Traversing the Night of the World
A close friend of mine who just started his Ph.D. program has been having trouble with balancing his personal life and academic life, and keeping up with the theoretical workload involved. I sent him some advice, just from my perspective about how to survive in an environment where you are reading so much each week and then expected to speak intelligently on the sheer amount of data and ideas you are expected to absorb. This naturally made me remember my own grad school days, in particular my days of reading multiple theoretical texts a week in my UCSD Ethnic Studies program. I had my own tricks in order to survive, but I was helped by the fact that I read pretty fast and also just loved reading. Not having kids at that time and living away from much of my extended family also helped. The reflection or analytical papers that I wrote in grad school are favorite mementos of mine. They represent a time when my brain was afire with ideas and I was writing and reading constantly. It is