Johanna L Peterson

5 Things: A Graduate Student’s Summer “Break” To-Dos

I’ve reached the end of my two-week schoolwork break. I’ve gotten a chance to catch up with friends and family, and spent five days in San Francisco. I’ve almost finished my (incomprehensible mumbling of an embarrassingly high number) re-read of the Harry Potter series. It’s been lovely.

Though I’m not doing anything this summer in the way of teaching or grading, I’ve got plenty on my plate, a lot of it put on the “to do later” list during the school year (/the last several school years…). So, without further ado, five things you can do (and I’ll be doing) as a graduate student during summer “break”:

Organize your note-taking and documents storage systems. In my first year of graduate school, the history and theory class I was taking spent two full sessions (that’s six hours) going over the various note-taking, document storage, and productivity tools that make all the information you’re processing easier to access throughout grad school and in professional life. Possibly the most helpful six hours of class time ever. I use Evernote for note-taking and -keeping and Google Drive for document storage. Use whatever platform(s) works best for you. My goal this summer is to settle on a citation manager and figure out how to use it.
Brush up on that language(s) you need for your research. Reviewing grammar and vocab is great, but it’s the summer, so mix it up and keep it fun! In addition to academic texts and primary documents, read news, listen to music, and watch TV shows and films.
Prepare for the coming year. Check out your institution’s graduate student handbook and see where you’re at in meeting the requirements. What do you need to do in the next year to keep you on track, whether you’re still in coursework, preparing for exams, setting out on research trips, or completing dissertation grants? What can you do this summer to make the school year (or at least part of it) a little more bearable?
Update (or create) your five-year plan. Closely related to #3 above, thinking long term helps you stay on track (coursework, exams, grants and fellowships, publication submissions, etc) and keeps all those pesky deadlines (holy grants, Batman) from sneaking up on you. As you progress through your program, it’ll also help you think about life post-grad school and you can begin shaping that sooner rather than later.
Relax. Brain breaks and academic disconnects are necessary for recharging, remembering why you’re doing this, starting the school year refreshed, and getting ready to tackle the next challenge. My plan is to do about four to six hours (let’s be real, four or less is what will most likely actually happen) of concentrated work per day, Monday through Friday, with weekends and a few vacations completely off.

Any other suggestions?

Bagels and Math

I wrote the following blog post for a pedagogy course I’m taking this quarter. We were tasked with recounting an experience we witnessed or had ourselves that reflected fixed and/or growth mindsets to learning. Enjoy!

My favorite breakfast is a bagel and cream cheese. To feed this habit, every couple of weeks I stop by a local bagel place and pick up a half dozen–3 cranberry and 3 blueberry. Last week, as I was standing in line to place my order, a dad and his two daughters walked in. The dad and the youngest were in the middle of a conversation about school:

Daughter: I’m bad at math
Dad: No you’re not. You’re smart.
Daughter: No, I can’t do math.
Dad: No, you’re smart. I can do math so you can do math.
Daughter: I’m bad at math! Why can’t you just support me?!
(this girl had some sass)

Years of conversations like this came flooding back to me. I was this girl. I was this girl until I was a senior in high school. Sometimes, I’m still this girl.

Since the 1970s, psychologist Carol Dweck has researched human motivation, looking at how people overcome difficulties. She developed the idea of fixed versus growth mindsets. According to Dweck, people that have a fixed mindset view intelligence as an innate characteristic that doesn’t change, so that academic success is limited by how “smart” you are. Those who have a growth mindset see the key to success in effort and hard work; intelligence isn’t something you either have or don’t, but is instead something that can be cultivated and grown.

Like the young girl I encountered at the bagel shop, for much of my young life I had a fixed mindset. As a third grader learning multiplication, I struggled a bit. I declared myself to be bad at math. When in junior high I got my first D on a writing assignment, I decided I couldn’t write. This thinking followed me around throughout elementary, junior, and early high school. Things finally began to change when I joined my high school’s cross country team as a sophomore. I had never been an athlete. When I first started running, I was really bad. I was sore for weeks on end. When I didn’t see immediate improvement I said it was because I wasn’t athletic. I didn’t think of running as a skill that needed to be developed; I saw it as something that you could do or you could not do.

