A note to IUS Students:

Hello English Enthusiasts:

For those of you who don’t know me yet, my name is Melanie Smith, and I am President of the English Club.  Our first meeting of the semester will be held on September 2nd from 12:15-1:00.  This will take place in the English Club office, which is located in the Student O, room 001L.  The Student O is in University Center in the hall between the game room and the coffee shop.  For new prospective members, this is a great opportunity to learn more about what we do and the events we are planning this year.  I hope to see all of you there!

Thank you,

Melanie Smith

Entry Form
(download as a pdf file here)

IU Southeast Writing Contest 2010

First Prize $50, Second Prize $25, Third Prize $10, Honorable Mention
Deadline for Submissions: September 15, 2010

Submit 2 copies of your entry clipped to this form to The Writing Center Room KV 208

Title of work: _______________________________________________

Category: Check one.

• ___ Poetry
• ___ Creative Nonfiction (essay)
• ___ Fiction
• ___ Research/Report
• ___ Flash Fiction (500 words or less)

IU Southeast Review Submission

• ___ Check here for your submission to also be submitted to the IU Southeast Review. The Review is a separate opportunity, and the Review staff will contact you for an electronic submission. If you do not check this box, your submission info will not be forwarded to The IU Southeast Review.

Personal Information:  Please print legibly

Name: ________________________________________________________________

Address (include zip): _______________________________________________________________

Phone:_____________________     E-mail: ______________________________

Alternate phone:______________ Alternate E-mail: ________________________

Submission Guidelines:

• Only entries following all submission guidelines will be eligible.
• A limit of two entries per category per student will be accepted.
• No submissions will be accepted by e-mail.
• Do not place your name anywhere on your manuscripts.
• Follow required format:  Title on first page, number pages, double space (poetry can be single spaced), indent paragraphs, use Times New Roman 12 pt. font.

A Gala Celebration to Honor the Winners Will be Held December 2, 2010

Questions? Contact Michael Jackman, Lecturer in Writing, Competition Coordinator, mijackma@ius.edu / 812-941-2397 or The Writing Center, KV 208, iuswrite@ius.edu

Proposals must reach the Office of Academic Affairs no later than Friday, September 3, 2010.

IU Southeast provides funding for Fellowships for Undergraduate Research or Creative Work. Four (4) fellowships of $1,000 each will be awarded each semester to allow students to carry out major independent projects under the supervision of a faculty mentor.Eligibility:  All IUS undergraduate students, regardless of discipline, number of hours completed or part-or full-time status, are eligible to apply.  Selection will be made on the basis of quality of proposal and letter of support from a faculty mentor who has agreed to supervise the project if funded.

Faculty Mentors: Full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty and full-time lecturers may serve as mentors. In special circumstances, a part-time or visiting faculty may serve as one mentor, but the student must have a second mentor from among the full-time resident faculty. Faculty mentors of the fellows selected will receive stipends of $500. In the case of two mentors, the stipend will be shared.

Application Procedure:  Applicants should submit a complete research proposal of no more than six (6) double-spaced, typed pages written with the educated lay reader in mind.  The proposal should include a title and the following elements clearly labeled:

1. Statement regarding the significance of the project; explain why it is important and what difference the results will make.
2. Statement of hypothesis, research question or creative objective in a form appropriate to the discipline in question.
3. Detailed statement of methods and plan of work, including a timetable.  Provide appropriate research risk documentation if relevant.
4. Statement of the applicant’s qualifications and training to carry out the project.
5. Name of faculty mentor.

Letter of Support:  Faculty mentors should address a confidential letter to the Dean for Research (c/o Academic Affairs) evaluating the project and the applicant’s ability to carry it out in a timely manner and indicating what role the mentor will play.

Budget:  A detailed budget IS NOT REQUIRED for the basic stipend of $1,000.

Additional support:  Fellows may apply for up to $500 for direct costs associated with their projects; a detailed budget IS REQUIRED for these funds.

Enrollment and Credit:  Applicants must be enrolled for the current semester. In consultation with faculty mentors and academic advisors, fellows may elect to enroll for and receive 1-3 credits for their projects.

NOTE: Awards are contingent on meeting all appropriate research compliance requirements, e.g. animal, biosafety, and human subject approval.

You are cordially invited

English Majors Picnic

WHERE:   IUS Shelter House down by the lake

(Hoosier West in case of rain)

WHEN:     Saturday, May 8, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

WHO:        English majors, alums, guests, children

Join us as we catch up with our alums and majors and congratulate our grads! We will have plenty of food and fun activities for the kids!

