Name: Tess
Home: St. Louis
My Excuse for Slacking
I have been a complete blog slacker lately. I'm thinking about going back to school, so I've been putting most of my spare energy into researching different programs, determining prerequisites, trying to remember math for the GRE, etc.
After some of my recent posts (most notably the one about abortion), I decided I wanted to back to school and get a PhD in sociology. Only one problem: the nearest such program is 2 hours away. So now I'm looking into all kinds of options. I haven't reached any firm conclusions yet, except that I need to keep talking with people about various choices, take a statistics class, and remind myself about exponents and square roots. I am just excited to realize I can go to grad school for something besides English; goodness knows I've had about enough literary theory to last a lifetime.
I plan to keep writing, but I'm tired of having it be my main focus. It's a crazy profession, and I'd like to find something else that's a bit more stable and rewarding. I also realized that of the two novels I've written thus far, one grew out of my experiences working at a shelter for battered women, and the other grew out of a text I taught to high school freshmen. Having interesting work experiences fuels my writing. A few weeks ago, I heard law professor Stephen L. Carter being interviewed on NPR about his latest novel, and the reviewer was asking things like, "Now, Professor Carter, why did you choose a New England setting?" I smiled because I wouldn't mind being one day interviewed on NPR as a professor and a writer.
After some of my recent posts (most notably the one about abortion), I decided I wanted to back to school and get a PhD in sociology. Only one problem: the nearest such program is 2 hours away. So now I'm looking into all kinds of options. I haven't reached any firm conclusions yet, except that I need to keep talking with people about various choices, take a statistics class, and remind myself about exponents and square roots. I am just excited to realize I can go to grad school for something besides English; goodness knows I've had about enough literary theory to last a lifetime.
I plan to keep writing, but I'm tired of having it be my main focus. It's a crazy profession, and I'd like to find something else that's a bit more stable and rewarding. I also realized that of the two novels I've written thus far, one grew out of my experiences working at a shelter for battered women, and the other grew out of a text I taught to high school freshmen. Having interesting work experiences fuels my writing. A few weeks ago, I heard law professor Stephen L. Carter being interviewed on NPR about his latest novel, and the reviewer was asking things like, "Now, Professor Carter, why did you choose a New England setting?" I smiled because I wouldn't mind being one day interviewed on NPR as a professor and a writer.
posted by Tess | 11:50 AM
1 Comments:
Wow--sociology, good choice! Though trained mainly as a historian, I'm a big fan of sociology, and I try to read work by sociologists as much as I can. I look forward to hearing about your own work in the field. You seem to have a good analytical mind for social issues and problems, so I predict you will do well. (But beware that some sociologists are equally--okay, maybe that's not possible, but perhaps "almost as"--theory obsessed as they are in English lit!) Though much beset with academic jargon, sociology is also a field with many outstanding writers for a wider audience, in my experience. I'll have to recommend to you some of my favorite sociological writings sometime...
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