Salted lemonades and watermelon-feta-crabmeat salads at The Provision Shop with our favourite Young Historian, who is enroute from Tokyo via the Old Country to Cambridge, where she intends to confront and badger advisors, the substance of which entreaties, I have been given to understand, is “Can you graduate me next Spring?” A bold move, I nod to myself, breaking a six-month Advisor-silence, much like poking a leopard, in this case a trio of leopards.Advisor-dread has long loosened its grip on me (I know, this from a woman who, senior-thesis year, once dived bodily under a table when Prof Milbank came into Alderman Cafe, while two amused and, more crucially, obliging graduate students shielded her) but the syndrome pervades the ABD ecosystem. On a current discussion thread I’m following, the Young Historian’s friends are confiding (in strickened or conspiratorial tones) that they also really need to go into the department but cannot brook the possibility of unanticipated run-ins (advisors ought not work unpredictable hours!) or how they clutch at every other email as happy straws, virtuously leaving those with names of faculty members to open last. Plus ca change.
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird