Twelve weeks of SIU’s seemingly interminable fifteen-week semester have thankfully elapsed. In another week, we will finally have our “Fall Break” for the entire week of Thanksgiving and then it’s only two short weeks after that until Finals. It is, thus, probably a good time to take some stock of my almost-completed first semester as a tenure-track assistant prof.

On most fronts, things seems to be going quite well, if a little differently from what I expected. Last spring, when I was still back in New York and had just accepted SIU’s job offer, I imagined that I would be swamped with teaching new students my entire first semester, if not first full year. I still have to teach History 101B - SIU’s 270-student giant world civ survey course - but teaching isn’t gobbing up nearly as much time as I thought it would be. Indeed, the majority of my week isn’t spent on teaching-related things at all, but research. Of course, this may all be different next year, when I will have three new course preps for the first time, but right now, teaching a 2-course load each semester is very manageable.

From all accounts, also, I am fitting in really well into my department. Initially, I had sensed a polite wariness among many of my colleagues, but I must have passed muster as I no longer sense this. Department meetings are still awkward affairs; senior colleagues tell me that I should give my imput on things but the meetings also seem rather scripted. Still, I am confident that I will successfully navigate how I should act in these settings over the course of the five and a half years I have left on the tenure-track. It seems obvious to me now that this is one of the reasons why you are on a tenure-track for so long; if graduate school trained you how to be a scholar, the tenure-track trains one how to be a professor.

What is shaping up to be the hardest thing for me to figure out is how soon should I start revising my dissertation. Senior colleagues (and even fellow junior colleagues still on the tenure-track) have advised me to slow down and not be so much in a hurry; “you’re in great shape” or “you have plenty of time” seem to be the two most common refrains I hear when I query colleagues on how they started revising their dissertations into books. Maybe I am in “great shape.” I have to keep reminding myself that my committee passed my dissertation with no revisions, which does not seem to be common in history at the GC where “passed with minor revisions” is far more commonplace. Sure, I have a lot of weeding to do. My book manuscript (I am trying to ban the word “dissertation” from my vocabulary right now!) will have to be shorter and my argument will have to be tighter. Yet, when I reread my dissertation last month for the first time since my doctoral defense, I was pretty happy with the overall chapter organization. So, maybe I am in “great shape” after all.

But, on this Veteran’s Day, as I work in my office yet another weekend, it doesn’t feel like it. Although I have accumulated over 5,000 pages of research notes and collated them in various binders since the dissertation, somehow I feel that this isn’t enough. One would think I should go through these binders now and call it a day and start writing the book. Indeed, a month ago when I bit the bullet and read my dissertation, I planned on doing this by the end of the semester so that I can start writing the book in January. Now, though, parts of me are not ready for the closure that this would entail. In classic neurotic academic procrastination mode last week, I gave my research assistant an eleven-page list of books/articles to look up on WorldCat for me!

Thus, I am confused when my colleagues all say that I’m in “great shape,” or that I’m committing a classic professorial mistake in worrying about the book my first year. How can I not worry about the book when it will make or break me come tenure-time? When I don’t have a book contract yet or even much more than a preliminary idea of who I might want to publish with? When I haven’t yet written a word of my book yet? Am I just being overly neurotic? Perhaps I should just stop worrying and listen to the colleagues who hired me.

Almost a month ago, I complained in a blog post about my shy but otherwise seemingly bright students at SIU. Since it’s been a relatively quiet week with very little in the way of interesting developments - unless you count exam grading, which has bogged me down from Friday to earlier today - let me return to the issue of my 400-level course.

As you will recall, at the beginning of this month I was facing a disconnect between a class that was by and large clearly capable of doing some hard work - as measured by my literature review assignment and my take-home midterm exam - but not consistent in class participation. Some days they would participate; other days, I would only get the usual three or four suspects - two of whom are graduate students who naturally you would expect to participate. Frustrated by this, I did two things which seem to have started to pay off. First, I yelled at them, letting them know in no uncertain terms that I was displeased and would have no problem giving a lot of them Bs or Cs if continued to slack off in class. Secondly, upon the advice of a senior colleague, I started giving them weekly pop quizzes.

