I’m more than halfway through my third semester of grad school and there is a light at the end of the tunnel- I have one full semester of classes left, followed by two internships and my thesis, which equates for me to about a year and some change. Thesis planning is in full swing, internships are being lined up… and I’m already plotting what I’m going to do with my spare time on the flip side.
When people ask me about grad school, I describe it as a really expensive book club- the courses are mainly seminars with discussions after all. It might be a book club on steroids- I don’t know of any book club that expects its participants to read sixteen books all about Reconstruction in sixteen weeks for instance.
Overall, I have actually enjoyed the experience for the most part. Some classes have been better than others, but they’ve all exposed me to things I might have not otherwise been exposed to, including books, topics, and ideas, and that’s probably one of my favorite parts about it. The cohort has been pretty great also, there are people at many different stages in their lives and careers from straight out of undergrad to older folks coming back around to graduate school to advance their careers. I do think I’ll miss it when it is all said and done, but I’ll be happy to have had the experience and happy to move along to other things.
This fall, an article I cowrote with members of the Eureka Chinatown Project for the Humboldt Historian will be hitting shelves in Humboldt County. It’s a combination of two ideas that I’ve been mulling over for a while: one about the history of the Eureka Chinatown Project and one about the Fowl mural painted by David Young Kim. I wrote up the Fowl article first and sent it over to the ECP group which spurred the creation of the longer history of the ECP article. I was happy to hear some of the more active ECP folks were interested in picking up the pen to write the history and recent work portion, including ECP founder Brie Mirjah and Vicki Ozaki, Amy Uyeki, and Sheri Woo who were also members of the original ECP team. Shoutout to Alex Service for coordinating the effort with the Historian editor, Wendy Platt Hill. I have other Eureka Chinatown article ideas jangling around in my head that I’ll probably sit down to hash out hopefully this summer or during one of my upcoming trips north.
Tomorrow I’m headed to the State Library to do some research in their archives. They have a few collections related to Chinese history in California including immigration of women, wage payment, and Chinese operated stores. The California State Library has its own publication called The Bulletin that publishes articles about research using California State Library materials so I’m looking into writing something for that, and the research will likely help with my reconstruction of Chinese daily life in Eureka by using information from elsewhere to fill in some of the broader blanks in Eureka’s context.
One thing that I have been thinking a lot about is that I wish I was better at cramming writing and research into my daily life, even while in grad school. I haven’t been doing nearly enough work on the Eureka Chinatown research for example. I was hoping that my thesis would allow me to really dig deep and get more of that done, but because writing a book about Eureka’s Chinatown wouldn’t necessarily be helpful in the long run for my career trajectory, I’m going a different route. I ruminate a bit on my sad lack of progress on Chinatown research, then remember I’m in school and have a lot else going on, then ruminate on how maybe I should realign my priorities to be able to accomplish the things I want to do, despite the fact that that list is really dang long. It’s times like this I wish I was retired and could pursue these interests full time, but I’m only what, 28? Lil too early for retirement. If only I had joined the FIRE movement when I was born!
When I’m driving from place to place, I’ve been listening to the podcast Drafting the Past. I found out about it while at the American Historical Association conference in San Francisco in January, which was awesome by the way. Drafting the Past is an interview show where the host interviews different authors with a history background (most of whom are writing history, but also some who are fiction authors who have training in history). Its been refreshing to hear about all the different ways that different people write history but one thing that keeps coming up for me at least is how these folks are fitting writing into daily life. Most of the interviewees are professors, many are also parents. They all have different strategies – some set aside time every day to write, some write in any spare moment they have using talk to text or various word processors on phones or computers, some have to set aside solid blocks of time to write with no distractions.
Coincidentally, I am enrolled for a non-credit class that provides a (zoom-based) space for people to come together every other Saturday for a block of 3 hours and work on projects, which I’ve found has been incredibly helpful for me. I can get by writing or research done, in this case for my thesis, then anything else done throughout the week is just extra. It makes me feel like the process is slow going, but steady progress is still progress, even if it feels slow. It is really easy to forget that.
It’s getting late and it’s time for me to log off so I’ll leave it at that for this evening. Progress is progress, even if it is slow. Goodnight everyone.
Katie Buesch 