan Wolf in tow. We all played the slots for a while (this time I actually won $4). I never thought that my philosophical career would have me playing slots in northern Wisconsin with Susan Wolf. The meaning of life indeed. It was great fun. Having had my fill of slots, I returned to the blackjack table where, once again, I enjoyed modest success. With some 20$ in my hand, I followed Jason to the craps table where, he told me, the best odds in the house can be found. 1.5 minutes later I had $5 left. So back to blackjack.

I had promised Emily I would get her a momento. I headed over to the casino gift shop and said, “I would like to buy something for my wife. Something really cheap.” The cashier got a kick out of that. I settled on a mug, but decided to get it on my way out. I headed back to blackjack where I survived at the table for about 30 minutes with some $6. I needed $3 for the mug. And then I found myself with $2 of chips and literally $1 in my pocket. What to do? Of course, if I continued playing, I might win more money so I could leave with the mug and a few dollars. And if I lost? Well, how much could Em want a $3 mug anyway, right? I was inclined to stay at the table. But then I thought of Em and the fact that she was home alone with Ellie for the first time. And that she had described the previous night with Ellie as “a gong show.” I got off the stool and bought the mug.

I was hoping to take some pictures of the gambling action but, wouldn’t you know, cameras are not welcome in casinos. So I only got one picture before security pounced of the screen above the slot machine that took my $2:

On the way home we passed through a town called “Chisago”. Every time I saw the name a set of neurons misfired in my head.

]]> http://thefamilyroll.com/2009/10/the-meaning-of-life-and-is-craps/feed/ 4 http://thefamilyroll.com/2009/09/week-one/ http://thefamilyroll.com/2009/09/week-one/#comments Thu, 17 Sep 2009 20:07:12 +0000 dmjg http://thefamilyroll.com/?p=568 Why did we move to Northfield again? Oh that’s right — I have a job. I’ve known that in the abstract for many a month but, having effectively been off for the better part of the last four months, the reality of it only hit me this week when actual professional obligations started to kick in.

I’m only teaching one class this term (we’re on a three-term system, so my teaching load is 1-2-2) and, having come from a place that runs on trimesters, I will not have the shock of moving from 14 week terms to 9.5 weeks terms. All in all, then, I’m fairly relaxed. I’m teaching a course called “Life and Death”, which is basically on the meaning of life. There are 30 students in the class, which is really quite large by Carleton standards, and from what I can tell so far, they appear to be a fantastic group.

Outside of class, there is a fair amount going on academically — I’m supervising a student’s independent study on compromising one’s moral ideals, there’s a three day retreat coming up at a cabin in Wisconsin with Susan Wolf, where we will read a bunch of her unpublished work, I’m attending the lecture series at the U Minn bioethics department, where I’ll be giving a paper in spring, and I’m part of a faculty writing group where we share our work with each other. So, thus far, it’s a satisfying philosophical life.

I leave you with the quotation that I started the class with (from Joel Feinberg):

[Consider] the case of species like the salmon, whose members struggle and strive heroically, swimming against the currents, battered against the rocks, plundered by predators, until the survivors reach the headwaters of their native streams, tattered, torn, and dying. Even then the ordeal is not over, for the males at least must fight off their own intraspecies competitors for an opportunity to entice females to lay eggs, to fertilize them, and only then to die. What is the point of all this effort? Simply to produce another generation of tiny salmon to start all over again, feeding and growing as they head down river toward the ocean, then after a time in salt water, heading back upstream amid the dangers and against all odds, to reproduce and die.

Discuss.

Today was my first day on campus actually doing something. This morning I played in a jazz quartet for a group of visiting college students from Japan. I can tell you, in case you didn’t know, that long hair with bangs, dyed auburn is all the rage amongst Japanese college girls. The class was part of their American Studies course and if you’ve never heard a classroom full of Japanese students singing “The Sunny Side of the Street” then you haven’t lived. Although, as Em pointed out, it would have been much funnier to have them sing “Love Letter” or “Like a Lover.” That would have been ridcurous. In all seriousness though, it was a lot of fun and we’re rehearsing again tomorrow night in preparation for our gig this weekend as part of the Northfield Jazz Festival. After the session I went to my office (let me say that again: my office. Mmmmm — that sounds nice doesn’t it?) and did some real live philosophy. That also felt pretty good. So my professional life at Carleton is a go.

Last week we hung out with our faculty friend, Annette, who, through various odd coincidences, was known to us before we got here (that’s her holding Ellie). She is Canadian and so we briefly commiserated about the challenges of explaining where we work to Canadians. The biggest issue is that “college” in Canada denotes technical or community colleges. So undergraduates do not go to college. They go to university. As do graduate students. Everyone goes to university. Canada does have undergraduate-only universities, but they’re not called liberal-arts colleges. Rather, they’re called “primarily undergraduate institutions.” Trips off the tongue, no? Anyhow, when I first moved to the US and people asked where I went to college I couldn’t understand why everyone thought I went to college and not university.

I now face a similar challenge explaining where I teach to Canadians. The moment they hear the word “college” in “Carleton College” they assume it’s a community college. Why not help them along by calling it Carleton University? Because there is a Carleton University and it’s in Canada, so everyone has heard of it. So, I think I’ll just start calling it “Carleton Primarily Undergraduate Institution” when I’m back home.