Now, I have a hard time in my head not seeing a pop quiz as punishment. Yet, in the four quizzes I’ve given in the past month or so, which I grade on a “check +/-” scale, most of my students are earning a “check +,” and if not this, at least a “check.” Only one student has earned a “check -” so far, and he sat looking at me for much of the time of the quiz that day, clearly indicating that he hadn’t done the reading.

Okay, so at least one major myth of mine has been dispelled. The pop quizzes can’t possibly be punishment if nearly all the students are getting at least a check, and perhaps 70% are getting a check +. But what has also happened in my classroom once I started giving routine quizzes has surprised me.

At least three or four of my shy students will now participate on quiz day. I guess this makes some sense; I’ve given them ten minutes or so in the quiz to formulate their thoughts about the central theme of the day. But a few of the students, once having participated on quiz day, have begun to participate on non-quiz days, too.

The past two weeks, especially, have been a night and day contrast with prior weeks of the semester. Last week we did propaganda and imperialism, with imperialist music on Wednesday and imperial advertisements on Friday of last week. These discussions went pretty well bringing in a good half of the room in the discussion. On Monday, I got even better discussion about photographs and imperialism.

Now, granted, there are still some holdouts. Some students are still not willing to talk in class, no matter how much carrots or sticks I use to try to entice them into doing so. And, there are only about 15 students who consistently come to class now, down from 35 at the beginning of the semester. But what is encouraging to me as a teacher at a totally new school is that an occasionally yelling or two at students, along with some nudging, does work, which probably goes to show that I don’t have all that bad students to begin with.

I’m not entirely out of the woods - I still have four more weeks left in the semester here at SIU - and topics which won’t be nearly as inviting to class discusison as music, advertising, or photographs. Still, all of a sudden, I’m more optimistic about this class and other ones I will have in the semesters ahead.

Back in early September, I wrote my original article – “On the Other Side of the Table Now” – on the strangeness of no longer being a graduate student and of having to immediately assume the role of a professor. Since then, I have found that adjusting to being a professor in several respects has been easier than I assumed it would be. Instead of dragging, my first semester here at SIU is simply flying: tomorrow will be the beginning of Week 10 and in a little over a month from now, the semester will be over! I’m getting a good amount of research done, which I assumed I wouldn’t have much time to do this semester. My dissertation’s again on the back burner as I think about some more what kind of revision I want to do to it, whether to just remove from it the dissertationese but otherwise polish it up and submit to the publishers, or whether a more extensive revision process is necessary. Still, I’m on track to begin work on the book next semester. If you asked me last summer whether I would be able to work on my book during my first year as a tenure-track assistant prof, I would have said you were crazy!

Still one thing hasn’t changed much, which is the awkwardness of dealing with graduate students, coming straight out of graduate school. Perhaps the most awkward relations are occurring right now with my three TAs, whom I will be working with in the spring semester when I teach the world history survey course, known as History 101B, which our department does as part of SIU’s rather extensive core curriculum.

History 101B is a weird animal. Despite the fact that SIU has 21,000 students, most of the courses we teach in the history department are less than 35 students. History 101B, however, has an enrollment of 270. Luckily, I will have three teaching assistants working with me in the spring and I won’t have to do any of the grading, only lecture twice a week. Still, I have more headaches already from this course than any others!

First, came all the book publisher representatives with their snazzy laptop demonstrations. Not only did they just waltz into my office during office hours, sometimes barging in before I could say that I was busy; some of them even stalked me out in the hallway when I went out to fill my water jug. Since neither of the two CUNY campuses I taught at had large lecture halls, it didn’t occur to me for a while why everyone was bothering me. Then it hit me: 270 students is a lot of business! But I deftly handled this problem by deferring to my TAs on which lousy source reader we chose over the other lousy ones, since they have to live with whatever we end up using. Luckily, two of the three TAs agreed on the same book, and the third was okay with using it, so that worked itself out. Likewise, we came to an agreement about how many exams, papers, etc. to have in the course.

More troublesome has been my inclination to also defer to the graduate assistants which primary source documents they have the students read in section. Since I never taught World History in my life – let alone a course larger than 40 students at a time – I do not feel that it is ethically right for me to impose an agenda on the TAs, each of whom has prior experience TAing for this course and, therefore, knows far more about it than I do. Furthermore, I never was a TA myself in graduate school. Up to now, I always thought of my GTF experience of being an actual instructor as far superior to the normal TA experience; indeed I still think it gave me a great advantage on the job market and may even have landed me my job. Now, though, I can see that there was one disadvantage to having taught only my own courses in graduate school: I don’t have any experience on the professor-TA relationship.

Now, two of my three TAs are perfectly fine with deciding which sources they use in their sections. Perhaps it helps that these two individuals are older than me and are non-traditional graduate students in terms of age. The third TA I’m working with, though, wants much more coordination on my part of the readings. Since I never taught World History before in my life, I would feel like a fraud if I did this, so I have refused to do this unilaterally. I’m willing to have a meeting to discuss this and perhaps come up with a joint list of sources. I’m not willing to tell them what they have to do. Maybe I will be in five or ten years from now, after a few semesters of this course under my belt and some more confidence about being a professor than I currently possess. It will also help when my graduate school years become further distant in memory than they are at present.

But until this happens, do I just have to pretend that I know how to teach World History? I’m starting to dread that I might just have to and that next semester – when I am thinking of starting my book – will be more rocky than I had hoped.

In my blog entry two weeks ago, I wrote about my one-year anniversary of the doctoral defense.  At that time, I was still stuck in mid-semester grading hell so I couldn’t do much but write about my fears of the big brown thing, otherwise known as my dissertation.  However, something big happened since then: I finally mustered up enough courage to read the dissertation again.  A whole weekend, two liters of mountain dew and two-thirds of a yellow pad later, I’m happy to report that it wasn’t as bad as I feared.

First, despite my fears of two weeks ago, I was actually able to read what I wrote dispassionately.  Indeed, while I remembered the broad themes I wrote about, I actually didn’t remember always why I had written something in a certain way.  Revisions will undoubtedly be hell, but at least I won’t be beholden to the prose if I can’t remember why I wrote it that way.  At least that’s the theory!

 Speaking of prose, though, this was the part which made me cringe the most a year later.  Too often, I write way too much like a graduate student with Germanic, multi-clausal clunkers instead of crisp, authoritative, and clear sentences.  More and more lately as I read, I’ve been doing more than gutting the article or book for its argument(s).  I’ve also been paying close attention to how scholars write.  One thing I’m definitely noticing is that most scholars - except for some notable guilty offenders like Gayatri Spivak or Dipesh Chakrabarty - actually write simply even when they have important and complicated things to say.  They don’t overuse the the semi-colon or the hyphen.  Nor do they write multi-clausal six-liners all that often, like I found several times in my dissertation.  My advisor once told me that my prose “sometimes collapses under its own weight.”  After just reading the first paragraph of my dissertation, with two complex, multi-clausal sentences right after one another, I know know what he means! 

Okay, but this can easily be changed when I begin revisions, right?  Well, not unless I undo the other big problem I found with the dissertation: the use of way too much evidence.  Now, you might wonder, why is this a problem?  After all, evidence (or data) is what we do as academics.   It’s what separates us from all those amateur pontificators out there (or the b.s. artists in our classes, otherwise known as my B students). 

