The Last Final and Other Things

Tomorrow I have my last final of my first year of grad school. Taking important exams is always such a wierd thing for me--at times, I've prepared very little and then gone in and rocked the thing and at other times, I've studied my brains out and gotten rocked instead. The thing is, you never know how prepared you are until you are sitting there, mono y mono (sp??), with mankind's most ingenious invention of mind-control and torture: the final exam.
So, at this point, about half of me feels like I have a full grasp on the material and the other half wants me to read over the textbook again. In grad school, though, they take it easy on us: I can bring the textbook to the exam. What I wouldn't have given for such a privilege in my undergrad years. I guess now, final exams are supposed to better imitate real life. ??? They've got some work to do.

...Cause all of this, it ain't nothing like real life, even if you define "real life" as just about anything you want that isn't a ph.d. program in sociology (yes, I know there were a plethora of negatives in that sentence--keeps you sharp). It's competition, assesment, achievement (and its frightening antithesis, failure), and annual reviews. Most of the time, I love this work because I can make my own hours, plan my own schedule, and I don't have to punch a timecard or have a manager breathing down my neck. When I filled out my "annual self-assesment", though, I realized that "they" still breathe down my neck--they just stand a bit further back than before.

Sociologists write a lot of critiques of capitalist culture, and merit-based systems, and increasing inequality between the haves and have nots. So it's ironic when they construct and maintain their own little market-system of knowledge entrepreneurship and that good ol' American work ethic. There is competition on so many levels: how many articles have you published, how many M.A.'s do you have, how many top researchers have you chatted up at national conferences, how many hours do you work in a week. Relationships become strained, women fight to get tenure and raise kids at the same time, and those with personalities other than type A struggle hard through graduate school. It just doesn't seem to fit the things that we're trying to say about what's wrong with society. It's not that we don't see it--we're trained to be observant. We know we're doing it. We just don't know how to stop.

I'm getting better at letting all of this roll off my back, though. And that is a huge accomplishment--just about all I could ask for, if I'm gonna stick this out. There's more to life than publishing in American Sociological Review. There's blogging, for instance.