Last Day of Summer School & Academia Musings

I'm between my last two meetings of my quant and econ classes - getting back our finals. I had another gut reaction to my quant exam. I made some stupid mistakes but still managed to do better than I did on my mid-term. I'm still struggling with the half-empty/half-full mentality. In my head, I kept figuring out how I could have gotten a better score if I had checked my work or just figured out such an obvious answer to one of the questions. In other words, second guessing myself and beating myself up for doing so poorly. At the end of the class, we played a fun game theory game on the computer in teams, and she handed out a prize to the student who did best on the exam - which was actually a tie between M and Z. M got it because he did better than Z on the mid-term (this is sounding like a math question in and of itself, but I was hoping Z would get it because she's the mother of a 2 year old. Go moms!)

So despite my hopefully temporary low-self worth feeling over my quant (and probably my impending econ) exam results, I was reflecting on the way over here how happy I am that I'm doing this program. It took me almost 20 years, but I finally made it to grad school. I resisted it for so long despite my love of research, writing and teaching. I guess growing up, really, in a university library, had something to do with it. Both my parents worked at a University. Dad as a prof and mom as a library archivist, so I spent so much time on a campus that I feel like I've come home. Aftere I graduated from college, I thought I would take a year off and head straight toward a double graduate degree in law and public health.

But I fell in love . . . with a strong political and labor movement in African-American communities in rural North Carolina. It became clear that grounded grassroots organizing was much more important to me than ivory tower research. Although I spent some of my ten years in that activist work actually organizing academics and even co-teaching a class at the Duke Medical school on rural health, I still firmly believed that work in the trenches was much more important than that of "students", which is the term we almost derisively used for academia. However, "we" still believed that academics were important cogs in the movement wheel. But rather than become one the best thing to do was organize them. An organizer has much greater reach than any one individual. I still mostly believe this, but, ultimately, it's not the right path for me. Yes, I'll always be an organizer. Can't help it, but I have resisted not just the steering away from academia by sisters and brothers in the movement but also by academics themselves. I look forward to finally persuing what I've been toying with for years and always coming up with reasons not to do it. It's clear by how satisfied I am that I'm in the right place.