Tarmac Tales

We all have those flights. The ones where you clap when you take off and then when you land. One day after graduation and I am headed to New York for our capstone project presentation. It is exciting but I also really want to nap and figure out the rest of my life. It is a cold blustery day. I decide to take a bus and the train instead of a SuperShuttle to economize as an unemployed student. My suitcase almost gets blown away on the street, my hair is whipped into a tangled frenzy. 'Summer' in Minneapolis is here.

And just like that, the party is over

Most of my cohort

Today was our graduation ceremony. I have degrees from before but I have never participated in one of these shindigs with gowns and caps and more. Parts of me were warring: one part did not want to attend the ceremony, was grumpy at the expensive gown and the time involved and nervous about walking on stage and suchlike. But the other part wanted to go and experience this final touch on two years of my life. It felt like an apt, if surreal, ending to this part of my life. The one where I moved cities, countries and continents and started a new life and it was a risk that I had to take.

I did not know...

...how I would feel this close to graduation; or that the happiness would be bittersweet and the losses would start lining up slowly (as would opportunities). So many smiles for the camera, concealing

Support Networks of Women in Higher Ed: A Crucial Pit Stop in Busy and Challenging Paths

"Women in higher education are navigating complex paths in academic fields, paths that see a steady increase in participation by women but still have more men in leadership positions. Support networks play a crucial role in helping women advance. Tessens, White and Web explain in “Senior Women in Higher Education Institutions: Perceived Development Needs and Support” that allocating resources, setting up of networks and gatekeeping for leadership positions is considered a gendered activity in academia.

Through my informal conversations with women faculty, staff and graduate students at the University of Minnesota, I saw how women in higher education engage with and react to support networks. The focus of my conversations was four-pronged: why women participate in support networks, what they get out of it, what makes the groups work and what are some of the tensions and challenges faced."

Read the rest of the piece here (I am the author :) and thus the link love) : http://qap2.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/whe.20193/full

How wonderful

A poem for all the loss and finding and love and longing and the confusion that is growing older:

How wonderful to be understood,

to just sit here while some kind person

relieves you of the awful burden

of having to explain yourself, of having

to find other words to say what you meant,

or what you think you thought you meant,

and of the worse burden of finding no words,

of being struck dumb . . . because some bright person

has found just the right words for you—and you

have only to sit here and be grateful

for words so quiet so discerning they seem

not words but literate light, in which

your merely lucid blossoming grows lustrous.

How wonderful that is!

Floating

A week to graduation. The end is in sight.

Time for Tulips

Bloom outside school

April has been wonderful weather-wise. The sun has been out most days; on others, the rain has been delightful. This is a (welcome) contrast from last year, when it was still snowing (perhaps good for water levels, but definitely disappointing for the soul). But the sun is not much good if you can't be outdoors and there is only so much work that you can do outside. I've been trying to go for a walk everyday, to soak up the sun and take a break. It is almost the end of this (final) semester and I am excited about finishing! The sum of two years of coursework and assignments and groups and (artificial-seeming) deadlines and readings and etc etc feels like a lot. I am sad about some things coming to an end (including my student-life, which I know has given me a lot of opportunities and allowed me live in a sort of a bubble).