Academic Courtship

We have reached the time of year. Winter has begun to thaw. Birds renew their perky morning songs and wake everyone up at the break of dawn...dissertations are in the air.

My fellow master’s students and I have been dreading our dissertations like an approaching junior high dance when Jimmy Baker asks arch frienemy Lindsey Arnold even though every day in pre-algebra you have been staring determinately at the back of his head, willing him to turn around and ask for a pencil. Choosing the topic that will define your professional specialization is nothing compared to the agony and potential public rejection of selecting a dissertation advisor. The experience is teenage dating angst all over again.

After spending months in class with a professor, you are still left with all those too familiar uncertainties: “Does the professor like me enough to want to see me over and over again into the summer?” “Does she remember the time when I confused Hamas with Hummus?” “Does he even know who I am?”

Worse is when that one professor who would be perfect for your dissertation is not one who is leading a class. After admiring from afar and after pouring over the potential mentor’s publications and theories, a moment to converse finally arises and you hope beyond anything that your comments exceed the academic equivalent of saying, “I like cheese” in the dating arena.

Whether the professor is personally known is practically irrelevant to the amount of nervousness that builds when having to ask that all important question, “Will you be my dissertation advisor?” That request has all the pitfalls of that ultimate, “Will you go out with me?”

And just like that dating black hole of insecurity, possible answers of “I’m already advising as many students as I can handle” or “I don’t think your topic really aligns with my expertise” or “I don’t think it will work; our research styles are just too different” could drive any hardworking student to the anonymousness of online degrees.

The litany of possible rejections is enough to reconsider career choices and opt for gardening instead.

Augustus Gloop Goes to Lisboa

After living in London for four months, I finally crossed the channel to meet a friend in Portugal. While I should begin by saying that Lisbon is beautiful and mysterious with its narrow cobblestone streets winding up hills, where laundry dances in the breeze and brushes against the brightly painted tiles of the packed buildings, what is a higher priority to me is the unbelievable deliciousness of the food.

I sustain on cold sandwiches and a hundred varieties of potatoes in London. Going to a seaside city with as many different dishes of cod as days in a year made me feel like Dorothy stepping from Kansas into Technicolor. Every meal whether it was a simple homemade meat pie to more elaborate seafood dishes made me question why I didn’t undertake to learn Portuguese instead of the dynamics of conflict. It seems the very first lesson of conflict resolution in my program is to compromise culinary happiness.

We never really had a bad meal on the trip. Even the somewhat harsh encounter with a waiter, who made both the Muppet’s Swedish chef and the Little Mermaid’s knife-welding cook look positively sociable, was not a completely terrible meal. The traditional soups he served were tasty if a little odd. The experience of eating cold vegetable soup and egg on bread floating in broth was certainly unique though I somewhat wonder if the waiter managed to chill our meals with his cold stare.

While the country is known for its scrumptious pastries, particularly egg custards, we stumbled across the most renowned pastry shop in the city. Hoards of revellers stalked the entry and waited to enter like the masses outside Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. The theme continued on the inside as people lined up to buy ridiculous quantities of tarts like they might contain the Golden Ticket. Considering the cabinets were filled with many tiny bottles of port and delicacies, I would not be surprised to find Everlasting Gobstoppers and Fizzy Lifting Drinks among the merchandise.

The trip to Portugal was much too short before I had to return to London and my studies, but I had at least a short reprieve before returning to the city of sandwiches.