Social-Emotional

Yesterday I kept thinking "I'm having a crisis of the will." Working on the NSF fellowship application was sapping all my energy and joie de vivre - there are three quite demanding essays and all I could think was "who am I kidding? I'll never get this; this application is so pathetic..." Kind of poisoned the general mood... browsing the Interweave Knits web site was just so much more fun than trying to prove to the scary invisible people on the other side of the web site how brilliant and worthy of funding I am.

Tonight my "posse" came over for snacks, hot tea, and our newly revived pre-Proseminar discussion of the week's readings. I was so happy they came! If not for this event, I would have gone over 24 hours without talking face to face with another human being (between my Tuesday morning and Wednesday night classes... I just work better at home than in the library).

The really cool thing is that we're reading the same Gramsci text in both of the aforementioned classes, so I should be able to recycle the paper I'm writing right now for the other class :-) More than anything else, it was this paper that pulled me out of the "what's the meaning of it all" funk, because I'm writing about Bolivia and I have to actually tear myself away from this to work on stuff for other classes. It's so interesting and fun, and a topic I feel like I know more about than the prof does... this is key...

Anyway, while waiting for the posse to show up, I was thinking about a BBBS study that showed that kids whose mentors do social-emotional activities with them actually improve in their schoolwork more than kids whose mentors only tutor them. Fascinating, no? Anyway, I figure the same goes for grad students; we need the social and emotional support just as much as the intellectual and academic. It will actually make us better students and better academics if we have a supportive community for each other. So it doesn't bother me that at our "study sessions" we spend more time socializing than talking about the readings; it still enhances our academic production. And helps us feel more human.