Many off-season cross country runners join their school’s track and field team for the spring. I did the same. I was slow. And everyone could see how slow I was (tracks are the worst). Because I was the only upperclasswoman on the distance team my junior year, I ran in league finals against the top runners from the other schools in our league. They were very good. I crushed that race. I didn’t win, and I came in dead last, but I improved my 2-mile time by over 2 minutes (for those who aren’t runners, that’s a lot). It seemed like my hard work was, just maybe, finally starting to pay off. That summer, as I trained with my team for the fall cross country season, I made goals for myself, I focused and worked hard at improving my running. It worked. I was voted team captain. I ran on the varsity girls’ team. I came to see that, just as I had to work hard to improve at and develop my running skills, I needed to apply the same kind of effort to those areas of school that I struggled with (which, at that point, was most things).

With that realization, I moved from a fixed to a growth mindset–from I can’t to not yet; from hating math to excelling on it when I took the GRE; from being a B/C-range writer to doing it as a central part of my career.

I was so tempted to turn around and say something to that little girl. To tell her that, though she might not be great at math yet, if she works at it, and maybe works at it really hard, she’ll get better. I wanted to say: I used to feel the exact same way! For years and years and years. It stunted my learning and kept me from pursuing opportunities. You’ll get there. Just maybe not yet. I didn’t say anything (I mean, did you hear her sass? I didn’t know if I could handle getting yelled at by a 10-year-old at 6:30 in the morning). But, I hope she figures it out. I hope she has a teacher or a parent, a friend or a coach, that can show her that we might not always be good at things on the first try – that we can’t do math yet, but with hard work, determination, and a commitment to growth, we can.

Summer

It’s here! I know. Summer actually started a while ago. But, I took (and passed!) my first minor exam last week, so I didn’t really begin my summer until this week, and I’ve been enjoying the time, doing some work, but mostly not doing anything. It’s been wonderful.

Anyway, there’s lots to do as I prepare for the third year of the program; I’m looking forward to completing the second of two minor exams, taking the Arabic language exam, and qualifying. Fingers crossed that next year this time I’ll have all those things crossed off the to-do list.

To prepare, I’ll be doing work related to all of those things for the next two months, with some breaks and trips thrown in there too, of course. I mean, it’s still summer after all.

The Interwar Middle East

If you’ve been following along on my blog or have read my “About” section, you know that I plan to focus my research roughly on the period between World War I and World War II in the Middle East. For those who are unfamiliar with the history of the region during this time, I thought I’d provide a (very) brief overview in a (probably kinda dry) post.

The period immediately following World War I was a time of immense change in the Middle East that defined, in many, and some very literal, ways, the region as we know it today. I’m particularly interested in the area that became the modern-day states of Syria and Lebanon as they came to be as a result of the divvying up of the Ottoman Empire by the British and French after their victory in the First World War. Because World War I is essential to what came after it, I’ll include a brief overview of that conflict as it played out in the Middle East (sorry, I won’t be including Iran in this discussion).

World War I in the Middle East

The Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of the Germans in November 1915. The result was a multi-front assault on the Ottoman Empire, largely by British forces in Egypt, Iraq, and western Anatolia (modern-day Turkey). While the Germans and Ottomans made considerable progress and held their own for the first two years of the war, 1918 saw a change in fortunes that eventually led to a German-Ottoman defeat at the hands of the British, French, and Italians. The loss in human life in the Ottoman Empire was catastrophic. In addition to the war dead, wounded, and missing, the territories that would become Syria and Lebanon experienced mass starvation, the combined result of successive years of drought, a locust infestation, and a Franco-Anglo blockade of the Mediterranean coast.

The Mandate

While everyone knows about the outcome of World War I in Europe, the massive human toll and the harsh penalties heaped on a defeated Germany by the winning French and English powers, relatively little is discussed of what this meant for the Ottoman Empire. During the course of the war, the ultimately victorious Powers (British, French, and Italians) made a series of seemingly conflicting agreements concerning the fate of the Ottoman territories. Egypt, and what became Turkey and Saudi Arabia became independent or quasi-independent in the years following WWI. Other territories saw themselves placed under French and British Mandatory administrations. The dividing up of these territories led to the creation of the modern-day states of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine (what would become Israel in 1948), and the creation of an internationally-administered Jerusalem. Syria and Lebanon were placed under French mandate and the remainder under British.

The notion of the mandate was established by Article 22 of the League of Nations charter. In its essentials, it declared that certain states were not yet able to govern themselves. Until they could, foreign powers would provide administrative oversight of all of that country’s affairs, helping to establish a constitution and a functioning governmental system. It was, basically, colonization under another name.

