I didn’t feel like an impostor. There were no consuming doubts about my skills or accomplishments loading me with the “persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud.” Instead, as a first-generation graduate student, I had the shaky sensation of being out on a limb, on my own, on a dark night with no moon. And too many missed signals would mean not a hard painful fall, but years of moving around through the branches without ever hitting solid ground. Surges of disorientation and anxiety hit when I had an awareness that some custom, gesture, and especially mediated benefaction was passing me by and I did not know what to do. Should I ask a question, comment on my research, how do I insert myself into that conversation, is this how people get on a panel, what do I write for this grant or that fellowship to distinguish myself but not appear presumptuous? Do all these protocols feel odd and uncomfortable to anyone else? Why do the young men seem to get more funding, more easily? The questions involved the nuances of tone and culture with insider power, not simply the next procedural step.

I was doing my PhD for one reason: a scarce tenure-track faculty position. Unlike younger doctoral history students, I had already worked in “alt ac,” the unfortunate term invented by senior scholars to denote the majority of jobs in the United States – in my case high school teacher, freelance writer, adult basic education instructor, and transition to college coordinator. Teaching was not a side gig to my academic life, it had been the core of my career. But I wanted more time and some funding to research and write – and to talk about writing projects. So I stayed upright on that unfamiliar limb and edged onto its most precarious branches, able to teeter with my head up because I had a sense my work was solid. But each inch further out brought with it strange sensations to which I had to acclimate.

I didn’t understand the behind-the-scenes system of academia, with its arcane unarticulated conventions, elitist habits that contradicted its public narratives of merit and access (as well as much of the faculties’ research interests), and ageism that could give Hollywood studios a run for their money. The constant appeals and applications for funding required ritualistic side conversations and closed-door referrals. Each year, I observed and pushed forward, shimmying my feet out on the limb. Other first-gen academics got me through the program and the years of job searches. We broke down the unspoken rules and the challenges of navigating practices and personalities that have been insulated (and often inflated). We talked about the initial discomfiture of enacting the unspoken theater of academia. I regularly think of another first-gen grad student who was also in singular pursuit of a tenure-track position. He grew up in Puerto Rico and told me he approached conversations with senior scholars or editors at conferences con una cara de lechuga, with bold innocence, without hesitance or arrogance. This concept gave me some insightful affective advice, more than just a basic instruction on what-to-do-next.

But just as I succeeded at one step, another would appear, imbued with that vague impression there was something more to it. The sense of being on my own, balancing under a vast dark sky, continued. My family and friends thought it was great that I was going for it. Professors in the department asked about my work and discussed further reading. For first-gen students and students in historically marginalized groups, however, family praise, friendly approval, and positive comments on academic work are not often enough. Telling them their scholarship is interesting is not enough. Even telling them to make a community of their peers is not enough, when most first-gen students do not know the larger etiquette and rituals.

Now I am in my first year of a tenure-track position. I became one of the few non-elite, first-gen history PhDs who hit the right convergence of hard work, white privilege assistance with access, conference encounters, and job postings. I landed – it seems my feet might be on semi-solid ground. I’m beginning to feel like I have some collegial backing, some understanding of how people navigate behind the scenes in departments and across campuses. I made it to the other side of something invisible but tangible, I got inside the cloister. There’s an appeal to leaving behind the whole out-on-a-limb syndrome, especially as service and scholarly demands pile up on me within a shrinking tenure-stream faculty. But then I wouldn’t remember to invite another first-gen scholar to share what they find disorienting or odd about academia, to let them know someone sees them balancing the best they can.

The post Out-On-A-Limb (Not Impostor) Syndrome first appeared on Aimee Loiselle.

I did my undergraduate years in a gloriously “traditional” manner. Eighteen, freshman year, assigned to a dorm with a roommate–luckily we fell into the lifelong friends category. We had another girl (although I would have said “woman” back then) who often stayed with us because she and her two roommates fell into the stone-cold adversaries category. I bought a meal plan and remained on campus for my part-time job, my room-and-board, my classes, my friends, my social life, my relaxation, exercise, love life, etc. etc. The college was the town.

I did my master’s program in a “mostly-traditional” manner. Twenty-six years old. Two years in a quirky, tiny apartment in the groovin’ downtown of a small city, just big enough to have two colleges and three “parts of town.” I met people who were not attending grad school and built a social network off-campus. I took road trips and threw together dinner parties and card nights with red wine. I devoted almost every moment to either my studies or my fun–I had no other real demands. I was a funded grad student in my twenties in my nation-of-origin doing research in a department with no Ph.D. students–so I got lots of support and guidance and attention. Academia magic.

