Category Archives: Academia

Raspberry white chocolate

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Change is finally coming! I am cautiously excited for a new assignment at work. I know it will be a lot of stress, but I am ready to deal with it with maturity and confidence. I guess my writers’ block was related to the anxiety I was feeling before the move was confirmed. I got the news on Wednesday and this is the second post I wrote since then! I may have less time to devote to writing going forward, but I hereby promise myself and you that I will write at least once a week. This blog has started so many conversations with friends all over the world. It feels as if I had the fortune of having coffee with each of them. That can’t stop!

I got an early Valentine last night. My daughter gave me a mini box of chocolate hearts and my love gave me the most sumptuous and gigantic piece of white chocolate I have ever seen and a big piece of raspberry white chocolate. Yes, it tastes as good as it sounds. I feel loved. Remember the end of “Notting Hill”? While Costello sings “She”, Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts relax in a garden surrounded by children playing. It exudes contentment and satisfaction. That is how so much love is making me feel. I must make sure that my new job doesn’t keep me from enjoying it.

Another recent surprise has been the coronavirus or Covid-19. I read that medical masks do not protect you from it and I went straight to amazon to get N95 masks (that actually work!) for the whole family. I pride myself of never wasting time in worst case scenarios, but I couldn’t help the urge to get them, you know, just in case. I tell myself that they would have been useful when my household was hit with the flu a couple of weeks ago. They will most likely stay in the closet until the next flu season, right? How are you handling this outbreak?

I finally spent some time formatting and editing one of my Chapters to submit it for publication in a journal. It took me this long, almost a year, to be able to carefully read it again and distill something from it. After all that work, it would be great to see my ideas in a legendary journal like CEPAL Review or World Development! Wish me luck!

Clarity

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I have noticed that, occasionally and without any free-will, there are days in which everything is clear.  Today is one of those days. Matters that have been bothering me suddenly have a new light, a new prism. Little and big things that I couldn’t do for weeks are suddenly accomplished. I am decisive, assertive and calm. There is no urgency or anxiety. Oh, how much I wish these days would come more frequently or I could do something to summon them. Does it happen to you? Or am I just delirious again?

My husband says that I am a half-full glass kind of person. Well, in days like today I am a glass-full person. In fact, it feels so good that the water may be overflowing while I look for a bigger glass. Music resonates. The same playlist is somehow more enjoyable. You get my drift. It is a good day. Not that things have been bad recently, really. This website has been an amazing Christmas present that keeps on giving. Receiving comments and starting conversations with you has been exhilarating. Yet, I really needed one of these days precisely now.

You see, there are changes happening at work, and it is hard not to be anxious about them. It is a futile exercise to even think about them, I know, especially because nothing really depends on me. But that is human nature for you. Today I woke up with one word in my mind. Well, two in reality: Patience and clarity. I guess after my dissertation got done, I have been waiting for my life to change. And it has, everywhere but at work. True, I feel more confident on my abilities as an economist. After all I am a now a scholar in full gown. Yet, my day to day activities are basically the same.

While an external change would be welcome, I can also change myself. I can take on more responsibility. I can be more assertive. I can move forward with my vision for the future. While I am writing this, I am already thinking about the days in which clarity will be absent, and I see myself re-reading this as a reminder, a totem to move forward. Now I must move on and use this energy while it lasts to go over my to-do lists and who knows, even maybe finally clean my room.

With a little help from my friends

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While I was writing my dissertation, I procrastinated in many ways. One of the most productive in hindsight was reading about the dissertation process. I got many books and read many articles. Not all of them were useful, at least not for my way of doing things (or avoiding doing them …). I read about the staggering number of students that never finish their thesis. I was shocked to realize that the thesis is the only academic endeavor in which you are suddenly thrown out of the support system students receive to succeed. Children have tutors. While you are working through your classes you have other students that support you in studying sessions and labs. You have deadlines for your term papers and exams. And then nothing. You are left with your advisor and a key to the library.

The issue is that the role of the advisor is to ensure that what you write is good. You must impress them. They can be very supportive, of course, and many of us are lucky enough to have very patient and sympathetic advisors, but even then, the psychology of the process is tricky. The proof is that the incidence of depression in dissertation scholars is very high. I will look for the statistics but believe me, it is high. And no wonder. If you are lucky enough to not have to work at the same time, you still have very little contact with other students and your social life is supposed to go to hell because you are, after all, writing a dissertation. You have no intermediate steps or strong deadlines, no team, no positive incentives. You must finish because after that you will have a life, you are promised, but all you can count on to support you in doing it is your level of commitment, your perseverance and the patience and more than a little help from your family and friends.

I think this is also why I never considered an academic life. I heard about the intense pressure to publish to get tenure, the lack of camaraderie among professors, the loneliness of it all. I wonder if it was always like that or if it must be like that. I also wonder what else could be done to help more students finish, even if they may never put a foot in a university for the rest of their lives. Coaches? Dissertation anonymous? Mandatory dissertation workshops? A dissertation whisperer? Guidelines that dispel the myths and sincerely address the potential hurdles? Or will the proverbial St Peter always have to admit PhDs in heaven because it counts as time served in hell?