 Except in my case, I often relied on my direct quotes to push the argument forward.  Clearly, I was making arguments and a lot of them.  I wouldn’t have been given a Ph.D. if I hadn’t been.  But, one reason why my tome is over 400 pages when one counts the appendices and bibliography is precisely because I have way too much block quotes and superfluous examples.  In effect, I hide behind my evidence.  Not good.

 So, what did I like?  Well, despite my rookie mistakes as a professional academic writer - and that’s what we’re all training to become - there’s a really interesting book buried in there.  Indeed, you don’t even have to dig all that far to find it.  I’m debating whether I ought to go with the argument that stands and refine it or to refocus it somewhat, but the chapter structure will probably stay roughly the same.  At the very least, it appears, I structured my dissertation like a book, even if the writing isn’t quite there yet.

But that raises a question which I will just raise in closing.  Why not have us - at least those of us in the humanities and many of the social sciences who have to write a book just to get tenure - skip a whole series of steps and write one for the degree?  Clearly, my overciting of evidence can be blamed, in large part, on the fact that I had to get my thesis past my advisor and my committee!   How many of us feel as graduate students that we have to cite the great Foucault or the great Said - even if to criticize them for missing something, however small?  (One of my biggest cringe moments was noticing how I spent an entire digression of close to three pages explaining why Nicholas Dirks and Bernard Cohn were wrong about Indian gift-giving!).  Well, don’t!  You will only take the citations out when you write your book.  Nobody wants to read you carp about how another scholar has missed something which is so elemental to you; they want to read you, to hear what you have to say.  That was the big epiphany that occurred to me as I was reading the big brown thing last week.  I don’t have to show in dense footnotes that I’ve read every last book on the subject.  They distract from what I’m trying to say.

I still have a while to go before I embark on the next stage, which is actually to write the book.  Depending on how soon I finish adjusting to my new job, finish the current research project that I’m doing, and, most important, muster the courage to just start writing again, it may be as early as this coming spring.  Or, maybe not.  A lot of my colleagues are telling me to relax, saying that I have plenty of time to get the book out before tenure.  And, if I do decide to do a more substantive revision to the argument of the eventual book, I may want to spend more time thinking about it before starting the book. 

 Either way, one thing is sure.  When I actually start writing, it will be with a blank piece of paper.  While the dissertation shows promise of a book, it’s too much of a piece of student writing to be edited into a book.  I still got a long way to go, but at least now I have some ideas about what I need to do.  Suddenly, my anxieties about getting tenure in six years are lessened!  

One of the biggest cultural shocks I have encountered since moving to rural Illinois in early August has been my students. Essentially, they’re not nearly as outspoken (good) or brash (bad) as some of the students I had at Queensborough, Lehman, the New School, or Manhattan College. Now to be fair: some of my Chicago students are not afraid to talk in class.  Considering how big Chicago and its suburbs are, relatively speaking, to the rest of Illinois, I’d say that probably close to half of campus comes from just Cook County alone, earning Carbondale the nickname of “Little Chicago” by many locals.  One would only have to look around my classrooms lately and notice the considerable number of Cubs or Bears hats and t-shirts worn by my students to recognize that there’s something to this.

But to get back to the theme of today’s blog post, even my Chicago kids don’t participate all that much in class.  Even if they did, that still leaves the roughly half of my students who come from small towns throughout the rest of my huge new state.

It being the end of Week 7 already at SIU, I’ve just spent the past two weeks grading the first paper assignments and the first exams of both of my classes.  I can happily report that very few of my students are getting anything other than an A or a B.  And this is after I ratcheted up my standards, particularly in my 400-level course on culture and the British Empire. My first writing assignment in that class was to write a literature review of three scholarly articles that my students read on race, class, and gender.  My take-home midterm essay question was to take a theory of “culture” they learned in class at the beginning of the semester - whether by Clifford Geertz, Edward Said, Nicholas Dirks, or Stuart Hall - and connect it to scholarly articles about race, class, gender, and sexuality in the British Empire. Neither of these were easy tasks by any means and, indeed, I worried a bit about what kinds of papers I would receive back after I distributed both assignments in class. Yet, very few of my students got below a B on either one of these assignments. Indeed, for the first time ever in my teaching career, more students have received As on both of these assignments than Bs or Cs combined.