I am doing my Ph.D. in a thoroughly “nontraditional” manner. Forty-three years old and a homeowner. I’ve been teaching at a community college and alternative schools–surrounded by the tumult and pressures of 21st-century democracy and education. I failed to anticipate the extreme nature of my nontraditional-ness and the extraordinary dissonance it would trigger when I entered a niche still entrenched in tradition.

I am older than a few professors in the department, which causes some weirdness since I feel collegial with them rather than subordinate. I drive several miles to campus from my house–I have other priorities in my daily life. Family, mortgage, bird nests in the attic, dog vomit in the living room, adult obligations like my friends’ birthday and graduation parties for their kids, multiple insurance premiums, and sales at the grocery store so I can stock up on a particular pantry item. Simple comforts have become more important than grand ambitions or riotous fun. I like playing in the garden, finding lady’s slippers on a hike in the woods, throwing together a crazy cheese and olive platter with my man, clean towels after a shower, sitting under an umbrella on a sunny day.

I’ve also been teaching for almost 20 years. So the usual TA anxieties about grading, undergrads, and authority flutter past me like gnats. I’m not a peer to those TAs… I could be a mentor. But I’m not a mentor because they’re third-year grad students. I’m also 15 years older and did not follow any established path, as many of them are in the midst of doing.

I also know the vicious truth about graduate research because I left academia and worked in the rest-of-the-world. Grad research does not mean anything to 98.2% of the U.S. population. Those students who travel from high school/private school to college to grad school to post-doc fellowship to university teaching have an absolutely different perspective on prioritizing research vs. teaching (vs. other duties… since many Ph.D. students will not become professors or even teachers). I value, celebrate, and advocate liberal arts & sciences education with all the enthusiasm I’ve always had. Such education explodes the mind, shifts lenses, and transforms individuals. Research–in conference papers, academic journals, monographs, and textbooks–serves a critical role in that formal education… but it mostly stops at the border between college and the rest-of-the-world (some policy and documentaries are the exception). If humanities academics want to be relevant beyond the niche of their peers and the liberal arts & sciences, they will have to conceive of research and its dissemination, teaching, outreach, and media in new ways. But grad research continues in a traditional manner…

So the grad school system remains aligned with a 19th-century model of a top-down master-apprentice relationship–based on an economic system (with its gender, race, learning, and product traditions) that has little relevance to the more fluid realities of the current economy or to the brutal conditions of the academic job market. Most Ph.D.s (especially in the humanities) will not become tenure-track professors… then they are not actually apprenticing. Right? I find my nontraditional-ness highlights such inadequacies, embedded in the stubborn notion that a 200-year-old apprenticeship model can provide (1) the teaching skills required for the 21st century and (2) an awareness of the full range of possibilities for the job search. The democratizing of education (the variety of students, backgrounds, technologies, ages) also pushes at a model developed for the elite of 19th-century European cities.

I have found ways to make peace with my nontraditional-ness. Younger students have also discovered ways to relate to me without assumptions. (Often the assumptions were paradoxical: I was old so I must be married with kids–but I was a grad student so I must want to complain about the undergrads’ lack of interest in the course material, which I actually see as typical of contemporary American adolescence.) Nothing about grad school itself has fostered these unique dynamics for the young students or for me. Instead, they wedged through the cracks, sought the openings. A way to grow and spin.

But I do recommend more middle-aged students in grad schools. Such demographic change often pushes reform.

The post Middle-Aged Grad Student first appeared on Aimee Loiselle.

– Do ask everything that pops into your head. Writers have ideas, we let our imaginations crawl into corners and peep into dirty human motivations. The ideas and questions might seem bizarre, but ask. Sellers are not obligated to tell you as much as you think. Write down every little question and write every one in both past and present tense. Write them multiple times in multiples ways–you got this skill. Then send that long list of all the questions in all the tenses by email or hard copy to the seller before you pay for a home inspection. If you ask sellers directly, they have a legal obligation to answer. Demand details. Be as picky with these questions and answers as you would if an editor sent you back a short story to check before publication. Line by line, word by word, comma by comma. E.g. Is there asbestos in the house? Was there ever asbestos in the house? Is the sewer main line clear? Has the sewer main line ever been cleared?

– If the house is older or doesn’t contain any serious renovation–but then, hey, there’s one room or one ceiling or one part of the basement with totally new work, be suspicious. You know sloppy writing, when you or another writer slaps some lazy deus ex machina into a story to fix a major problem. Bad writing is bad writing, and only hard work in the structure of the whole piece can fix it. It’s the same with construction. If it’s out of place, ask when, where, why, and for what purpose. What’s it hiding? What really needs to be done?

– Visit the house at various times of the day and night. Where does the light fall, what are the noises. If you like to write at night with the starry sky, make sure neighbors don’t have a couple outdoor spotlights illuminating a two-acre diameter around their garage. If you like to write in the morning sun, make sure the knot of trees and mildewy arbor vitae drooping over the neighbor’s fence doesn’t block your office–no matter how wonderful it looks on the inside.

