A Sense of Community

Yesterday afternoon, I had my first Historiography class. While it's going to be the hard one this semester (and I will not use this space to complain about some of the problems I was noticing), it's really interesting because we have 21 students taking the course: all the MA and PhD students who haven't yet taken it at the grad level. (Meaning that we have all the first-year PhDs, except for the one who took his MA here. I could have taken historiography at the grad level, except that I took it at the honour's level...) I'm really starting to get a sense of community, having the opportunity to meet with the whole gang once a week.

It was especially good, because I've had more of a chance to get to know Simon, one of the other first-year PhDs. (We all were given an article to go away and read, and then come back and discuss. Therefore, Simon decided to show me our office, since he has a key. Yay, a quiet place to read!) We're both in similar places right now: we're from far away from home, we brought spouses who are trained in a profession and yet can't yet work here in that profession, and we spent last semester surrounded by first-year MAs and undergrads, feeling lonely. We compared notes on the deals we got on apartments, and pitied PhD candidates who don't have a spouse or a major scholarship to make this degree affordable. I also found out that only three of the PhDs from our entire department got sent on to the national competition for SSHRC, and so I'm not at all alone. (We think that none of us first-years got through.)

While this is going to be my most hectic semester ever (I'm reading the equivalent of 3-4 books a week, in addition to the reading and marking I must do as a TA, and then I'm also writing 80-90 pages of research essays, in addition to short assignments and this conference paper), in a lot of ways this semester will be better than the last one. I'm making friends, and they're all in the same place as me. On Friday, I'm getting together with a couple of other PhD candidates (ones that are a couple of years ahead of me) for lunch, in advance of the upcoming conference.

And now I understand why Dr. B was so insistent that I go to a bigger school for my PhD. "You need a sense of community," he told me. "You can't make it through, in a department where there are only a couple of grad students." It was okay for my MA, because it was only a two-year degree, I'd been there forever and I was close with the profs. But I'm thankful for a decent-sized grad community in my department. We have heaps of MA students (and we have a fantastic gang of them, and I'm now so thankful that I had that group in my American history course), and even a decent number of PhD candidates. And yet a small enough number of us that we can share an office comfortably.