So, what gives? Clearly, it seems that the SIU students taking my 400-level course are really capable, the type you will find at any good “public ivy” such as SUNY-Binghamton, my alma-mater, or three hours up the road at Urbana-Champaign. I’m throwing tough things at them and certainly not making it easy to get an A.  And, yet, my students dutifully read much of what I throw at them and show up to class. (I’ve lost about 10 people from a class initially of 35 students, but only about ten!) Judging from both of my tough assignments so far, the students who remain seem by and large to understand this material and “get” it.

But, why aren’t they talking in class so much, when they clearly understand the challenging course material? When class participation is worth roughly 30% of their course grade? When I go around the room and randomly call on people so that I don’t hear the same five students all the time?  Why am I not getting a lot more people talking when I warn all the students getting A-s (which might well be a majority of the class right now) that I have no problems giving them all Bs (SIU doesn’t have plus or minus grades) at the end of the semester if they continue to not participate?

Am I engaging in a kind of cultural imperialism myself, being a lifelong New Yorker up to this past summer, and expecting similar outspokenness among my Midwestern students?  After all, brashness is practically the city’s and the state’s middle name!  Is this just an expectation that I will have to ditch, like my mile-a-minute speaking speed or my attempts to find good bagels or pizza in Carbondale?  Is it, rather, that my students, not coming from privileged backgrounds, are not always consciously aware that they are bright and that they might have something to say? There’s a lot of homogeneity on campus; wearing something Saluki [”sal-ooo-key”] maroon and white to class seems to be the default setting, especially as our football team is 6-0 and college basketball is due to start up next month with many of the same players that went all the way to Sweet 16 last year (including one of the A students in my class!).  Is it, therefore, just not “cool” to participate much in class, even if one actually spends a good deal of his/her time studying rather than partying? Perhaps, as Geertz would say, I still need to engage in more “thick description” to truly understand the behavior of my students? Stay tuned.

It’s hard for me to believe, but exactly a year ago today, I stepped inside the History Conference Room on the fifth floor of the GC a graduate student at noon and, exactly an hour and a half later at 1:30 p.m., stepped out of that room with a doctorate. Of course, soon thereafter came the typical debauchery involving copious amounts of beer over at the Astoria Biergarten. That brave day, when it seemed that I had conquered the entire world and finally completed that damn thing which had hovered over my life for the past four or five years, now seems like so long ago. Indeed, sometimes it seems like it happened to a different person than the individual writing this column right now.

As a cocky and diffident, but also insecure graduate student last fall, worried about being stranded for years on the job market, I promised in all eighty of my job letters that I would be sending off my book proposal with full speed ahead. Indeed, if it weren’t for heavy pressure from my advisor and some of my other professors, I probably would have started revisions right away last fall. Instead, in my last act as a student, I listened to my professors and held off.

After surviving the brief post-dissertation depression, which everyone told me is normal (but, again, did not warn me about prior to it occurring), I banned myself from looking at my dissertation until it came bounded in the mail - which, as it would turn out, would not be until mid-April. Aside from briefly peeking at it last winter to write my job talk, I honored the embargo.

But, when the dissertation finally came in the mail last April, I cringed. I still wasn’t ready to deal with it. So, not knowing what else to do, but hopeful that if I procrastinated a little bit, somehow the answer would come to me, I extended the embargo until the one-year anniversary of my defense. This brings us to today, September 29, 2007.

