Academic Destiny and The Men Who Stare at Goats

This weekend, I went to see the new movie, The Men Who Stare At Goats.

It was weird. Really effing weird.

But I knew that going in, and I laughed a bit, so no real harm done. It’s basically about a unit of the army that was commissioned to develop psychic warfare methods. Apparently, more of it is true than you would believe. At least, that is what the movie tells you at the beginning. I totally believe in all of it, and even though the movie portrayed the people as over the top wack-a-doodles, I also think that there might be some legitimate uses for outside of the box thinking in the army. But then again, I am a pacifist so I probably shouldn’t want harm done by either brute force or mental will.

There was one really hilarious line in the movie about Anne Frank. I don’t remember it exactly, but it went something along the lines of saying that we all have a destiny and we can’t fight it. If Anne Frank wanted to be a high school teacher, tough titties, she’s instead going to write something that will be read by millions.

First, you don’t hear too many Anne Frank jokes these days, so that is notable.

Second, even though it was a stupid movie and a joke in questionable taste, I did start thinking about whether I am fighting my destiny. How do you know that you are doing the right thing with your life? What if there is something bigger and better that I could be doing? How much positive reinforcement does one need to know that he or she is on the right track?

Grad school has a way of making you feel small and insignificant. The only thing that makes me feel that what I am doing has a positive impact and is worthwhile is teaching. I love my students, and I am pretty sure that most of them really like me. Lately, they have been really engaged and interested, and this makes me feel like I have an important platform to get them to think about life differently.

At the same time, I want to to do that on a bigger scale. I want a broader audience than just my students. I just don’t know what that is yet. I also suffer from a lack of overarching passion for one topic. There is nothing that I fight for, nothing that gets me out of the bed in the morning and drives me. Sometimes, I wonder if I would feel better about my purpose if my life was more centered around activism. But what activates me? I haven’t found it yet, and I worry that I never will.

On the other hand, maybe I am just not an activist type person. On top of that, I still feel like I am not on the top of my research game. I don’t put enough time and effort into that, either. Teaching comes so easily, but writing is so very hard. The drive to be a great researcher and to get published is based on feeling not good enough, like I need to prove myself.  I think  I feel that way because my program is competitive and some people are very successful at getting published as grad students. One thing that I have noticed from taking classes in another department for my minor is that the expectations for grad student publications and professionalization activities are much, much lower there. They expect students to focus on their dissertation. That’s it. I am really looking forward to my doing my dissertation, and I hope that it will be the breakthrough for me. I don’t expect it to be some blockbuster type thing, but I hope that I will feel as good about that as I do about teaching. I want to be excellent at both teaching and research. It’s scary how invested I am in academia and yet I wonder if maybe I would have been even more successful and things would have come easier had I done something else. Since that is very speculative and hypothetical, I’m going to say No. In fact, I’d probably be far worse at any other type of job. So, here I am,  stuck in the middle with grad school.