Don’t Eat the Cubed Cheese (and Other Advice for Classics Graduate Students)

Disciplinary Action

Johanna Hanink
EIDOLON

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Marble Stele, Attic, 4th c. BCE

This year our graduate program in Classics at Brown has an impressive first-year cohort. Six of the students are in my Early Greek Literature class, a fast-paced survey of archaic Greek poetry. It meets in a classroom deep in the stacks of Brown’s Rockefeller Library, and one of my favorite parts of class is hearing the chatter in the room from a few bookcases away, even before I walk through the door (I tend to be the last to arrive).

That chatter is usually about Classics and the life of the department. Sometimes it’s about the text on our plates for the day. A few weeks ago, it was about how interesting it is that the recognition scene in Euripides’ Electra seems to parody the one in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers. One morning, students were still discussing — with surprising enthusiasm for 9 am—a lecture recently given by an invited speaker.

Despite the early hour, hearing those conversations gives me a shot of energy. They also make me think back to my own experience as a first-year grad student. And since a) in class we’ve been talking about “wisdom literature” (Hesiod’s Works and Days) and b) last month’s E(i)ditorial shared some great crowd-sourced writing advice, I’ve decided to use this column to pass on some friend-sourced wisdom on tackling the first year or two of a North American Classics graduate program.

(Everyone that I canvassed has already finished the PhD, but not everyone has decided to stay in Academia. Pretty much none of us followed every piece of advice on this list. All of us felt like we had made mistakes, and we’re pretty OK with that.)

So, first-year Classics grad student — let’s just call you Perses?— lay these things up in your heart:

Coursework

Coursework is different once you’re in graduate school. It’s not about getting through the assignments, and definitely not about just getting by. This is the subject that, out of all the possibilities in the whole wide world, you’ve decided to make your own for at least the next five years.

If you have to take classes in subjects you consider outside of your interests, remember: you should be interested in, or at least open to, everything — every Greek or Latin author, every classical theme and topic — at this point. Maybe you came to grad school not knowing what “numismatics” is, but maybe you’re also a secret genius at it! If a class is in one of your core areas of interest and is moving too slowly for you, take the initiative to read more on your own. If you’re interested in a text or topic that’s not being taught this semester, pursue it on your own time. Coursework is an anchor in the discipline and your department, but now is also the time to start striking out a little on your own. And you don’t need an independent study registration to legitimize it.

When I was taking courses in grad school I made two big mistakes. First, I sometimes left seminar papers to the last week of the semester. Here’s what you should do instead: get an idea brewing in the first few weeks and develop it in consultation with your professor (visit office hours!) well in advance of the deadline. Seminar papers should be first passes at writing and ideas that you’ll eventually publish, or at least (even more importantly) be proud of — not the product of bleary, coffee- (or otherwise-) fueled all-nighters.

I also wish I had never taken an Incomplete, and had been generally better about respecting deadlines. I still have an outstanding Incomplete on an Oresteia seminar I took in my first year of grad school, and it bothers me to this day. One day, I’ve promised myself, I’ll write a paper on the topic and sheepishly send it off to the professor.

I am, however, glad that I took a seminar outside of Classics. I took an Italian palaeography class in my second year of grad school and it was the highlight of my week that semester. Friends I informally surveyed also took courses in Comparative Literature (a practical course on translation) and Theater and Performance Studies (the graduate proseminar). Taking courses outside of Classics has two added benefits: first, you get to meet people from outside of your department who still share some of your academic interests; second, it makes you look interdisciplinary. Or even better, it makes you be interdisciplinary.

“Extra-curriculars”

As if coursework weren’t enough, there’s a lot that to be doing outside of class. But if you feel like you’re drowning in work as it is, don’t worry — everyone else is too, and if they’re not then they’re doing it wrong. Guilt is the name of the game in academia, because we tend to feel guilty pretty constantly about everything we don’t know and don’t do (as time passes you learn to manage that guilt a little better). The following pieces of advice are just meant to stress that there are many things worth spending time on besides your straight-down-the-line Classics classes.

It is important to read Latin and Greek, as much as you can, with friends and fellow grad students. Do it on Friday evenings over dinner or after dinner or both. Read together on Sunday afternoons in coffee shops. Don’t be afraid to divert from your department’s reading lists. One of my fondest memories from grad school is of reading Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia (a work written, ironically, in Latin) over Sunday brunches with another student, who now just happens to be my closest colleague and collaborator at Brown.

But about those departmental reading lists: make sure to read everything on them. Reading lists are designed carefully, and to be a conversant classicist you really should know those texts. And if you read everything, nothing on a translation exam will catch you off guard. Study so hard for your translation exams that there’s absolutely no way you won’t pass. Simone Biles trains six days a week for a total of 32 hours. Reading Greek and Latin is much easier than what she does (let’s be serious), and if you, too, trained 32 hours a week you’d also be unstoppable.