Changes

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Adapting is perhaps one of the most important skills in life. At least it has been for me. I have been thrown into thorny situations, as much as anybody else has I guess, and without adapting skills I could have been seriously broken. Yet, I survived and thrived and at this point I welcome change and challenges. The question is, how did I acquire those skills? Can you learn to adapt without going through hardship? Or, more importantly, how will my daughter be able to face adversity and adapt without going through a somewhat difficult childhood? I hear horror stories about kids that go to college and commit suicide because it is their first experience with rejection and failure. And yet, I would do anything in my power to protect her from any real suffering. How can I not? What would you do?

Anyway, just yesterday I was thinking about how different this January has been for me. It is the first January without a dissertation to write, and somehow it feels very empty. As work slows down a bit during the holiday season, I used to devote this precious time year after year to advance on my research. I guess I somehow miss that urgency. And it is not the first time I look back at Dissertation times with nostalgia. Am I insane???? I recently reread my first posts and they candidly show that the experience was mostly excruciating for me… dark times. I felt insecure, tired, overwhelmed. Yet, I guess I adapted to it and now I guess I miss it.

The change of all changes is getting old. And adapting to ageing is something not everybody does gracefully. I still feel like an adolescent sometimes and refuse to let that feeling go. A decade ago, crossing Central Park on my scooter used to be one of my favourite activities.  Today,  it sits in my closet.  I frequently look at it with the conviction that I will use it again someday. I may. I am not afraid of embarrassment and I could still do it and enjoy it. Yet, that day hasn’t come… Come to think of it, it may not be about ageing after all. My relationship with physical exercise has been an erratic and mostly uncommitted one.  I go from one extreme to the other.  When I first moved into our building, I went to the downstairs gym  everyday.  That lasted a month, and I haven’t used it since. Same with yoga, Pilates, swimming, running, etc… I only hope taekwondo doesn’t join the list too soon. I am going to my second class this week…

How it all got finally done

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Some time last December a dear friend told me that to finish his dissertation he went away and worked on it far from his usual environment. And that is how I finally finished. I took time off work and spent days at cafes and libraries around the city, without the usual excuses and distractions. 

All of the sudden I started enjoying the process. I got into a rythm and things fell into place. I also demanded from my supervisor a clear plan and specifications about what he wanted to see. This was crucial. I always tended to go astray everytime a new topic surfaced, a new idea, a new literature. I also tended to decide “what I was interested in”.

My advisor said: This is an academic exercise in which you need to show that you can do a job. Keep what you are interested in for your future research agenda… It was a blessing.

Yet, I asked him: How come the professors don’t say that upfront? He was surprised. For him it was obvious, but for me or most of my struggling classmates it never was.

Granted, I was told many times that the dissertation was not supposed to be a masterpiece and to not pick something we really cared about, as both pathways would end up without a happy ending. But a blunt: “this is you showing that you are a professional” would have really helped. It is obvious, yet…

Anyway, I did it. And finishing felt GLORIOUS! For a few weeks I was walking in clouds. Graduation was spectacular (photos coming up) and then came life without perhaps the best excuse I will ever have… More on that next time.

Identity

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So…about my partial draft…it got good reviews!! The 100th years enchantment in the forest of the impostor syndrome has been officially broken. Hurrah!

I felt light and happy for a few days and then something hit me. Who am I without a PhD to finish? Painfully, I realized that being a struggling working student had become a very important part of my identity. I felt disoriented and tremendously sad.

After all, if my hurdles were over, writing about them was also over. And this blog has given me immense gratification. Yet, the sadness was so overwhelming that it couldn’t just be about my latest, even if wonderful, hobby.

To be honest, I was prepared for a depression after picking up the leftovers of my graduation party. I had even talked about my fantasies after D day here. That the sadness came so suddenly, and especially when I am still 3 long months away from having a complete first draft of the 5 chapters, was a big surprise.

I am still recovering, but after a big session of tears with a dear friend, I feel at peace. For the first time in my life I don’t feel the urge to go after the next big thing. I still fantasize about an MBA and other big projects, but I can finally see that none of them will ever bring me the complete satisfaction that I was perhaps expecting some day (D day of all days!).

High expectations may be the mother of all abstract suffering. I hope I will soon be ready to adjust mine to fully enjoy the many little and big things still to come.

Is it all about grit?

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Yesterday was the last day of my interdisciplinary dissertation workshop. We exchanged hugs and best wishes and promised to keep in touch. I think we will. After all, we were there for each other in a critical point of our dissertation processes. Something like that is not easy to forget. 

For me, it was the moment in which I went from writing in numberless ways the introduction to my second paper, to developing the main ideas and braving the gods by calling it a partial draft. For others it has been realizing that they don’t need to develop all their outline headings into full chapters. A particular aspect may be fascinating but at some point it is crucial to let it go and focus on what can get done within a reasonable period of time.

