#Najia goes to grad school

[gothhabiba]

Hey Najia 🤍 I come by to leave words of praise to your inbox every couple of years anonymously lol. But this time, I just thought I’d ask— how did you get funded for your Oxford MA, if you don’t mind? I’m about to start applying for PhDs and I’m considering taking the leap on this one (US citizen as well, and poor, and brown etc.) so I thought I’d ask what your app and funding experience was like. I was always so enthralled by your MA updates and so, so happy to see you out there. Now it’s my turn to take a shot! As always, thanks for everything you do— hope you have a great day.

my undergraduate university awarded me a grant, to go to one person in my graduating class in history or literature on the basis of original research / writing. it was enough to pay for my tuition, travel, room & board, & miscellanious expenses for my year at Oxford. it wasn't open for applications--my professors named me for it. so I actually didn't apply for funding.

I remember during discussions about applying for PhD funding in the UK that people expressed frustration about how they wouldn't hear back about whether or not they were funded until after they were supposed to accept a placement at a university they had been accepted to.

with regards to PhDs, I will say that the US is generally considered a more viable place to get one (at least in literature?) if you plan to work in the US--the reason being that a PhD programme in the US doubles as a job & so comes with teaching experience. with a US PhD you would be qualified for a job in the US or in the UK & Europe-- with a UK PhD you would not necessarily be qualified for a job in the US. this also means that PhD programmes in the US take longer to complete, and pay a stipend rather than charging tuition. so (assuming you could live on the stipend) that would solve your problems with funding as well.

whichever professors you're going to ask to give you recommendations--ask them for advice about which schools to apply to, what funding is available for students in your field, &c.

[gothhabiba]

Salam Najia, this is off topic from your current posts but, have you posted about your experiences studying in the UK? I remember you saying you were (are?) working a lot during as well. Were they mainly academic jobs like research, tutoring, editing, ect ? My friend is struggling to make ends meets while doing their PhD program in London. Do you have any advice on how to find work there whether as a student or not ? The job economy sucks now regardless but sharing any kind of insight could possibly help a Black queer not drop out of astrophysics 🪴🌌🙏🏾

sorry but I didn't work while doing my grad programme! we actually were literally not allowed to have a job. it was an accelerated programme & we were all putting in 16-hour days just with reading & classes. I was lucky enough to get a scholarship for writing that paid my way.

[gothhabiba]

guess whom just submitted a master’s thesis

[gothhabiba]

what happened last week? are you ok?

I tried to set up a big Aid dinner & originally had the (enthusiastic!) offers of my classmates to help bring food & cook, as it got closer I ended up having to chase and message people individually to find out whether they were even coming, people were saying they could no longer help, I expressed upset and said basically ‘my problem isn’t with issues with scheduling or people prioritising other things but that you didn’t tell me sooner, making me chase you when I have just as much work due at the same time as you do is disrespectful of my time’ & basically this like, brown man & a white woman who I had thought were my friends completely ignored me & acted like I was being cr*zy and aggressive for asking for an apology. lol. it DID bring me to tears BUT Divya was here soon afterwards and we outdressed EVERYONE at a black tie dinner (pictures forthcoming!!!!!!!) so it’s okay. thank you for asking

[gothhabiba]

I’m using my custom natural-fibre academic robes as a picnic blanket to sunbathe in this courtyard in a metallic crop top because that’s just where we are at this point in our lives I guess

[gothhabiba]

my brain fog has gotten worse & it’s causing me to completely misread sentences the first time... misspell or forget how to spell words that I Definitely know how to spell unless I really sit there and Think about it (& I’ve always been a very good speller)--I sat there staring at the word ‘oppossision’ for upwards of ten seconds because I forgot that ‘opposition’ was spelled with a ‘t’... I’ll mess up verb forms the first time I say them in conversation even though it’s something that I Know & I’ll have to correct myself... or I’ll watch myself typing out the wrong word from a set of homophones when that’s never been a problem that I’ve had & I have no memory of ever having been aware of needing to consciously select between homophones in writing... it’s kind of fascinating from a psycholinguistics perspective but also troubling in that I need to write my thesis Now. I’ve been reading way too much race science so let me clarify that the issue is not with my brain or my capacity to read & comprehend or to formulate complex ideas lmfao............ the issue is solely that this is new for me so I haven’t constructed strategies for working around it yet / figured out how to budget for the time it costs me

[gothhabiba]

what was ur thesis? good luck with getting it done!! u're great you can do it!!!

