Sally's Two Cents about ENL 200 and Life ...

This is what I’ve learned this quarter:

1.     The people who surround you make or break any experience in life. Making the decision to begin a PhD program at this point in my life—and to come to UCD for this endeavor—was not difficult. It was the realization of a personal dream that has become a passion. Many of my friends have not lived long enough to discover, let alone pursue, their passions. Always, I remember those friends with love. And I am grateful every day to be living my passion. I am also grateful to have been welcomed into this cohort and into this university by people who understand and support passion—such people are a gift that I appreciate more now than ever. I shall always remember what Cassie said early on, that UCD was the only graduate program she explored where the graduate students “looked happy.”  I think she is right.

2.     You can go home.  I started my academic career at UCD so long ago that the ‘new’ dorm complex that I called home has since grown old and is now being replaced with new housing. I was not a happy camper during the two years I spent here and eagerly anticipated transferring to UCLA to complete my education. However, Life deemed it necessary that I consider UCD once again if I hoped to complete a PhD. Life was right. There could not be a better place for me than this campus and this program at this point in my life. UCD has changed and I have changed. Time has a way of making that happen. I am very happy here.

3.     Serendipity, synchronicity, and coincidence in all things. These might be the new buzz words for the new millennium but I embrace them and hold on to them for dear life because they got me here and I’m sure they’ll get me to wherever I need to be in the future.

4.     I don’t understand the hype about the literary quality of Pale Horse, Pale Rider any more now than I did when I first read the text. But that’s probably more about me than about the work. It’s a fine novella (or short novel, as Porter would admonish me to call it), and it certainly gives us the only first-person glimpse into the devastating neurological assault the 1918 flu virus visited on its victims. For me, however, it still lacks a story cohesive enough to draw a casual reader into the text—but perhaps that’s how it was deliberately designed, again to show the brain-scrambling left in the wake of that influenza. No matter. I took up the book because of my interest in all things pandemic, it served as the basis for a fine presentation for a Science and Lit class (if I do say so myself,) and I devised my (obviously successful) writing sample for grad school apps on the information Porter provided. So I’ll always keep this ‘short novel’ and think warm thoughts about it whenever I spy it on my bookshelf.

5.     I’m still trying to understand why some (most?) academic writers convolute and contrive the wording they use to describe their research.  I understand that academics are writing for an academic audience when they publish but I regret that so much wonderful knowledge will never filter down to even a highly educated group of readers because the works are so heavily laden with institutional and departmental jargon that discourages all but the most devoted (or masochistic) scholar from exploring such articles. When I helped a student in my current TA class revise a thesis statement so that it made sense, she exclaimed with horror “but that doesn’t look like college writing!” Well, yes it did. But the revision no longer contained any extraneous words that confused what she was trying to say. I guess our students learn from the academic sources that we assign that writing should difficult, even to the point of nonsensical. We must be careful what we teach…and what we write.

6.     Nevertheless, pouring over the articles for ENL 200 introduced me to many foundational works that have shown up already in other readings and classes and have enriched my understanding of our discipline.  More than that, they’ve given me historical focus in a direction that I hadn’t formally entertained before this course. Only two articles really excited me to the point of reading ahead: Smyth’s (not to be confused with Smith) “Shreds of holinesse”: George Herbert, Little Gidding, and Cutting Up Texts in Early Modern England” and Justice’s “Did the Middle Ages Believe in Their Miracles?” I’ve decided I must be a medievalist at heart. Who knew? Fortunately there is plenty of trauma, disease, and pandemic in Medieval Studies to feed my medically-oriented brain. But more than that, there is an otherworldliness of spirituality and mysticism that calls my soul. I probably lived there in former life (and died of plague) and I think I would like to live there again at least for the rest of graduate school.

7.     So, that’s all folks. It’s been a fun ride. I’ll really miss having a cohort class with all of you next quarter. My thanks to Desiree for allowing us to laugh and share and grow together as a group. As a cohort builder, this class--along with the great grad school-focused articles Desiree introduced us to early on--could not have been better designed; it was a wonderful way to begin graduate school.