oh shit congrats on doctor! thats huge!!! what was your fav part of the process?
Thank you! Between my defense on Wednesday and having family in town and the commencement and everything I haven’t been Online much the last week, hah.
My favorite part of the process… ooh. The most meaningful part of the process was absolutely getting a much fuller and deeper view of the ethics, the colonialism, and the need for Indigenous rights underpinning Literally Everything. As an archeologist studying Indigenous American cultures and histories, it is something we never stop talking about and thinking about. “Favorite” isn’t really the way to conceptualize that, but I do think it was a deeply fundamental shift in my understanding of the world that is really valuable to me.
Favorite, though… The thing about grad school is that it makes you swing wildly between “I am brilliant, why has nobody thought of this before, I am noticing things in The Data no one has ever seen, and I am handling objects that were last held by people 800 years ago and I understand the world on a fundamental level” and “I am the stupidest and most useless person alive and I hate everything and also myself” pretty rapidly. But the former moments feel amazing. Honestly favorite part of the process is realizing I’m seeing a thing that nobody else has written about before in the hundred years people have been studying this topic, getting increasingly excited and also frustrated because after looking I did find references to this phenomenon in three different books, but they’re all one-sentence notes that this is a thing that’s happening and then the authors seem to shrug and move on. And I’m like no wait back up. This is interesting!! Why has nobody written about this!! I am going to write about this!!! Which is the whole point of academia in the end. Going into the museum collections and getting to work with these clay pots from the 1200s-1400s and realizing I’m seeing something there that nobody else in my field seems to have seen is a really, really cool feeling.
However, one of my absolute proudest moments was when I was teaching World Archaeology and after every lecture, I had a little post-lecture comprehension quiz for easy participation points and each one ended with the open ended question “what was one new thing you learned from the lecture today?” And a lecture on human evolution got multiple people answering “I learned that humans didn’t actually evolve from chimpanzees, which is what I thought before” and I was just absolutely punching the air like YESSSSS I AM SUCCEEDING, IF YOU REMEMBER NOTHING ELSE THIS IS WHAT I WANTED YOU TO REMEMBER, I’M GETTING A GOOD GRADE AT BEING A TEACHER
