The Loss of Innocence

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Clarissa

January 17, 2014

College Misery has a hilarious thread going on where people have to answer the following questions:

When did you lose your naive and dewy eyed view of the profession? When did you lose your academic innocence?

The answers are priceless. This one, in particular, almost made me weep with laughter:

Let’s see…I think it was on my last couple of years as a grad student, when I suddenly understood I was completely on my own. Not in the sense of being responsible for anything that happened in my career (or didn’t happen), but in the stronger sense that the people around me–advisor, department, research group, fellow graduate students–were all completely indifferent to whether I stayed in the profession or was never heard from again. That’s the reality of the career, maybe every career. The Universe does.not.care

The poor baby realized it was necessary to grow up. How totally tragic.

For some people, however, even that realization is yet to happen. Here is an example of somebody who is still sore over some grade he got a bizillion years ago:

I lost my innocence while I was still an undergrad, in my 4th year. At the end of term profs put the marks for all of the assignments, midterm & exam, on the course bulletin board (yes, this was before the Internet et al., and this was how profs “communicated” with students about a course). In the “final mark” column I noticed an enumeration error. A really big one. So, I went to the prof’s office, introduced myself, handed him a handwritten copy of my marks, and noted the error. The prof’s face drained of colour, and he angrily sputtered out “This is a big change. So I actually have to fill out paperwork to get your grade changed. DO YOU REALIZE HOW MUCH FUCKING PAPERWORK YOU ARE MAKING ME DO???”

It’s very heartening to see people who have experienced no greater tragedy that a grade mess-up during their BA.

Of course, I’m yet to lose my “naive and dewy eyed view of the profession,” so I’m biased. I’m also in a playful mood today, so let’s not take this post too seriously.

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7 responses to “The Loss of Innocence”

good enough cook

January 17, 2014

As the child of academics, I never really had any innocence. When I mentally walked away and started taking some classes to retrain for another field, though, I discovered a passion for the field that I didn’t know I had. Particularly since having an exit strategy in place helped me embrace the job in my own terms.

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1. Clarissa
  
  January 17, 2014
  
  I’m not even sure what the word innocence means in this context. What are people supposed to be innocent of? The knowledge that everybody is human, many people are not perfect, often people mess up, and life is filled with disappointment and struggle?
  
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good enough cook

January 17, 2014

I think in this context “innocence” means “vision of academia gleaned from the movies.”

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1. Clarissa
  
  January 17, 2014
  
  Ah! This is something I would have never guessed.
  
  No matter how long one lives in a country, one never becomes fully integrated.
  
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  1. musteryou
    
    January 17, 2014
    
    I also have this thing where as a matter of course I don’t realize what somebody meant to imply by their language until way after the event has occurred. For instance, I am reflecting on the pervasiveness of infantilism in contemporary society. I hadn’t realized this was such a problem before, because of course there are different kinds of projection, not just Freudian projection — one also projects onto the world one’s expectations, based often enough on the model of one’s own mind, and how one would expect oneself to react. But that is a mistake, which does nobody any favors. It’s far better to realize that there is a gap and that one is not responsible for bridging it. Just as one example of how things MAY slot into place to make more sense much later down the track, yesterday I recalled how one of the skydiving jumpmasters was cautioning people that if they had an emergency in freefall, there would be nobody to call upon and they have to handle it themselves. Okay, I thought, well that is common sense. But now I think about it, maybe it was a particularly culturally attuned warning: “You know you have been babied all your life? Well there are some places where that does not apply.”
    
    I’m really not good at locking into people’s cultural expectations and heading them off, But I realize that this is a large part of what is expected from an educator (more babying?)
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      January 17, 2014
      
      ” But now I think about it, maybe it was a particularly culturally attuned warning: “You know you have been babied all your life? Well there are some places where that does not apply.””
      
      – And in response to that people tend to freak out like it’s the end of the world.
      
      “But I realize that this is a large part of what is expected from an educator (more babying?)”
      
      – Babying students is not even the worst part. The worst part is having to baby colleagues who are 30 years older than you are.
      
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      1. musteryou
        
        January 17, 2014
        
        Yes, there is infantilism even at a high level. One tells somebody something about a particularly negative event that one has experienced and gets a response, “You hurt my feelings!” That’s really surprising. I think the worst aspect of it is that when somebody responds in that vein there is nowhere to go from there. For instance if the events related to my own life and had nothing to do with their feelings, but they cannot hear the narrative because their feelings will continue to be hurt…?
        
        It’s like there are rungs missing from the ladder, that prevent a higher climb. I can’t put them back in place. They’re just missing. I can’t add them back in with any philosophical conceptualising or gentle assistance, or performing seal antics.
        
        This whole sense of something fundamentally missing, that leads to a failure of communication, or more likely being blamed for hurting feelings when I take about a difficult topic ……
        
        People don’t know there is something missing. Perhaps they sense it on some level, but to that degree that they sense it, the situation only becomes worse. It’s even more hurtful to indicate that there should be more there than there is than to hurt feelings by talking about one’s life too directly.
        
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