These rough remarks [now touched up some] are specifically composed for students who are interested in a career in teaching and scholarship in English Literature, Creative Writing, or Composition and Rhetoric, though other people will find them useful as well. I also have a Grad School FAQ on my faculty Web site, written for my students I hope will go to grad school despite what I’m about to tell you.

The last question of the FAQ reads: “What will grad school be like? What will I do there?” The answer is, “Listen, you’re stressed enough as it is. Let’s keep the subject to admissions.” You’ve heard about admissions. Here’s the answer to question #21:

If you’re intellectual, and unconventional, you probably don’t fit in well with the usual rat race of nine-to-five jobs. And if you’re intellectual and unconventional, there couldn’t be a more rewarding place to fit in than among similar people like you who are professors and graduate students at a University. That’s the up side. The down side is that all these unconventional people are all in the same place together, and that could make for some problems.

Of all the jobs I’ve had, teaching is up there as about the most rewarding.

My definition of a rewarding job is one where you get to do something that is personally meaningful, socially useful, and where you’re left alone. As a teacher, you’re largely left alone and trusted to pursue your own destiny, at least compared to most other professions.

I couldn’t have gotten this faculty job teaching writing without grad school – which was a rewarding experience, but not always.

A little about me. I’m a Lecturer in Writing here at IUS. I did a masters in creative writing and literature, and Ph.D. work in Rhetoric, Composition and Literature. I adored my masters program, and based on that I decided to go for a Ph.D. But I didn’t complete my dissertation – instead, I left graduate school, worked as an editor for the Courier-Journal’s first Web site, freelanced feature articles and technology articles for many magazines, worked as a part-time lecturer, a short-order cook, visited Nepal for 25 days, wrote for the radio for four years, worked for a dot com startup, edited a couple of online magazines on technology, and then through a fortunate confluence of many errors and coincidences found my way into teaching here at IUS. I love teaching at this place, and I love that my graduate work, even though I didn’t finish the Ph.D., has made it possible, thanks to the rise of lecturer faculty positions. Tenure track – need a Ph.D., Lecturer track –graduate school is required, the Ph.D. is nice to have, but optional.

So what is life like in grad school? How do you survive it?

Dr. Sam Earley has some advice she’d like me to pass on – keep your head down and don’t get involved in politics. Avoid controversy. Concentrate on your work. Remember that “this too shall pass.” And in six years or seven or eight years or so you’ll be done with your masters and your ph.D. and can get on with the next seven years of your life, if you get a job. That next seven years will be qualifying for tenure, so you can keep your job. What happens if you don’t get tenure, and many people don’t? After working at a University six years, you have to leave. That’s the end of your career there. You try for another job and start the tenure process all over again.

I wish I knew Sam Earley when I was in my Ph.D. program, although I’m not a person who is always able to avoid controversy or keep my head down. I am sometimes to controversy as flies are to flypaper. If you are like me, you will want to try to suppress that part of yourself…for about 14 years.

[Note: I’d like to insert some advice given by my colleague Dr. Angela Salas in response to the above advice because I absolutely agree. Paraphrased: don’t look for controversy, but if it comes your way, and it’s important, don’t avoid it either. Don’t give up who you are in order to “fit in.” If you do, you risking losing who you are. Or as Angela said, “Life happens today, not seven years from now, so don’t think you can put off being who you are for seven years.” Thank you Angela.]

There are many reasons to avoid graduate school. But there are many students I mentor who I think would make excellent professors and whom I’d like to see become professors and improve their lives. As a professor you get a middle class salary, good retirement and health benefits, perks like library privileges and research money, the chance to teach, mentor students, and do research in a field you love, and the opportunity to be around a wide cross section of smart and curious people. You will be able to express more or less what you want to say without fear of reprisal, once you have tenure. If you are not a fan of institutions, though in many ways the institution will annoy you, nevertheless, in many ways it will protect you. Once obtained, it’s a secure job – and that by itself means a lot.

As a graduate student, you get to live some of that life as well, but without the salary or benefits, and with a great deal of impossible work load and mental stress, with no security, and for many, piling up a great deal of debt.

In many ways grad school is the intellectual version of serving in the military – contact with many people, some sane, many crazy, some of whom you can depend on, and some who will screw with your head, long stretches of boredom followed by sudden intense dangerous action that can leave you with post traumatic stress disorder.

As an example of the benefits: as a diligent graduate student I gave many papers as conferences, together with faculty and fellow students, and solo. I enjoyed going to conferences all over the United States. For instance, Chicago; Charlotte, S.C.; Logan, Utah; Temple Univ. in Philadelphia; Lehigh, Penn. My inner and outer world expanded and I met many professors and grad students.

