so, um

[katekat]

My advisor emailed last night to say she didn't get granted tenure, which means that she's leaving the university at the end of this semester.  I have no idea what this means for me, who was being advised by her, especially since she's the only modern japanese lit person pretty much in the entire school.  There's one prof who does modern japanese cinema, and I'm sure he's got a lit background because he's also in the comp lit department, but he's also the head of the cinema school's crit studies program and already has a ton of students he advises (but it's him or the classical lit guy left, and i don't really want to work on ghosts/monsters in classical japanese lit as an alternative to the postmodern.)

i actually don't know if this means i'm totally screwed or just a little screwed.  i do know this is the woman i came to the university to work with... so that sucks.

which is sad because i was finally getting into a groove with school stuff the last couple of weeks and now it all just feels humped up and derailed like crazy.

shit.

Comments

[akavertigo]

The first year of my transfer, the department assigned a meeting with my advisor: the head of Shakespearean studies. Because, hey, English! Shakespeare! Awesome!

...except for the fact that I spent a goodly amount of willpower building my schedule to avoid the bloody bard as much as the degree allowed. (Answer: 2 class minimum even for a prof/tech writer.) During the next couple of years I was adopted by everything from the Slavic department to British Lit to, god help us all, Contemporary Poetry.

The point of this story?

The academic system does not like us. It doesn't like anybody. It wants us to cry and wail and give it money for the privelege of telling us all the things we have do in the hopes that one of those items actually resembles something that pertains to your actual degree. And after that? You'll still have to talk about f*cking Hamlet.