Welcome.

As I said in the info, my name is not Polly Roberts, but we are going to pretend it is. I'm a grad student employee in the humanities at State University (nope, not gonna get more specific), which means that I occupy this very weird space on the higher ed totem pole.

And by very weird space I mean the bottom. My students think that since they paid lots of tuition they are entitled to a good grade in my class, regardless of whether or not they did the work, or even showed up once in awhile. My professors either pile on the work or ignore me. My adviser is nice to me when I'm right in front of her face, but can't answer an email that requires more than an "Awesome!" or "Sorry, I don't come to campus that day."

Today's fun was driving to another area college to meet a professor there in Subfield who could maybe be part of my thesis committee, which would be awesome since my department has been hemorrhaging faculty since before I got here and has only replaced one of the five or six we've lost. Well, Other College Prof leaves the country every summer and so needs the defense either to be at the end of May or end of August. Adviser is going to be on sabbatical next year, Other Committee Member is going to be out of the country for a good chunk of the summer as well, and Polly Roberts wants to be done with State University and starting at Unspecified Institution in the fall. This is gonna be a blast.

Did I mention that Adviser basically ditched me at the end of last semester, which is why this isn't all taken care of now? Had Adviser said sometime in November something like "hey, I might need to leave the country for a few weeks without much notice - maybe you don't want to concentrate so much on conferences right now and oh, here's a good book that might help you with your proposal," things would be much different right now.

Sigh. My department is special. And by "special," I mean "way more fucked up than most departments, which are all by definition sort of fucked up."

I wish my desire to teach Subfield at Super Sweet Tiny College weren't so strong and that I had some other ideas of things I might be vaguely qualified to do. Things I might even enjoy. But no.