When you’re exhausted from reading Greek and Latin, a change can be as good as rest. Finish your workday by going to lectures, and not just in your department. Go to fancy university-wide ones. Go to small workshops and works-in-progress seminars in other departments. Notice not just what speakers say, but how they say it — and learn from those observations. I once skipped a Serious Seminar in Cambridge to go to a Judith Butler lecture, in part because I was interested and in part so that I could say for the rest of my life that I’d heard Judith Butler speak. Even bad lectures are a good learning experience, but avoid the cubed cheese at the receptions afterward.

These first years of grad school are also the time to get in the habit of writing. Write, realistically speaking, three to five days a week. Learn to see writing as a process and as something you do for yourself, rather than something you do for deadlines and grades. One friend suggests writing “especially in non-academic registers (satire! fiction! food blogging!).” Writing is like exercise: you can be in and out of shape, and it’s best just to stay in it. The same friend recommends 750 Words, a place where you can build writing muscle (750 words a day will be about right as a goal when you do get to the dissertation).

In an ideal world, all classicists would also take the time to learn to speak a modern language. Not just to “get by” in it, but to be able to talk in it — to communicate with other people about your work, current events, and your real complex human feelings. A lot of classicists come to grad school having focused so hard on Greek and Latin that they can’t even pronounce, let alone speak, a modern language. By taking modern language courses you’ll also learn from your teachers about language pedagogy, which is not always the classicist’s strong suit.

Dealing with faculty

During the first years of grad school it can be difficult to negotiate your new double role. You’re a student, but you’re also a colleague — both to faculty and to your fellow students. I love it when I can write recommendations where I can honestly gush that I’ve always seen the person I’m recommending as more of a colleague than a student. Be generally punctual, polite, and interested. When faculty give you extensive writing feedback, thank them and respond (as Mary Beard has noted, “thank you goes a long way”).

Even though you’re a colleague now, you do need to be proactive about speaking with faculty members. As one friend wrote, “Most faculty care about your progress, but they are busy and cannot always seek you out to praise your successes or alert you to problems…” Office hours aren’t just for undergraduates. Stop by and say hello, re-introduce yourself, ask faculty about what they’re working on (a question I, at least, am asked very rarely), and tell them what’s got you most interested about the field these days.

One piece of advice I have is a risky one, and should be taken with a grain of salt: seek out mentorship, but don’t be afraid to do something that one of your advisers thinks is a bad idea. Not something she rightly worries will be downright destructive, but something she fears might detract or distract from your “serious” work. Give a paper at a conference in Slovenia that you’re invited to last minute (true story). Spend a summer working with a midwife (a friend’s true story). Help organize the new grad student union. Train for a marathon — and generally, make time for exercise. Write for Eidolon! Do that extra thing and get your serious work done (on time), and your adviser will be all the more impressed — and might even mention it in a letter if you apply to academic jobs down the road.

More generally

It’s important to develop your sense of self as a community member. Do your best to check any instincts you might have to indulge in Hesiod’s bad eris. Develop a circle of fellow grad students who are both trusted friends and respected colleagues. Read each other’s work. Give your seminar papers to each other for comments and feedback (and even proofreading) well in advance of deadlines — that’s what most academics do before they send their work off to less sympathetic referees! Friends I made in grad school are now my most trusted, honest, and constructive critics. Sometimes they don’t love my writing or my arguments, but at least I know they love me — and that’s generally not the case with anonymous reviewers.

You should also learn to be OK about not knowing things, and honest about what you don’t know. The deeper you dive into the subject the more you’ll realize how wide its ocean is. Get comfortable with that idea now.

Start to look at this discipline with a critical eye. Classicists often spend so much time evangelizing about their subject that they fall back into old and dangerous clichés about the superiority of the field, its texts and its status. Question why classicists do things the way they do, and try not to get defensive when other people wonder. Reflect on why Classics enjoys such a disproportionately privileged position in the Academy even today. Be critical of the history of scholarship and its intersections with racism, bigotry, and colonialism. Ideas and fantasies about Greco-Roman antiquity have been used to justify pretty terrible things. Be able to explain to yourself, and eventually to others, why despite all that baggage this is the field you’ve chosen.

And finally…

In grad school I wish I’d known that there isn’t just one way of being a scholar. We all need role models, but too often we measure ourselves by an imaginary standard keyed to some Platonic form of a classicist. The best classicists I know are all incredibly unique, as people and as scholars, thinkers, and writers. So if you do decide to become an academic, give yourself permission to be the kind of academic you want to be.

But seriously, Perses: read everything on those reading lists!

This article is part of a bimonthly column, Disciplinary Action, in which Johanna Hanink will address the politics of the Classics field.

Johanna Hanink is Associate Professor of Classics at Brown University. Her new book The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity is due out with Harvard University Press in late April (it began life as this Eidolon article). If you’re interested in applying to grad school in Classics at Brown (or just generally!) feel free to get in touch with her.

Special thanks to Yung In Chae, Vale Cofer-Shabica, Athena Kirk, Tara Mulder, Rachel Philbrick, Anna Uhlig, and Donna Zuckerberg.

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