I think I'm a lot less sure about whether I want to just add B.A. to my resume and call it good. My desire to spend time studying and learning is directly correlated to the quality of the teaching. Throughout most of my first two years at Barnard I had no desire to get anything more than a Master's (either an M.I.A. or an M.A. in Political Science, both essentially "formalities") because I did not enjoy school all that much. Then I took the colloquium with Professor Cooley and I wanted a Ph.D., only because of that colloquium. I kept that up at the University of Melbourne, because I had two very cool female professors (Colman and McGregor), and Professor McGregor actually wanted me to stay in Melbourne to complete an honors thesis on Indonesia. I got back to Barnard/Columbia and I've been unimpressed with my professors this semester, meaning I'm back to the M.A. plan and at present can't imagine getting a Ph.D.
Most of the professors I've had here don't have a lot of tolerance for the kind of political science I like. Professor Cooley is really the only one who is. I think my vitriol amuses him. I had to listen to my Nationalism professor decry constructivism the other day and it saddened me, because most people here are hardcore realists for reasons I do not know, and for me taking classes with a realist bent is pretty much taking classes at UNL because it's so not what I care about and so painfully minimalist and shallow to me. The history class I took at Melbourne was really phenomenal in that sense that it actually had a nuanced approach to political events. And I think how I'd describe the kind of political science I like is... that it's poetic political science, soulful political science, the kind that remembers that:
"if you had no name, if you had no history, if you had no books, if you had no family, if it were only you naked on the grass, who would you be then?... I wasn't really sure, but I would probably be cold."
This is something I realized at Melbourne, when I was basically thrown into a very poor library system with no guidance, surrounded by a huge number of students who came from a variety of backgrounds but were not all that gifted, and allowed, based on this lower but more open threshold, to be more experimental. My teachers gave me more inspiration than rules and I wasn't stressed out about competing with my classmates, and I ended up actually learning things I was interested in on my own and felt safe responding to things emotionally as well as intellectually, as opposed to going to class armed to the teeth because I hate all my ambitious sharky classmates and my asshole-ish, anal teachers who can barely teach. I have the tendency to speak really colloquiually about political science and in the less formal environment at Melbourne that was okay - people didn't say "I agree with X's point", people said, "that was hot". I just don't speak in formalities, I fail at formalities because they feel dead and inauthentic to me, and I don't speak in classes at Columbia because you HAVE to speak in textbook language because everyone's a freaking future MAJOR THINKER. I never once had to gear up to going to class at Melbourne by listening to angry Rammstein, because I liked being part of a large and chill and anonymous student body, and even the brilliant students in my classes weren't snobs because everybody was wearing the same clothing brands and there were no cliques, none, and people actually wanted each other to do well.
I think the ridiculously flat, dry, and cold methodology that Columbia imposes on everything may be something particular to mainstream political science, which is part of the reason I don't think I want to spend a lot of time in graduate school.
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Date: 2008-05-01 08:28 pm (UTC)Most of the professors I've had here don't have a lot of tolerance for the kind of political science I like. Professor Cooley is really the only one who is. I think my vitriol amuses him. I had to listen to my Nationalism professor decry constructivism the other day and it saddened me, because most people here are hardcore realists for reasons I do not know, and for me taking classes with a realist bent is pretty much taking classes at UNL because it's so not what I care about and so painfully minimalist and shallow to me. The history class I took at Melbourne was really phenomenal in that sense that it actually had a nuanced approach to political events. And I think how I'd describe the kind of political science I like is... that it's poetic political science, soulful political science, the kind that remembers that:
"if you had no name, if you had no history, if you had no books, if you had no family, if it were only you naked on the grass, who would you be then?... I wasn't really sure, but I would probably be cold."
This is something I realized at Melbourne, when I was basically thrown into a very poor library system with no guidance, surrounded by a huge number of students who came from a variety of backgrounds but were not all that gifted, and allowed, based on this lower but more open threshold, to be more experimental. My teachers gave me more inspiration than rules and I wasn't stressed out about competing with my classmates, and I ended up actually learning things I was interested in on my own and felt safe responding to things emotionally as well as intellectually, as opposed to going to class armed to the teeth because I hate all my ambitious sharky classmates and my asshole-ish, anal teachers who can barely teach. I have the tendency to speak really colloquiually about political science and in the less formal environment at Melbourne that was okay - people didn't say "I agree with X's point", people said, "that was hot". I just don't speak in formalities, I fail at formalities because they feel dead and inauthentic to me, and I don't speak in classes at Columbia because you HAVE to speak in textbook language because everyone's a freaking future MAJOR THINKER. I never once had to gear up to going to class at Melbourne by listening to angry Rammstein, because I liked being part of a large and chill and anonymous student body, and even the brilliant students in my classes weren't snobs because everybody was wearing the same clothing brands and there were no cliques, none, and people actually wanted each other to do well.
I think the ridiculously flat, dry, and cold methodology that Columbia imposes on everything may be something particular to mainstream political science, which is part of the reason I don't think I want to spend a lot of time in graduate school.