Before my Master’s program, I was a McNair scholar- a program aiding undergraduates in pursuing advanced degrees. I was looking forward to graduate school because I came from a small university and I was ready to build community at a larger institution. However, as an undergraduate, my enthusiasm for a multitude of grand ideas often overwhelmed both my focus and my professors. Juggling numerous ambitious concepts led to a lack of depth and coherence in my academic pursuits, exhausting not only my own efforts but also straining the capacity of my instructors.
I came to my Master’s program with big ideas about animal minds and human aesthetics. The multitude of ambitious ideas, initially exhilarating, soon posed a formidable challenge as I navigated the refined and focused demands of advanced academic study. Wrestling with the temptation to pursue every expansive concept, I came to realize the imperative of honing my focus, aligning my intellectual pursuits with the program’s structured requirements.
The accelerated pace of graduate studies, especially in institutions on quarters, hinders the luxury of allowing ideas to evolve naturally. The need to finalize paper concepts by week 3 or 4 can lead to premature ideas and bias, presenting challenges in producing well-developed work. When it was time to write my Master’s capstone, I was a little lost after the whirlwind that is graduate course work. I had abandoned my big ideas because I simply did not have the time to develop them. That is when my faculty mentor did what mentors do best, and directed me towards a project I could get excited about.
In addressing my Master’s capstone dilemma, my mentor suggested that I revisit a prior paper on the Indian philosophical concept of rasa. It was not something that I was interested in or understood before entering my program, but it was the paper I wrote for a class that my faculty mentor taught. The paper was not as good as I thought when I wrote it. I could feel my own sloppiness in the writing and I was embarrassed that I ever turned it in. At this point, my only focus was on my capstone because I was not taking any other classes, so I dug in and gutted and reworked the entire paper.
It was difficult to push through the embarrassment of working on the bad paper but with the help of my mentor and with enough time on my side I came to find that rasa theory is essential to the kinds of philosophical questions I was interested in. I would have never discovered a topic that I am ready to dedicate my academic career to if I had not let this subject come to me. Librarians say “every reader their book”, and “every book its reader.” I believe that applies here. I was not the reader finding a book, I was a reader that had a book find me, the book here being my Master’s capstone subject.
I want to take this fundamental lesson and apply it to my work as the new series editor. This blog series is for graduate students to share their experiences in order to help others navigate the graduate school experience. It can be difficult from so many angles, not having secure housing, constantly running out of money or asking for money, suddenly switching from student to teacher, constantly writing in different modes for different purposes, daily discussion of philosophical concepts that have the ability to send one into an existential crisis, all while finding enough time to research and maintain a personal identity and social life. That being said, the most positive part of my experience was developing a community with my peers. As the series editor I hope to help cultivate an online space similar to the community that was so valuable to me as a Master’s student. I look forward to being surprised at what can be gained in this space, and contributing to the continued development of the online resource that is the Blog of APA, Graduate Student Reflection Series.
Maya Lomeli
Maya Lomeli is the current series editor for the Blog of APA, Graduate Student Reflection Series. She attends University of California Santa Cruz for a Master's in Philosophy. Her research interests are aesthetics, philosophy of emotion, and philosophy of skill. She also has her Master's in Library and Information Science and enjoys reading in her free time.