– Look up the word “efflorescence.” Know it, inspect for it, avoid it. Or you will spend too much time in your basement fiddling with a dehumidifier and online researching drainage ditches rather than writing.

– Junk is surprising. It always masks more junk. A house with a basement, garage, and shed full of old doorknobs, broken shutters, drippy paint cans, moldy boards, scraps of metal screen, rusty grills, styrofoam planks, and musty tins of nails and screws might be a bargain. But it is also an optical illusion. Under all that crap is more crap. And more crap. And more crap. And several writing weekends lost.

– Even if you hike, garden, camp, or compulsively clean, when you move into a new house–buy a respirator mask for scrubbing and moving. We live in an atmosphere of funk and ozone. Don’t inhale it, don’t act tough. Don’t be afraid of looking like a word dweeb in a mask, too frail for the hard hands-on labor of brooms, mops, rags, chemical cleaners, concrete, cobwebs, and sawdust. Or a good chunk of your writing time might slip away as you loll in bed recuperating from all those nasty bits in your lungs. On the other hand, if you want to enrich your next description of a character struggling for breath, feeling the truth of her tiny mortality and absolute alone-ness with each wheeze, don’t get a mask.

– Use the PennySaver, Craigslist, and the free local papers. Search out free or cheap help the same way you search out free or cheap submission opportunities. People will give you estimates on the strangest jobs–filling, sanding, and staining/polyurethaning all those empty cable and phone line holes left throughout the house. People will happily and with gratitude carry sawed-up old floorboards full of nails out of your house and into theirs. People will battle to pay $20 for a twenty-year-old chest freezer. People will give you stories as they help you with all this housework.

– The old saying “Good fences make good neighbors” depends on the ‘hood you live in. And the type of fence. Sometimes a six-foot solid stockade fence is the best plan, sometimes it gets you ostracized from the random street and sidewalk chatter. Explore your setting and the logic of that world before you make the fence call.

– If you want to be a writer, live life and ask for help with your craft. If you want to be a homeowner, live life and ask for help with the chores and repairs. If you want to be a writer who owns a home, those are your life.

The post To-Do List for a Writer (Thinking of Buying a House) first appeared on Aimee Loiselle.

If you want to see a true and pure slice of America–America in all its glory of conglomeration, weirdness, exuberance, achievement, and commotion–visit a community college. The word “community” actually means what it says in this case: everyone in the area, from all different backgrounds, in some type of sync for some vaguely shared goal. In this case, formal education. Everyone and anyone.

In the fall of 2010, a reticent young woman who moved to western Massachusetts from Cambodia showed a knack for camera work and an interest in digital editing. I was impressed with her audacity–she used a digital still camera to secretly record all of us on our last day of class, made a video with creative cuts and music, and then told us by handing out DVDs.

So I made up my own production company, French Fry Productions. And asked if she wanted to make a video of this semester’s class. It took some negotiating. I think she wanted to believe I was joking. At one point, far into the process, her nephew downloaded a virus onto her laptop; she had to re-format and lose the file. Or at least that was her explanation for the delay…

She made this video with promotion in mind, the promotion of education for people who didn’t think they would go to college. Students who need not only academic preparation, but also cultural initiation. Because college is its own culture, with distinct jargon, conventional practices, accepted creative and intellectual products, and behavior patterns that are passed along. (I remember the pummeling of my own initiation, just a year after my father’s death, 17-years-old at a summer program in Boston. Surrounded by heirs to distinct privilege and bearers of international ambition, I flailed my way through the process of registering, getting syllabi, meeting professors, and walking across the yard to the cafeteria. I learned to cast away my parochial suburban habits–I was self-possessed yet pliable, dominant traits of the striving adolescent.)

I realized after a semester of teaching the “adult transition to college class” that psychological reinforcements help students flourish as well. Most have not had positive experiences with formal education. They harbor deep secret personal anxieties which can be triggered by stress from the unknown and the pressure of college deadlines. Fear of success with its expectations can sabotage as easily as the fear of failure with its despair or simple familiarity. I write prompts on the board like “What are external obstacles to college? What are internal obstacles?” and they brainstorm and we discuss.

The students who stay, those who believe formal education is worth everything or those who come to the decision they will transcend into anything they might become in this world–they develop trust in me and each other, and their willingness allows me to share my own terrors (granted from the safety of my instructor position and advanced degree).

This reciprocity, this soulful contact amidst the daily grind of paperwork, attendance sheets, and repetitive instruction, gives my life such moments of grace.

The post Moments of Grace in Learning from Teaching first appeared on Aimee Loiselle.