It took me a while, but I’m finally setled into my office at school and have all my books organized on their appropriate bookshelves. As I sit here typing this article right now - taking a break from grading midterms - I only have to glance over to the left middle bookcase and look down to the fourth row and there it is. I know that I can’t keep running away from dealing with it, especially if I want to continue having an academic job after six years from now, but on the one-year anniversary of my doctoral defense, I feel only intimidated and afraid. I know that I will have to deal with it sooner or later, and after a brief nervous breakdown a few weeks back, I have talked myself into believing that I have a game plan for doing this. If you pressed me, I could come up with a whole litany of revision ideas, ranging from changing the prose (dissertationese sucks!) and getting rid of all my extensive quotes (again dissertations suck!) to changing the focus from East India Company-period India (the dissertation) into a broader case study of early European and British colonialism (probably where my book is headed). I still haven’t figured out how religion (a topic absent from my dissertation but which my entire committee felt absolutely needed to be included into the book) fits in my research, but I probably won’t until I actually write the damn thing!

All of this might sound like I’m ready, and perhaps I am, but there nevertheless exists a big lingering doubt in my head that I won’t know how to revise the dissertation when I sit down and actually start trying to write the book. Oddly enough, despite the fact that I now cringe whenever I think about my dissertation and the fact that I can rattle off a whole list of what’s wrong with it, I’m secretly afraid that when it comes down to it, I won’t want to change a single word. But I suppose until I get over my fear of looking that thing in the eye and realizing it for what it is - a good first draft of a book but also at the same time my last piece of student writing (albeit 449 pages long if you count appendices and the bibliography!) aimed at pleasing a committee - I suppose I will continue to ask myself, “Now what?”

Ah, yes. It’s that time in the semester - Week 6 here at SIU already - when a department meeting takes place. A memo gets circulated via email; several of your colleagues button-hole you for your vote in advance; and then the meeting occurs which breaks up the flow of the day. It wouldn’t be academia without fireworks, especially over small beer, such as whether a department has to elect a new chair who will be on sabbatical next year to a full three-year term or whether we can elect an interim chair next year and then start the full three-year term the following year. And in the end, after palms are slammed on the table and it seems there might well be the airing of accusations and recriminations for the next hour or so to come about various colleagues being supposedly groomed to be chair for years to come, my department soon comes to its collective senses and votes unanimously on how we ought to proceed. Don’t you just love academia!

Again, like almost all of my experiences as a new tenure-track assistant professor this semester, this was something which graduate school did not really prepare me for. Granted, I did more than my share of service as a graduate student on departmental committees. Indeed, with the multiple years I racked up serving stints on the Speakers, Curriculum, Faculty Membership, and Executive Committees of the Ph.D. Program in History at the GC as well as a two-year term on Grad Council, I had way more than my fair share of experience of this nature. And perhaps, compared to newly starting out professors in my position without any experience like this, this is true. But it was the experience of a spectator, not of an active participant in the decision-making process; you were clearly a junior, associate member of the meeting, and when it came down to actually voting on something or not that was actually important, you were asked to leave the room. (As this happened today to the two graduate student representatives and the non-tenure track lecturer in the department, it made my situation suddenly feel strange. I suddenly was no longer being asked to leave the room.)

Indeed, probably about the most meaningful decision I made as a graduate student, looking back, was deciding as a member of the Executive Committee whether to order pizza or sandwiches for the end-of-semester party. (I should clarify here that this is not meant in any way as a criticism of my former Ph.D. program.) It’s just that now in retrospect the kind of experience doesn’t exactly strike me as having been entirely useful in suddenly knowing how to be full-fledged member of a department.

So, like my first column where I discussed the weirdness of being suddenly thrust into a professorial role vis-a-vis graduate students without any knowledge exactly of how one is supposed to go about that role, similarly I’m finding that I have to act the part of a full member of my department, even though I don’t have tenure and don’t really have prior graduate student experience in doing this. Luckily, today’s meeting was relatively short and there was clear unanimity on all the big questions, so I was able to largely follow my instinct and stay silent and just observe. I know there will come a time, though, when I will have to voice my opinion on something or another. I’m starting to doubt whether the lesson I learned in grad school - become as inoffensive as possible if not blend into the wallpaper - is actually all that useful now.

