From bison to String Theory and beyond

Warning: lost post ahead!

So I went to Fordham yesterday for a long day of orientations and introductions and meetings and preparation for the next few years of doctoral work, and I don’t know what else to say at the moment beyond the fact that I am just downright delighted with all I saw and heard. Of course I didn’t feel delighted while I was there. Frenzied with nervous energy is a more apt description. My resolve to be honest and direct about my feelings about grad school had amounted to me walking around the house all weekend muttering the phrase, “I feel nervous” at regular intervals. To rally my spirits on orientation day, I wore my red platform sandals (see earlier post). I had hoped to shock at least one tweed-wearing person, but not a soul was in tweed, corduroy or even a patched-elbowed blazer, though a few girls wore the requisite lit department whimsical earrings and poetess blouses. A few of the older kids (I mean, the more advanced PhD students) even sported tattoos and bleached blond hair. (Speaking of tattoos, did anyone read David Brooks's silly, irrelevant piece about tattoos in the Times this weekend? I guess there really isn’t anything else going on in the way of global news. Dumb globe.)

Focus, Jane.

The last time I visited Fordham had been at the height of the summer, when the leafy campus was a good ten degrees cooler than the surrounding area. Yesterday it was as foggy, cool and gray as the setting for a Bronte novel. At 8 am, I arrived at the appointed building and found the registration table, where I was given a large Fordham tote bag and a pile of handbooks. I helped myself to some Continental breakfast and proceeded to stand around awkwardly, pretending it was perfectly natural to be spearing grapes from a tiny plastic plate while wearing an oversized red tote bag. Luckily, I soon noticed a woman I sort of know from Hunter, and we hung together happily for the rest of the orientation, talking about Faulkner and school and life and how she secretly doesn’t care much for Jane Austen (“Make up your mind already, Elizabeth!”). She’s entering the program this year also and already knows her dissertation topic: Faulkner through the lens of quantum physics and string theory.

Quelle coincidence! That’s my topic, too!

Err, yeah.

After breakfast, the university president, Fr. McShane, spoke about the school’s history and threw in some juicy factoids about the campus and the surrounding neighborhood, which includes the real Little Italy and the Bronx Zoo. I’ll tell you one very cool piece of trivia, so grab a pen and give it a test run at your next cocktail party: In 1899 after the U.S. had wiped out most of the 50 million bison on the Great Plains, a crew from the Bronx Zoo put together a small herd at the zoo, which was later released into the wild to repopulate the species. Even today, many of the bison you see in western states are descendents of those original Bronx bison!



Fr. McShane then spoke eloquently about the meaning of a Jesuit education, which might be summed up as 1) academic rigor, 2) ethics in and outside the classroom, and 3) respect for the whole person. Not having started classes, I can’t yet attest to the rigor or the ethics, but I am thrilled with how the last factor has played out already. There have been courtesy and sympathy in even in the smallest interactions—from the many faculty members who have offered to answer any question I might have and actually mean it (I’ve already put them to the test) to one of the professors who spoke affectionately of his family and how much he enjoys spending his summers with them. I file away these little moments of humanity, especially after the bureaucracy of CUNY, where individuality amounted to a social security number and a pile of passwords. “Whole person?” I was just another whole person taking up space in an already- crowded elevator or a long line at the registrar’s office (and usually the wrong line, knowing Hunter's helpful, sensitive signage).

The last meeting of the day was the most useful, when the seven or eight of us new PhDs met with the graduate director and the director of job placement, who explained that we should view our graduate work as career preparation, pure and simple. I appreciated this. By this point, we all know books are awesome and reading them is great! We don’t need to sigh over the fate of Tess to remember why we’re here. What I did need to hear— and what I heard to my satisfaction—is that the program will do everything it can to urge (read: boot) me swiftly through the process of courses, comps, and dissertation and, most importantly, help me land a job at the end. Recently, they’ve had a 100 percent job placement rate! Along the way are conferences and research grants, faculty-student reading groups, and the reassuring fact that I’ll be getting a paycheck every two weeks.

So, I’m glad and nervous. The little voice demanding that I justify my decision to go to graduate school has been quieter than usual. He must have heard that I'm now in full possession of a tote-- and I’m prepared to use it.