it was a comparison of rhetoric, narrative & analogy in mid-nineteenth-century American scientific racism & sentimental novels, the central point being that racial ideology can be worked out differently in different genres based on what kinds of standards they have (e.g. for what ‘counts’ as evidence) so you have to consider that in considering racial rhetoric rather than comparing it to one sort of rarefied idea of what ‘racism’ looks like. I DID get it done but it wasn’t organised as well as it could have been given that I did most of the research for it & wrote all of it in the space of…. six days………… RIP

[gothhabiba]

I would really appreciate it if on occasion these white gay men who talk about effete Victorian decadence & dandies & whatever would at least PRETEND not to have a hard-on for colonialism

[gothhabiba]

I hate that moment in reading something where you’ve got to decide that it’s just not particularly well-written, stop trying to figure out what each sentence means in terms of the words that it actually contains, and start reasoning about what it makes sense in context for each sentence to mean. I have said before and I will say again someone PLEASE teach academics to write

[gothhabiba]

poetry reading w/ Oxford Review of Books ~

[gothhabiba]

tbh. I should be forced to cut 1,000 words from my draft of any essay regardless of what the maximum word count is. I always go back through, reducing strings of three adjectives, shaking my head and muttering ‘why am I LIKE this’

[gothhabiba]

omg tell us more about hating stephen jay gould finally someone is coming for him

omfg I love how the quote I posted from the intro of his book popped out of my queue right after I said that

anyways he revisits 19th-century race scientists’ findings to dispute their accuracy in terms of statistical / measurement errors & fudging numbers &c. which I guess is all well and good but the fact is that you’re STILL measuring people’s skulls by ‘race’ and putting them into tables. in 1981. which doesn’t sit very well. & if he ever DOES back up and say ‘also it’s inaccurate to sort these by “race” in the first place and also you can’t assume that skull volume = intelligence’ it’s very glancing (& at least in this chapter he really hasn’t)

& then he’s like ‘these numbers came about because there are these disproportionately smaller skulls in the n*groid and m*ngoloid samples so we’re just going to assume that they’re female therefore these numbers are skewed based on uneven representation of different sexes in the samples’ and also ‘these numbers are skewed because he doesn’t control for body size & selectively ignores the fact that h*ttentots, incas and hindus are small in stature’ (LITERALLY HE WROTE THE WORDS “Hottentots are very small in stature” LITERALLY DIRECTLY INTO THIS BOOK, NOT IN THIS RACE SCIENTIST’S WORDS, IN HIS OWN) completely ignoring the fact (somehow, even though he had mentioned the thing about women earlier) that these scientists also used women’s smaller brain size to say that they had very little functional intelligence & that different ‘race’s’ statures were also focused on as signs of inferiority in 19th-century racial science (& racist comments are still made along those lines to-day). you can’t criticise a racial scientist for assuming that he can sort skulls by race based on what he’s about to measure (i.e. cranial size, thus begging the question) and then be like ‘now let me sort out these Lady Brains based on nothing but their size’ like dude…………. come on. and then call racialised people ‘very small’ in stature or ‘body size’ & not realise that you’re flattening internal variation as well as using “”””causcasian”””” people as the norm as well as still validating the sorting of these people into racial groups to be compared to each other in the first place

[gothhabiba]

I’ll be hosting an Aïd dinner soon AND there’s a formal dinner for a guest night that I’m attending w the love of my life Divya the next day AND I’m going to a party for Pride the day after that inchallah so I’ll effectively be celebrating Aïd for three days. PHENOMENAL..... show-stopping

[gothhabiba]

selectively stripping white people of their middle names in academic citations as Moroccan anti-racist praxis

[gothhabiba]

sitting here for four minutes trying to recall the Perfect word to use in this sentence because it was escaping me. ‘developed’ didn’t work because it seemed to imply some fore-ordained end stage. ‘expounded upon’ didn’t work because it implies that there are preconceived ideas in some neutral dimension that are then merely explained. I needed something that means ‘worked out in real time from multivalent and dysteleological possibilities such that the process of working the ideas out BECOMES the ideas.’ finally recalled that the word I had been searching for was ‘elaborated.’ & then remembered and had a laff over the fact that .05% of people who read my posts On Here insist on believing that my writing is unclear and that that’s my fault. mesdames........ my writing proceeds by dint of blood sweat & tears

[gothhabiba]

intoresting that the literary critics who say “you can’t look at literature as a register of racial / gender ideology of the time period bcos it’s the sovereign creation of an individual creative genius etc.” are the same ones who say “you can’t call x author a racist for y reason bcos he was a product of his time period”............ wyd