A Love/Hate Relationship

I have a love-hate relationship with my graduate program.

The other day, I was working on my thesis, and reading the (very) limited research about my topic which is, incidentally, serving the social, emotional, and intellectual needs of students who are gifted and a sexual minority (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, questioning, etc). And as I was reading an article about how there is so little research on the topic, I was thinking, "You know, I care about this topic, and I would love to be involved in something that is truly an emerging topic in the field." I was having delusions of grandeur, and thinking about publishing, and it was, frankly, pretty motivating. I really am enjoying working on this thesis, despite the sometime-drudgery.

But then I thought about how much I despise going to classes and actually being in this field which, to be frank, I don't respect a whole lot. Now, to be fair, I respect gifted education as an academic field slightly more than the wider field of just plain education, but in the grand scheme of things, I'm pretty unimpressed. It all seems so wishy-washy, and, you know, it's a social science, which automatically gives it a bad name. That, coupled with the sorry state of education in general in the United States, doesn't give me too much desire to do much with the field academically speaking.

The ironic thing is, my adviser keeps hinting to me that I should go for my Ph. D. On the one hand, I can see why she would say that. I'm good at school, I'm motivated, and I'm doing well in all her classes (and I've taken four of them with her in my two semesters here thus far). I'm not bragging, but school, especially this stupid program, is easy for me, and always has been. I have the ability and aptitude to get a Ph. D. But it frustrates and stuns me that she doesn't know me well enough to know that I hate this program and wouldn't ever ever EVER think about getting a Ph. D. in education. I would do it in a field I thought highly of (like medieval studies...oh, if only I had stuck with my Latin...).

I think the fact that she knows me so poorly rubs me the wrong way. As the person in charge of the master's in gifted ed program, she currently has only four full-time students. This ratio of adviser to advisee should, at least in my eyes, ensure that we have a good relationship and a high level of communication. We don't. I think there are personality issues at stake (I am a linear thinker and highly organized -- she is a random thinker and disorganized) which adds to my personal disregard for this whole thing. But I just don't feel like she cares about me or knows me. I asked her to help me with licensing in Vermont. She told me to call the state department and make them agree to accept my Virginia license (which I don't have...mine is from Louisiana. And I had already done that. And they said no.). She commented the other day about how it was good that I was getting back into the classroom to I could gain credibility before I go to get my Ph. D., when I told her the week before that I'm not going into the classroom again next year because I can't get aforementioned teaching license. I feel like she's not listening, and I feel like, frankly, she's missing a good opportunity to actually recruit a good candidate for further education...but she doesn't understand that I have no respect for the way things are being handled and I have been turned off.

One of my co-workers at the Center for Gifted Education knows my plight and has encouraged me to speak up. But I told her that I have no yet learned the art of expressing my concerns gracefully and non-accusatorily. The unfortunate circumstances of the situation, namely that my adviser happens to be over-worked and happens to be teaching way more classes in the program than she ever has before, will make my criticism seem personal. And while it is, on some level, there are also program-level problems that just happen to be manifested through her. For example, I feel that the four core courses in gifted education overlap way too much and there is too much repetition. This is only partly her responsibility. On the one hand, I think she could be doing a better job differentiating between the four content areas covered in the classes, but on the other hand, there really IS a lot of overlap, and the program needs to be fixed so there is less. of that. There's only so much she can do when she is handed a course and topic and told, "Here, teach it."

So, the moral of the story is this: I struggle with not fulfilling my potential as an academic, but I truly feel in my heart that academia is not a sector in which I will ever feel fulfilled. I want to speak up and help improve the program, but I am confident that doing so during my time here will create problems for me because I have not developed that talent to give criticism with grace. In the end, I suppose I will just push through, make the best of what I have, and be thankful that at least I will have an advanced degree when all this jazz is through.