academ-mania

i’ve been part of the world of higher education for, let’s just say, many years now, as a student, faculty member, and administrator.  now, i have never claimed any level of sanity but i think that higher education is a place were sanity is ironically low.  you might have thought that higher education would incrementally lead to higher levels of sanity, normalcy, sensibility and self-awareness in addition to higher intelligence and a wealth of (often useless) information about a very specific subject that a select (and oh so) few people care about.  my experience and reason says otherwise.

i’ve just returned from a fun experience, a weekend conference in indianapolis with colleagues in higher education, fellow graduate students and faculty from many schools, both domestic and international.  i got to catch up with some friends and meet some really great new people that i hope will be friends for a long time to come.  conferences of this type are always so amusing to me because sometimes i think that either i am getting more normal and sane or that others are more normal and sane than i am.  but then i am reminded that neither are true.  the very fact that i am in a phd program that has taken students an average of 13 years to finish and that i knew going in that it would be an uphill battle are two indications that i have….let’s call it issues. and when i spend time with other graduate students i realize that they are not nearly as normal as i think they are when i sitting at my house spending 10 straight hours trying to read 3 lines of akkadian.

but it is comforting to my sanity-challenged, over-worked, over-tired brain that neither sanity or normalcy are all they’re cracked up to be.  but you should probably consider the source before you put too much stock in that.