A friend once told me that “the best thesis is a finished thesis”. It may be as simple as that, but it is still a titanic effort.

Sometimes I wonder what writing a PhD thesis is really about. Formally, the final document will be there for posterity to show that the student became an “expert” on something and was able to add something new, no matter how tiny, to the academic literature. That in itself is a monumental task.

Yet, I have a growing conviction that the process in itself aims to achieve much more than that. It is a test of strength, obstinacy and perseverance. It ultimately provides grit. That at least has been my experience and I have a feeling that it is not only because I work full time and have a family.

Not everybody goes through the same painstaking learning process, of course. For some, writing is relatively easy and confidence issues are not overbearing. For others, writing a dissertation is a matter of methodical application of the tools associated with their discipline.

For the rest of us, there is always grit.

I have a draft!

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I finally managed to submit a draft (albeit very very partial) of my second paper!! There is still so much to do, of course, but this is definitely a BIG step!!

I am a bit surprised at myself. Instead of focusing on what my advisor may have to say about the draft later this week, and panicking, I am just enjoying a soothing sense of relief. I guess I am so tired, after working under duress last week, that my usual self-doubt voice is falling on deaf ears.

This is definitely unfamiliar territory for me. I should feel anxiety because the draft is slightly opinionated and I doubt anybody should care about my opinion. At the same time, I am just amazed I finally managed to do what many had urged me to do… countless times: put your ideas in paper!

I am honestly and almost excitedly looking forward to my advisor’s comments about the structure, substance and even gaps in the draft. It will be a long way from the many disconcerting meetings we have had before: him providing abstract guidance; me, a deer caught in bright headlights.

Now we have something concrete to talk about. We may disagree and he may not even like it, but I will no longer have to start from zero again!

Where do rainbows end?

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It is insane to think about studying something else while going through this process. I am afraid I am more than a bit insane… Or I need to unsubscribe from open courses sites. One thing is for sure. Whatever I do in the future, it will never involve a thesis. At this point I remember taking exams, or even writing term papers, almost with pleasure. That is how much I am not enjoying this rite of passage.

I certainly know much more about my topic than when I started. I have printed all I could found about it. I have carefully read a respectable part of it. The trees sacrificed in the process didn’t gift their pulp in vain, I promise. Why is it still so hard to advance?

One of the difficulties I am facing right now is trying to put my own argument forward, while supporting most statements in the paper with citations. That is what I am supposed to be doing, right? If it was just about summarizing the literature and adding an empirical exercise, it would be a million times easier.

I got spoiled early on against monumental bibliographies. My mentor is a prolific writer, an experienced scholar and practitioner. In collaborating with him I was somehow covered by this wisdom. I could phrase my ideas on paper without a bibliographic filter. He would tell me right away when I was wrong, naïve or lost. We would then decide what literature was crucial to cite.

Independence is scary. To look at the bright side, it is a growth process. I know my future self will be thankful for having done this. But my present self feels like a child I know after few swimming classes. He sees other kids swimming without support and people assure him he can do it. Nonetheless, letting go and submerging in the water cannot possibly be more frightening for him.

Don’t get me wrong. I am progressing, slowly but steadily. I will have a draft even if I must go sleepless for days. I just wish I was enjoying even a slim bit of it. It is an interesting topic, at least to me. I have been curious about it for years.

What do I need to do to finally demystify it? How can I stop second guessing myself at every turn? Where do rainbows end?

In sickness and in health?

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I thought the muses had left me. For a while I seemed to have lost the exhilarating energy that fuels this blog. Perhaps it was because last Friday I had the crazy idea of trying to use that energy to write few paragraphs for my dissertation. I think I insulted the muses by even considering their guidance while writing about international trade. I must say I wouldn’t blame them for leaving. The muses gave me a gift of personal intimacy to share here with you and there I went, misusing it to talk about the asymmetric effects of globalization…

I also got a cold. Spring has really played hard to catch this year and I inevitably fell under the weather. I should have paused to take care of myself, right? Liquids and rest… But there I sat, on the chair, captured by the guilt of what I saw as just another excuse to be unfaithful to my dissertation.

After all, this is what the task has become: to diligently work on it, proverbially in sickness and in health, ‘til the defense hopefully do us part.

Taking the sweet muses out of the equation for a moment, I think that I am so used to being self-conscious and hesitant when writing my dissertation that Friday’s unfamiliar energy was just too uncomfortable. Today, feeling a bit better courtesy of various cold and flu medicines, I went back to the text. My first instinct was simply to discard what I wrote Friday. But I didn’t. Instead, I continued writing around it, fleshing it out. I take it as a small victory against shame and self-loathing. I hope many more will come.

But what will my life look like after D-day? Will I finally take time to exercise, separate stress from eating, get back home earlier, read for pleasure, take vacations? I must tell you: The life I imagine is nothing short from achieving all my recurring New Year’s Eve resolutions, and all at once. Boy am I setting myself up for disappointment!! My quality of life will certainly improve, that is clear, but I will still be me. And I think I am fine with that.