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Where have I gone, since we last spoke? Perhaps I should begin with the most obvious. It was a beautiful morning, I had my coffee and wrote a letter to my parents, and walked to the business school via the picturesque Oxford Canal. I gave a really good interview for the Martin Studentship, but alas, there was someone who was just that little bit better. As is the case with these full-ride offers, competition is always uncertain. This year just happened to be one where a number of candidates were highly qualified for the position.
So, with that funding shot now in the past, I am looking around for whatever options are left to me. I have applied for the position of Junior Dean at New College (essentially, I would live in College and be a first point of contact at night), and should hear about that in the next week. Not getting the Studentship, however, has also allowed me to once more take a step back and see where I have come thus far and whether the direction I am going in is one in which I would like to go. For those of you who have followed these Journals for a while, you may chuckle to yourself at that last sentence, as I have rarely gone in a single direction at any given time. More often, I am pursuing a half-dozen different efforts at once, and juggling them with a social life and, every now and again, a bit of time for myself. This is, as my supervisor put it, the outcome of a liberal arts education.
It's not a bad thing, having a liberal arts training. I feel that it has given me a well-rounded knowledge of the world, and has taught me how to enjoy almost any intellectual pursuit. I am able to switch between disciplines with ease, and can understand and respond to people's arguments when they are speaking about a subject of which I have little knowledge. The trouble, however, comes in when I try to rigorously apply myself to a single topic to critically research it, develop an argument, and carry that argument through to conclusion. In my pursuits, I am more like a sheep grazing a field than a puma or hawk stalking its next meal. I touch on this spot and that, find a little nourishment, and move on, often not remembering from whence I came to where I am going next. I had recognised this about my physical pursuits a while ago. I do rowing for a few years every now and again, interspersed with soccer, ultimate Frisbee, racquetball, and a half dozen other sports. I dance, I run the Strategic Studies Group, I act (a new hobby. Check out the 2D-Manifestations section of my website soon for a page on my first play, Arcadia). In none of these, however, would I say that I have achieved my potential or applied myself fully.
But it wasn't until this past week that I had a bit of a breakthrough, and applied the same understanding to my intellectual life. My supervisor has been getting more and more anxious each meeting, as I continue to not make as much progress on my dissertation as I should be making. I too have been anxious, as a few of you know, because each time I describe what I am researching to someone, it comes out differently. I read all the time, but in very diverse sets of literature (political science, sociology, economics, anthropology, organisation theory, philosophy Ð at least no physics right now!). The point that I am weakest in right now is in accumulating the knowledge I learn from one area and applying it to another. A sheep simply see grass everywhere, and there is little need to tell the difference or similarity between this patch and that. A liberal arts education, in my view, gives one the ability to feed intellectually off of most anything, and thus keep the mind at a constant base performance level, like taking a daily walk to maintain a base of physical fitness. One would never be able to run a marathon, much less strive for the Olympics, however, if one's training was a light jog around the block, the track determined by the whims of the feet. Likewise, I have been having a jolly ol' time grazing the intellectual fields of Oxford, but as a result, I have not yet developed the ability to hunt for my food. I skim the surface of all my interests, but haven't really gone after anything with all my energy, as a hawk or a puma must when it goes for the kill. Could I live my life as a sheep? I probably could, and I certainly hope to always retain the ability to digest knowledge from other fields, but right now, in order to get this Master's and pursue a doctorate, I need to take up a serious training regime not unlike a professional athlete.
As with any training programme, it will take up a good deal of my time. I think back to last year with rowing, in which we trained an average of 3 hours a day 6 days a week for 6 months, and that was just for the College (intramural) team, not the university. More importantly, rowing took up a lot of my life. I still managed to do a few other things, but I didn't have the energy for much more. What I discovered last week, while lying in bed, was that I engaged in a half-dozen or more different strands of thought right now with my research, any one of which I could spend a lifetime pursuing. However much I may wish it so, I don't think I'm cut out for the decathlon right now. As I have been cutting out all of the extraneous physical activities in my life to have more time to study, so too do I now need to cut out all of the extraneous mental activities that I have been playing with in order to focus my mind on the task at hand.
Until just now, I had never thought of controlling my thought process, of developing intellectual discipline. I haven't really needed any until now, as I have been able to get by with grazing. It is all too clear to me, as it is to my supervisor, that such a state of affairs as has persisted the last year and a half will not get me a Master's degree from one of the best universities in the world. I have always been a quick learner. Let's hope that I'm quick enough.
~Sam
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