An example of long stretches of boredom: I could not recline while preparing the enormous amount of scholarly readings for class. If I did, I would fall asleep and risk not being prepared for class. You just wonder why some of these articles were published, though others are great.

An example of craziness: I was a very good graduate student who made very good grades…

Let me say something about grades, by the way – it’s kind of expected that you will earn all in the A range – Bs are not considered good grades in grad school. Cs are the equivalent of failure.

Back to craziness.

After you finish your two years or so of coursework, you take qualifying exams. Passing these exams moves you to the stage of being an official Ph.D. candidate. Sometimes the exams are oral defenses, sometimes written essays. Mine were written – six hours a day of essay writing for three days – each day two questions on one subject area. You prepare by studying…everything. You don’t know what the questions will be until they hand them to you that day. Good luck & God bless. If you’ve done your job for two years and then independently or in study groups worked like hell prior to these exams, they will be tough, but doable.

Craziness exerted itself in two ways.

Before your exams, you meet with the exam committee. Their job is to go over your preparation with you, to make sure the questions will be on an area you actually studied. For example, I had studied post-modernism, modernism, British and American fiction and poetry, feminist literature and theory, but wasn’t able to study much post-colonial literatures, or much of the Harlem Renaissance, because they hadn’t hired professors in those specialties until after I finished my coursework. It was important the exam committee knew those two subjects weren’t in my areas of competence.

What happened when I sat down to take the exam the second day? A required question that included the Harlem Renaissance and Post-colonial literatures. Luckily I had studied a lot on my own, and after I calmed down (I almost quit graduate school that day) was able to pull something together that passed, actually passed with flying colors. One grader remarked that he had learned something from me. I have no idea how it happened – I was just lucky to be inspired.

I confronted one of the professors on the exam committee, asking, “How could you do this to me?” His reply? “We were bored asking the same old questions, so we just decided to give you this one.”

By the way, I’m still friends with this professor today, and he helped me more than he hurt, for instance, he helped me to write one of the first papers on the poet Harryette Mullen, so it proves you have to just get over some of the weirdness.

These qualifying exams are graded by three faculty. Each examiner gives you a pass or a fail on each essay. Two fails means that essay fails. If you fail one of the three days you take that test over another semester. If you fail two days you take the entire qualifying exam over. No one wants to fail – it’s too exhausting to do it again.

I passed everything, but on one of my essays, I noticed one of my graders had flunked me. It was a very strong essay, and I couldn’t imagine why. That grader stopped me in the hallway a few weeks later. Looking for feedback, I asked why she had flunked me. She said there was nothing wrong with the essay. She was just in a bad mood that day and felt like flunking someone.

I am not still friends with this professor.

Sometimes you have to watch your peers, too. I have to say I was in a pool of pretty competitive Ph.D. students – it was like high school cliques, maybe more like gangs, out to get each other, only everyone was geeks and nerds. People would decide if you were worthy and could be in their clique, or if not, run you down behind your back, and make innuendos to the professors, some of whom loved to play this game, too. Or, if you were too worthy and too competitive, they might try a little academic sabotage so they could be on top. This doesn’t happen everywhere, and it didn’t happen to me (much) – but I saw it happen and it was ugly. It’s one place Sam Earley’s advice would be excellent – stay on an even keel, avoid controversy, keep your head down, don’t take sides…

There’s a saying that is variously attributed to Harry S. Truman or Woodrow Wilson: “Academic infighting is so vicious, because the stakes are so low.” But they are not low to the people involved. Sometimes people feel like they’re fighting for their lives.

What was life like while I was a grad student? I had a teaching assistantship, which meant I was paid $12,000 a year to teach two classes a semester. I had a step son to take care of, who was in high school, and my wife at the time was a secretary. I used student loans to make up the difference in our incomes. And I was intensely busy most of the time.

Even so, in the mornings during rush hour I used to walk down to the bus stop, sit on a bench, watch everyone driving to work, and laugh, because I had gotten out of the rat race. It was wonderful to be in school and paid to go there, and to spend all my free time not in classes or teaching studying, hanging out with grad students, writing conference papers, and watching the world slow down. No kidding – that’s a great thing if you don’t like conventional work – and I don’t.

On the other hand, it puts a strain on relationships. There’s the lack of money and time. You travel in a pack of other motivated, exciting, active and interesting young men and women without your special one around – there’s a lot of bonding and drinking to lubricate the stress so it goes down better – attractions and obsessions form, and that can lead to trouble. Sometimes faculty are involved.

