Chicago Nostalgia

It isn't always schoolwork that makes this process difficult. I'm starting to realize that good grades, active classwork, and strong effort aren't going to be nearly enough to make the PhD a worthwhile achievement. What's going to get me hired to teach and research when I graduate might be more dependent on what I did outside of the classes: publications, research grants, and presentations at national conferences, than any grade I receive. Scary stuff. A large percentage of my cohort has been published already. I expect that almost all of us will have submitted something for publication by the end of the first year. I have a classmate whose publication goal is one per quarter, at least four per year.

This pressure weighs heavily on me. This morning I woke up at 6:30 with thoughts for the project that I've been working on, and I needed to put them down on paper RIGHT THEN. I think that I had only fallen asleep two or three hours before because of my tossing and turning while I worried about this project. I've been writing almost continuously since I woke up. I want this project to be something great and that sense of pressure keeps me up a lot of nights.

My cohort has a term for the profs that are great. (Great in this context means that they have changed the world with their research and that they teach, write and raise their families with aplomb.) We call them "rockstars." The term, when used by my cohort, is imbued with respect, awe, a little fear and a deep longing to one day be among that group. One of our TAs yesterday summed up rockstars in nursing by saying, "You might ask a question that we don't know the answer to. Unlike Dr.___, we're only human." I'm working on this project with one of these superhuman nurses, a  real rockstar of nursing research, and I want to produce something that is worthy of that honor.

When I look back on the first quarter of the doctoral program and this project, there will be a soundtrack playing in my head. This soundtrack is compiled of 15 songs that I've been playing on repeat since I started the program. On iTunes I've labeled this group of songs "Chicago Nostalgia." The music in this grouping reminds me a lot of the music that my friends and I danced to in high school, hence its name. It is loud, throbbing and entirely offensive to people who aren't as actively stressed as I am.

I was playing it on my computer speakers, but my husband started calling it the "Oh God, turn it off" music, the cat was hiding under the bed, and the neighbors were banging on the floor (our ceiling) to express their displeasure. Now, I only listen to it on my iPod. But, really, I would never have guessed that taking a work break to crazy-dance to  Kinky's "Mas" wasn't relaxing to everybody if I hadn't seen the evidence for myself....