Welcome to senior year! I already feel excited, anxious, exhausted, and pretty darn accomplished and it’s only the first week of the semester. Usually this week is relatively relaxed, everyone getting back into the swing of things and no one feeling weighed down just yet by work. This Tuesday, I woke up at 6:55 am and dragged myself over to the library with my friend Mary to stand in a line to get a carrel for the semester. A carrel means a place to leave your book so you don’t have to lug them around and, if I understand correctly, an excuse to ask people to kindly remove themselves from your study area whenever you feel like it. Mary, a pro, had scoped out carrels the day before and chose the exact one wanted whereas I picked randomly. You can all visit me on the third floor. I feel like I’m spending all my time outside of class and working on fellowship applications traveling from office to office getting signatures, advice, or attending a meeting. Even though I love it all so I’m motivated and feel so fortunate to have these possibilities, I still feel swamped and stressed by everything I have to do. It’s funny that these cool opportunities are also a big part of what’s making our first week back a bit too demanding.
Lately all I want to do is discuss Middle Eastern politics. If you also want to do this constantly please contact me so we can go over today’s news. I recently realized that analyzing Al Jazeera had taken over my life the day I got back states from Beirut, Jordan, and the West Bank and was hanging out with Claire, a Scripps friend who I lived a block away from in Beirut, and I noticed all we could talk about were the settlements, differences in the ways Palestinian refugees in Beirut and Palestinians in the West Bank in Beirut structured their identities, etc, etc. I’m sure the other Scripps friends we were with got tired of us, but no one was more vocal then my friend’s seven year old brother who told me matter-of-factly that what I was talking about was too complicated and didn’t make sense.
The good news is that all this reading and talking over the news is extremely helpful for thesis. I so look forward to researching many of the topics that came up in interviews this summer. I got to do this ethnographic portion of my thesis research while I was living in Beirut and absolutely loved conducting interviews, making friends and contacts as I got to hear people’s thoughts on a subject that interests me to no end, personal religious identity (I’ll get into what I was doing in Beirut and specifics of thesis in future post). It really affirmed an interest in Middle East Anthropology that I’ve been exploring in the last year. I’ve been thinking more and more about going to graduate school, and would basically be in heaven if I could get into Columbia for Middle East Studies. Their faculty is magical in that many of the professors have written books ethnographies exploring favorite topics, and especially because one of my favorite couples of scholars of the Middle East, Timothy Mitchell and Lila Abu-Lughod, teach there. But grad school wouldn’t start for a couple of years at least. For now I need to focus on more immediate applications and choices. In regards to thesis, I’m just thankful that I already have some research done and both my advisor Professor Lara Deeb and the professor teaching my senior seminar, Professor Oona Eisenstadt, have pretty strict and early thesis deadlines.
How is everyone else doing with the first week back? Seniors, are you feeling overwhelmed or is it just me? Dearest Alumnae, do you have any advice for balancing everything at the start of our last year?
Friends and me at Scripps’ carnival for new students during orientation, preparing to embrace senior year (I’m center).
Friends Mary and Matt congregated for what I’ve named Carrel Day at Honnold-Mudd. Note the very long line in the background.
If you’ve been inspired by my need to keep up with Middle East events and politics, check out http://www.jadaliyya.com/. Jadaliyya is one of my favorite journals containing thought-provoking analysis and opinions on the subject.