Maybe more importantly – if your significant other is not intellectually minded there’s a sense that there’s an increasing gap between you – this can be a problem for some people. No one who is not in grad school could care less about the ideas you’re studying and find exciting. At gatherings or parties with faculty and grad students, they’re bored out of their minds or feel patronized. I know this strain affected a lot of people – so there’s this phenomenon of having your special person work to help support you through graduate school, and then you end up getting divorced. Again, doesn’t happen to everyone – but it does happen – basically, you’re living an intense life that’s separate from the normal structure of the world.

[I’d like to elaborate on one other great point that came out of the panel. Another participant mentioned one of the hardest things is keeping your self worth on an even keel. First of all, the work is hard and you start feeling incompetent (which is normal, as long as the feeling eventually goes away). Second, your ego takes a lot of bruising. You may have been near the top of your class when you got into grad school. But so what? So was everyone else. Finally, as I said, people screw with your head. And when you’re going through all this, you may not feel you can trust anyone to open up to.

One day I was so distraught over the effect of my grad school experience on me that I decided to walk over to the student counseling center and get some help right away. When I walked into the waiting room, guess what I saw: three other students in my Ph.D. program, also in line to get help. We just nodded at each other, and I immediately felt better, knowing I wasn’t the only one struggling with these doubts and feelings.]

When I was a Ph.D. student, Kim, one of my best friends in the master’s program behind me, and a talented artist, decided to become a Ph.D. student in Medieval Literature.

Kim is a medieval nerd. She was in the SCA – Society for Creative Anachronisms; she names all her cats “pywacket” – which means a witch’s familiar. She speaks fluent Anglo Saxon. She was perfect for the job.

I gave her a home made “graduate student survival kit.” If I remember right, it included aspirin, over the counter pills to help keep you awake, over the counter pills to help you sleep, a book on meditation, and some pills from another friend’s prescription for Prozac.

Kim has since left that Ph.D. program “ABD” – “all but dissertation” and completed a degree in library science, where it was a little bit less insane. I left the Ph.D. program “ABD” as well, but thanks to my hard work, teaching skills, and the rise of lecturer positions, I was able to snag this lovely job where I get to teach, use my training, and scare the pants off you about graduate school.

Some people love their graduate school experiences. You have the chance to make lifelong friends, live intensely, and be directed toward a career where you become one of a smallish group of people in the country who are in this unique profession. But it can be tough – a lot of work, and in some fields the competition for a job is extremely high. So I hope I didn’t scare you too much, and I am happy to answer questions.

This will, in all probability, be our last official meeting of the semester. There are a few more events to set up for May, including brainstorming ideas to celebrate poetry month and possibly holding another book drive. There will also be officer elections for the fall semester. Please come and bring your creative ideas!

Support the English Club – your portal to the literary life on campus.

“I was suppose to go to the party.”

“I use to live in Arkansas.”

The correct sentences would use “supposed” and “used.”

Lots of students leave off the “d” of past tense words like these, words with a silent “e” at the end. (we pronounce them something like “suppowz” and “yewz” – no “e” sound at the end). Maybe you’re one of them. If you are, the likely reason is you’re writing like you speak.

Many dialects don’t pronounce the “d” of these words in the past tense. It takes a little more effort to flick that “d” in so the principle of least effort results over the years in a simplication. Instead of saying “I was ‘suppowzdto’ go.” Yuck. Who would come up with that awful clash of consonants?

No one, really. English dropped pronouncing the “ed” is what happened. Once upon a time you would have said “ed” like the name “Ed,” giving a little bit of space between consonants – “suppowz-Ed to.” (Today, New Yorkers say something like “suppowzda” – “I was suppowzda go to the store, but I forgot.” We just mush the two consonants d&t together.

So this grammar error results from no longer spelling like we speak – dialect interference, which is a shame, since writing started out as a transcription of speech.

A long time ago. Like the English that was the language of Chaucer.

But something happened. Writing became highly standardized in spelling, grammar and style. Speech, though, continues to change rapidly and to be different in different places, even different neighborhoods. Learning speech and learning writing is not even close to learning marks to transcribe sounds into written words. It’s really learning two variations of one language.

Don’t feel bad if you do this, but if you do, remember to add the “d” to the past tense of these words.

“I was supposed to go to the party,” and “I used to live in Arkansas.”

That simple change will bump up your writing a lot in a short time.

Thanks to the English Club and the Honors Program, if you’re interested in grad school, you can get advice at the Grad School Panel. I’ll be there, along with two other professors, to tell you how to apply and how to survive. Come down to Hoosier West at 12:00 pm, Friday April 5 – snacks provided. Free.