On Year Two and Blogging

At Balvenie Castle

Last week the spring term wrapped up at the University of Aberdeen, where I am amazed that 1) my second year of PhD studies has gone by so fast, and 2) it's still not any warmer than about 12 degrees centigrade during the day.  The end of the school year, and the fact that a number of my good friends and compatriots are getting ready to move back to the States this summer, has me in a reflective mood.

Life is fleeting -- PhD studies, even more so.  Twenty months in Scotland have flown by, and with one year to go I'm deeply grateful for the experiences, the friendships, and the education.  When my family moved here in 2009 my children were ages 3 and 1; now they are 5 and 3, and when we return to the land of Walmart, soundbites and self-entitlement, my son will be ready for grade school.

I had a handful of career-minded goals for my first year -- ways to build my CV and hopefully make myself employable when the day comes.  I wanted to give a paper at one scholarly conference, and publish one article in addition to the usual smattering of book reviews.  On the Aberdeen front I wanted to participate in the life of the theology community as much as I could, including our weekly Systematic Theology seminar.  In the fall term of that first year we read through Barth's Church Dogmatics volume IV/3.1 together; in the spring it was a somewhat eclectic collection of essays on the doctrine of creation.

All in all, I managed to hit most of those goals.  In terms of conference proposals and article submissions it was largely a bust -- until the summertime hit and I was able to give a paper at the British Patristics Conference in Durham last September.  (Hey, our academic year technically runs from October to September, so it counts!)  Both of my journal submissions were rejected, which in retrospect was a fantastically good thing.  Journals are forever, and I learned that first year how not to write an article for public consumption.

In my second year my goals were to buckle down and make some serious headway in the draft of my 100,000-word thesis, get another conference under my belt, and pick up that elusive journal article for the CV.  (Two more submissions are in, and I may not hear about them until the fall.)  Thesis work has been going well, and through the process of research and writing I've learned ... well, how to research and write a thesis.  There's nothing like actually doing it to show you how (and how not) to get the job done.  For me, the result is a large count of written words that will form the basis of my actual first chapter -- a "page one rewrite."  But I have a much greater sense of the overall project and how I am tackling it.

Perhaps a lot of where I'm at now on my thesis comes down to my own work habits and learning style, but it is vastly different from the PhD dissertations I saw turned out during my time in Princeton.  It seemed to me as though students spent three to five years thinking about their topic, reading everything they could find, and then sat down to write it in one go over the course of about 10 magical weeks.  The U.K. system of extended, uninterrupted research certainly fits me better.  Here theses aren't written, they're crafted.

The U.K. system is notoriously week on offering postgraduates a measure of teaching experience, however, and so this year I also wanted to push for a chance to work directly with students.  I served as a tutor ("precepter" or, in fancy CV talk, "teaching fellow") for a medieval church history course this spring, which was very rewarding.  I hope to do more next year, though opportunities are hard to come by.

On the conference scene I've had more luck with proposals this year, making it onto the docket for both the Society for the Study of Theology and the Edinburgh Dogmatics Conference -- perhaps the two biggest theology events in Britain this year.  This fall will mark my first trip to AAR/SBL and ETS in the States (San Francisco is this year's venue), and I can now proudly count myself among the rank of scholars who have had paper proposals rejected by both AAR and SBL.

Finally, a little bit on blogging as a young academic, heading toward what will be -- by God's grace -- my final year as a postgraduate student.  I always expected that, as I grew busier in my thesis work and less willing to commit my willy-nilly thoughts on doctrine to the electrons of the Internet, I would blog less.  Faced with the demanding job market and the permanency of the Internet, I've considered deleting this blog altogether.  I still haven't ruled it out.  I started blogging soon after starting MA studies at Wheaton nearly 10 years ago, and there is plenty in the archives -- some older, some more recent -- that I wish I could take back or say differently.  It is terrifying to imagine members of a search committee -- let alone future colleagues and students! -- pulling up my ruminations on theology dashed out at 1 a.m. after a cereal and cartoon binge while preparing for final exams in college.  To learn that established scholars in your field at major educational institutions have been reading your blog is humbling, and for the unemployed grad student, just a little bit terrifying.

The place of a PhD student is oddly precarious that way.  You find yourself aware (often intensely) of the fact that the next step is a job, God willing, and a house and a mortgage and your kids going to the same school for a decade or so.  You're in that middle territory between sitting in lecture and taking notes from someone with a PhD and standing in front of a class while people write down what you say for their own exams.  You're a scholar, but you're not quite "in" yet.  You're a researcher, but nobody knows it yet because you haven't produced much worth reading.  The learning continues, of course -- but in some respects the PhD program is one, long, final examination.

So the archives of this blog (and that includes what I'm writing now) are, shall we say, only as good as the electrons they are printed on.  They are dust in the wind.  They don't (and shouldn't) matter to anyone other than as a history of my development -- and a weird, partial slice of that history.  I consider this blog a part of my student days, and to that end, it will wind down as my student days wane.  But have no fear: I'm cooking up a new project that I hope will be worth a spot on your feed reader.