I suppose the thing about plans is that they change. My plan for the last several years has been “go straight to grad school to be an English professor.” Then I wasn’t sure what to study, so I decided to take a year or two off to do some independent study and find an academic passion that wasn’t simply knowledge. But always, I knew I was going to be an English professor.
During the last semester of my undergraduate degree, however, I started to feel a little bit like I was living and working inside a vacuum. I was writing my Capstone paper, “Science Fiction Sleeper Agent: Narrative Subversion in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lefthand of Darkness” and loving it. I was having a great time immersing myself in great writing and in the thoughtful, though at times disappointing, scholarship of others in my field. I was having a blast but I couldn’t shake a certain feeling of futility.
To understand this feeling, we might have to delve a little bit into my life and educational philosophies. In life, I value learning. As an existentialist, I believe that what I choose to value has global and societal ramifications; In light of this fact, I must value the act of learning over knowledge itself which can be understood to be finite. I can consider myself fully knowledgeable on a given subject but I can never consider myself to be finished learning about a given subject. It is that eternal questing which excites me and that gives us a tangible point of entry into the future. We can always learn more, we can always seek more knowledge, more understanding. The act of learning, of seeking knowledge, is endless and open and freeing. Continue reading “What if I’m a Bad Academic?”
Lindsey Grundyson 