And no, I’m not so vain as to think that you’re back on the blog to read about me. You’re here for more pictures. We’ll take more house pictures when we have things set-up a little more. Future posts: “First trip to the Cities”, “Fun in the garden” & “Considering vermiculture” (thanks to this blogger and her readers).

The defense not only went well, but was actually quite fun. Emily and Ellie came down and the latter was appropriately oohed & aahed at before and after the defense. My advisers asked good, challenging questions. No one was going for the jugular. And I have a good direction to go when I take up the project again (something I can’t think about right now).

The dissertation was a 3 year project, but defending really signals the end of being a graduate student (I’m already off the UofC webpage and on the Carleton webpage (now that I’ve defended, I’ll be upgraded from Instructor to Assistant Professor or, as like to call it, Ass. Prof)), so I count it as the end of a 7 year journey. The arc of graduate school is strange. The first two years are fantastic — you feel legitimized by having got into a good program; you’re surrounded by other people who are interested in the same thing as you; the dreaded job market is for those weirdo senior grad students whom you only see now and then; and you learn so much so fast. But the start of grad school also signals the beginning of the insecurities that are simply a fact of life for most academics: I haven’t read as much as so-and-so; my writing isn’t as good as it should be; everyone keeps talking about so-and-so like s/he’s the most important thing in the world and I’ve never even heard of him/her (in my case, it was Stanley Cavell). But those feelings, at least for me, took a back seat to the feeling that I had, in some sense, made it. And that felt good.

Years 3-4 is the transition period (to put it in labor-terms) and it was the most difficult time for me (just like real labor!). You’re no longer taking classes and you’re asked to do something that you have never done before and that nothing in your education to that point has really prepared you for, viz. writing a book length manuscript which contains something original. Not everyone has trouble at this time, but many do: no deadlines, no firm committee, no real idea what the hell you’re going to say. I mean, no idea. Deciding what to write on was perhaps the most stressful part of the past 7 years; it took me more than a year, and one topic change, to figure it out. There were a number of sleepless nights where my mind would not shut down, preferring to chew away on various topics I was thinking about: is there a project there? What, exactly, is the point? Is that way of construing things going to hang together? These thoughts never go away — it’s how one’s project gets sharper and more focused as you go along — but they’re exhausting and, on some days, paralyzing in the early days of writing a dissertation.

One of the more interesting aspects of this time, and a source of difficulty for me, is that your professors start to treat you more like a peer and less like a student. You had firm deadlines (well, supposedly) while taking classes and a predetermined, general topic (even if you get to decide the precise issue you’ll write about). The profs are, usually, experts on the topic and your paper (usually) is really only a tiny tiny poke at some much larger issue, so you can get a sense very quickly whether you’re on the right track. None of that is there when you start to dissertate — there are no real deadlines;  it is entirely up to you to decide what to write about; and, within a relatively short period of time, you will be as much, and in some cases more, of an expert on the topic you’re interested in than your advisers. This means that you are very much on your own. Now I actually ended up enjoying this (it made me more productive), but it took me a little while to realize that the game had changed. To the extent that I thought about chucking it all in, it was during these years. The self-doubts I described above are front and center at this point, except they’re morphed somewhat into a single tune: I’m not smart enough, I’m not smart enough, I’m not smart enough. (And the chorus:) Who cares about this crap anyway?

If you’ve settled on a good topic, years 5-6 are, perhaps, the best: you have some momentum in developing your project; you (or at least those of us at UofC) get to teach a course of your design; you’re starting to feel like you know what the hell you’re talking about, at least with regards to your subfield; and the end is somewhat near. But this brings its own, distinctive stress, since the end game of grad school is the job market. The terrible, dreaded, vomit-inducing job market. For a taste of the misery, spend some time reading the archives from years past at this blog.

I have nothing systematic to say about my job market experience, except that I couldn’t have done it without Emily who kept me relatively calm and distracted (“Hello! Someone’s having a baby.”). I remember the very low lows — no interview at Queen’s this year; no job offer from Toronto; and, perhaps the single most gut clenching memory of the whole thing, sitting in my hotel room in San Diego after giving a not very good job talk at UCSD and simply wanting the entire thing to be over (a special shout out to two of my advisers, Dan Brudney and Jason Bridges, as well as a former prof. Michael Green, for helping to pick me back up after the UCSD trip). And I remember the very high highs — learning about getting APA interviews,  particularly at some of our “heart” schools (Carleton, U of Toronto, Fordham); learning about flyouts in early January; and, of course, learning that I had got the Carleton job (I was informed by e-mail. I ran down the street to the gym to tell Em. We jumped up and down like little girls. The trainers were not impressed).

All in all, I have had a fantastic time in graduate school. And I’ve been told that I will look back at this time and wonder why I didn’t spend more time here (limited/no teaching; fantastic peers; no administrative duties). I’m sure that’s true. But right now, I feel oh so ready to move on. And I’m done!

Oh, and I got the following, awesome message of support from Ryan Blitstein (who has a fantastic article on health disparities in America over at Miller McCune. Go read it.) before yesterday’s defense:

Indeed, I will.

Update: My mother told me that this post is “sad.” I was about to say that it’s hard to convey the intended tone in writing, but that’s obviously absurd (good authors do it all the time). Apparently, it’s hard for me to convey the inteded tone in writing. This post wasn’t meant to be sad. I find it more amusing than anything else that I’m still getting rejection letters several months after everything has wrapped up. It’s a little like someone turning you down for a date months after you asked them out and you already know they have a partner. It’s just silly. That’s all.