The Mandate in Syria and Lebanon

The implementation of the mandatory administration in the Middle East took different forms. In French mandate Syria and Lebanon, the ideological base of the project was based on France’s Mission Civilisatrice, or the Civilizing Mission. This was a paternalistic belief that French colonization and administration would bring European civilization to the uncivilized masses; in the context of Syria and Lebanon, France had additional ideological interests as the special protector of the region’s Maronite Christians (a type of Christianity that had claimed allegiance to the pope in Rome). The inhabitants of these new nations did not acquiesce silently to this imposed administration, and the twenty-plus-year period of the mandate was a time of conflict and upheaval, as various nationalist groups attempted to rid their country of what they saw as colonial occupiers.

Ultimately, it was World War II that brought the Syrian and Lebanese mandates to an end in 1945, when the French agreed to full independence and the withdrawal of all their troops from the two nations. Historians of the mandate have long debated its legacy. While the French mandate officials often saw themselves as saviors from the oppressive rule of the Ottoman Turks, Arab nationalists at the time questioned the morality of the mandate system itself, as well as the French implementation of it in their countries. Later historians, while often acknowledging to one degree or another some of the positive aspects of the mandatory administration, have generally concluded that this was an inherently colonial process that left an insufficiently-prepared, and in some ways permanently weakened administrative system in its wake.

Conclusion

World War I and the implementation of the mandate period in the years following it ushered in an age of increased European, and later American, direct intervention in the workings of Middle Eastern states. While European powers had been meddling in Ottoman affairs since the late 18th century, and held effective control over Egypt since the late nineteenth century, the post-WWI period ushered in an era of direct colonial rule over the more populous Arab regions of the former Ottoman Empire. When the mandatory administrations were brought to an end throughout the Middle East, Western involvement with these states did not come to an end, and can still be seen to this day. For the governments of Syria and Lebanon, the legacy of the mandate can be seen in the conflicts and divisions that have plagued those two countries since.

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Feel free to leave any comments, thoughts, or questions in the comments section!

Week 2 Roll Call

The quarter got into its full swing this week. I had a full load of reading and writing. As I noted in the first post of the quarter, my reading load is really quite a bit lighter this quarter. This will give me the opportunity to provide a greater diversity of posts. Last week, I wrote that I would use this extra space and time to talk about pedagogy, my research, and other things. These kinds of things will be forthcoming, and some will be incorporated into my weekly roll calls.

Without further ado, readings from Week 2:

Middle East in the Twentieth Century

This week’s readings focused on the two World Wars, the interwar period, and the establishment of the mandatory administrations in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine. I’ll provide a post on the Mandate in the Middle East for more information about this period this week.

Scholarship of the Modern Middle East, Post-Colonial

Longrigg, Stephen Hemsley. Syria and Lebanon under French Mandate. London: Oxford University Press, 1958.

We’re doing something a bit unique at the beginning of the quarter where each student picks a different book to read each week (not sure if this will continue beyond these first two weeks). The authors of these books were, in some way, involved in European occupation of the Middle East from the late 19th century to the interwar period. An interesting variety were presented last week, from a British Zionist to Lord Cromer, and the book I selected by Longrigg.

Though Longrigg’s first relationship with the Middle East was through his service in Iraq during the First World War and then as a British mandatory official there, and later worked for the Iraq Petroleum Company, he wrote this book as a 15-year retrospective on the French mandate in Syria and Lebanon, examining the legacy of the mandate generally. His purpose is manifold: he wants to counter the notion that the British had any acquisitive interests in the region during the period (this was, apparently, a great issue based on the vehemence with which he denies it throughout the work); he wants to show the possibilities and problems of mandatory administration; and he wants to support the notion of the mandate at a time where historical perspective has perhaps painted it with a rather bad brush. These purposes are weaved throughout the work and are part of the overarching thesis that, in spite of the many and positive contributions of the French to the mandatory and post-mandatory state (most of which have been overlooked by detractors of the mandate and of people in the region), the project was ultimately a failure due to the implementation of an administration that refused to acknowledge and adapt to local political and societal circumstances.

Works such as Longrigg’s provide the historian with first-hand accounts of the intentions, beliefs, and worldviews of those involved in the Mandatory system implemented in the Middle East in the aftermath of World War I in the former Ottoman Empire.

French Revolution, 1789-1815

Week 2 offered a continuation of the discussion on the social, ideological, political, and economic realities of France in the years immediately preceding the Revolution in 1789. To drive this point home, the class was assigned several primary documents that revealed the various currents of thought proliferating at the time, and we watched the 1988 film, Dangerous Liaisons, based on the novel Les liaisons dangereuses, written by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos in 1782.