First quarter Grad School write-up.

Coming from San Francisco State to the University of Chicago was definitely an eye-opening experience. Just the transition from place to place was pretty hard, Chicago is quite different from San Francisco. The weather is a huge change. There are actual seasons here! And by that, I mean for 6 months out of the year, the weather is awful. Way too hot and humid in the summer, sub-zero temperatures in the winter. I moved in with plenty of time to settle before school began though, and living close to/in the city rather than in the suburbs is a significant upgrade. I’m only a short bus ride away from apparently the world’s biggest Macy’s and other amazing shopping possibilities on the Miracle Mile. Good food abounds, much of it open late. Everything delivers. You can get a real italian beef sandwich, or a thick crust pizza (and not have to go to Zachary’s to do it). At least where I live, all the architecture is really nice. It’s probably the ability to use all the brick. Not having the deal with earthquakes lets one build all sorts of very nice buildings that would absolutely not work California. But that’s all unimportant, I’m sure what you’re all here for is my initial grad school experience.

The program itself seems to really care about us and upon arriving we receive tons of resources, free meals, and individualized attention. I really felt they rolled out the red carpet for the incoming graduate students, party after party was thrown in our honor. My fellow students are universally interesting people, and friendly, more so than previous years from what I gather. Friends were made. Interesting classes were chosen… and then dropped for other interesting classes. 

Of course, the classes themselves turned out to be something else entirely. I definitely tried some challenging things here, taking the core required course that I knew would be difficult for me (it’s the high level version of the one class I didn’t get an A in during my undergrad), as well as a business school course that was way outside my academic wheel house. I definitely learned a lot in both classes, but they were tough. The level of reading is intense and they don’t pull punches in grading. My third class (US Foreign Policy) was easier, but that could be because I came in with some knowledge of the topic and the teaching style was right up my alley.

I actually built a very good relationship (or at least I’d like to think so!) with the professor of that Foreign Policy class, asking her to be my thesis advisor. I’ll get in to the thesis itself in a minute, but first about the advisor picking process. The general rule is find the most famous professor you can that knows your topic and you get along with. As it turns out, there was no one on the campus who worked on what I was interested in specifically. Or even not specifically. I was basically on my own in terms of people I could talk to who really knew anything about it. Luckily, Professor Vabulas fell into my lap. Her teaching and advising style is exactly how I prefer to learn, and when I pitched my idea, she seemed really excited about the project. She’s not the most well known professor on campus, but that doesn’t really matter when you find an advisor who will really help with the project itself. After all, I’d like it to be MY name that is remembered for my work. Maybe that’s just vanity, but it’s the truth. If Mearsheimer was my advisor, my thesis would just be “something John Q. Random wrote with Mearsheimer”.

The thesis process is a long one. You spend basically the entire first quarter generating an idea, the second quarter turning that idea into an official proposal, and the third quarter writing the paper itself. I came in to Chicago with elements of an idea, and about 2/3s of the way through the quarter, after getting quite a bit of feedback from faculty and fellow students, I settled on a research question: ”Is prestige the major motivator behind a state’s decision to develop an orbital program?” Orbital program in this case means the self sufficient ability to send something, satellites or people, into orbit. This question is not totally final, but this is basically what I am going to try to answer. Both Prestige and Outer Space are relatively under-theorized in contemporary IR, which makes my research harder, but also gives a good project a lot of extra value. As fas as I can find, no one has tried to write a paper like this before, or at least no one has gotten it published, so any exciting findings will actually ADD something to the literature. 

It is definitely not all sunshine and rainbows though. Towards the end of the semester I started having something of an existential crisis. Lots of grad students have weird mental issues, usually relating to Impostor Syndrome. That wasn’t my problem, but I have been battling despondency and malaise for the past…probably month? Since before thanksgiving certainly. I seem to have shaken it for now, but it was killing my productivity in the weeks leading up to finals. It was probably the finals themselves that helped get me out of my depression. No time for all those feelings when papers are due! I must be only student EVER to be happy about finals. Anyway, I seem to be over it, temporarily at least.

That brings us to today. Finals are over, I achieved high marks despite my issues. Though I have been lazy about it until now, I hope to get some serious thesis research done before the quarter begins. Next quarter looks pretty exciting, I signed up for two classes that will be both incredibly interesting and hopefully helpful to my research: Foundations of Realism (with Mearsheimer!) and Nuclear Policy. Classical Realism is the theoretical backing of my thesis, taking an entire class on it should really help me nail down what I want to say. 

That just about covers the first quarter. I’ll try to post more content before my second quarter writeup, but we’ll just see what happens.