Since moving to Carbondale in early August, I would have to say that most of my major life adjustments so far have been professionally-related. Granted, there are a lot of personal adjustments I’m making right now, too. Until this past summer, I had been a life-long New Yorker so suddenly living in the rural Midwest is a bit different than what I had been used to (although I did grow up in the Hudson Valley so having lots of trees around me again is a good thing!). After years of being a night-owl or a modified night-owl back East, I’m finding that I can’t sleep past 7:30 most days, even weekends. And, after living for years in the outer suburbia of New York City or in the city itself where traffic is always a problem, it feels really strange to be able to get to campus in five minutes and to the other side of town in no more than ten.

The biggest adjustments I’ve had to make so far, though, have all occurred on the professional level and basically can be boiled down to one thing: I am no longer a graduate student. I have rapidly become aware of this crucial fact in several ways. First, I now get memos and a lot of them. There have been numerous rounds of orientations for new tenure-track hires, some helpful, many not, but all together much more time consuming than anything I’ve ever endured as a graduate student holding both a Teaching and a CUNY Writing Fellowship. But perhaps the biggest adjustments I find myself making so far are at the department level, and particularly, in my interactions with SIU graduate students, so let me devote most of my first column to this.

First some background: my department had both its Modern Britain and its British Empire historians leave within the last five years, and, as a result of the zero-sum game of academia and the absolutely essential need to expand our offerings in Native American, African-American, African, Cuban, and Middle Eastern history, where the last five hires prior to me have been, I am basically the replacement for both professors. (Due to recent Illinois public higher education cuts – from a Democratic governor no less – I suspect that there may not be many new hires for some time to come, and they most certainly won’t be in British history if or when they ever come). In addition, our Modern Irish Studies person, whom we shared with the English department, is retiring this year and dumping his history students on me.

So, right off the bat I have one Ph.D. student at dissertation stage, three others wanting to do British or Irish history who are still taking courses, and a fifth doing Modern Germany who, nevertheless, wants me to do a field in British history with him on his orals next fall. Thus, without any time under my belt as a new faculty member in a new school with a Ph.D. program which I’m finding is structured somewhat differently from CUNY’s, I have had suddenly to come up with orals readings lists as well as advise my furthest-along student about his dissertation proposal. And, if this weren’t surreal enough, I also have a graduate research assistant with whom to work this year. As I haven’t yet been able to open my dissertation without cringing and will not be ready to begin writing until, at the earliest, next spring, I basically feel at a loss of how best to utilize his help at this point.

As you can probably imagine, I feel like saying: "Wait a minute! I just got my Ph.D. I don’t know the faintest thing about advising other graduate students: I was one myself not that long ago." Instead, what I find myself saying is this: "We will expect you on your orals to be able to demonstrate that you understand the major historiographical interpretations of British and Modern European history," or, in the case of my student who is writing his dissertation proposal, "I think you should be thinking about how you could make your project (which is about eighteenth-century Catholic upper-class families in Ireland and whether or not there were Catholic and/or Irish mindsets that early) as much a project that touches on British history as Irish as you’ll have a better time on the job market." But since when did I become one of "them?" Part of the "we?"

However this process occurred and however much at times I might want to run away from it right now, the truth of the matter is that I am one of them now, even if wearing that mantle feels awfully pretentious to me at the moment.

And that, above all else, is the hardest adjustment I find myself making right now as a new tenure-track professor straight out of graduate school. I wish someone had told me about all this, but I guess, just like being a new parent, there are no "rough guides" on how to be a new tenure-track professor at a research institution with a Ph.D. program.

I imagine that now with the college football season upon us and soon the all-important men’s college basketball one – go Salukis! – I will be blogging in future columns about adjusting to life in a small college town with a serious athletic program. And I will be discussing the differences I am noticing between SIU and CUNY students. In the meantime, please feel free to send any comments or questions you might have to sramek@siu.edu.