Category: Daily updates

Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph

Fall 2014 coursework

With two core seminars and some electives behind me, I am nearly done with my PhD coursework. The one PhD requirement I still need to meet is one term of political theory. To that end, I am planning to take “Markets, Justice and the Human Good” with Joseph Carens this term.

In order to satisfy the requirements of the Environmental Studies Collaborative Program, I will also be taking “Environmental Decision Making” with Doug Macdonald and Becky Raboy.

At the same time, I will be a teaching assistant for “Canada in Comparative Perspective” with Pauline Beange.

That should leave a reasonable amount of time for the main business of this year: producing a research proposal for my dissertation, assembling a committee, and getting the proposal approved by them and the department.

PubPol comp written

I wrote the public policy major field exam today, and I feel like it went OK. I have to wait at least two weeks for results, but I would be fairly surprised if I failed. On that basis, I think I will commit to accompanying Toronto350.org to the forthcoming People’s Climate March in Manhattan on September 21st.

Matt Wilder helped me out with some astute reading suggestions.

In solid and informative surroundings

It may be something of a hulking brutalist monstrosity in terms of architectural design, but it is both extremely useful and aesthetically appealing to live a block away from such an extensive store of knowledge as Robarts Library. The long summer hours on weekdays are also appreciated.

I have been occupying long stretches of time on the eleventh floor – in the company of most of the political science books – reading, summarizing, writing out definitions of terms, sketching the content of theoretical schools and the relationships between them, and fervently hoping that Friday’s exam yields the A- or better which I need to move on to the research stage of my PhD.

One week to the exam

My public policy comprehensive exam is next Friday from 10am to 2pm.

It’s challenging for a lot of reasons, but the biggest is the sheer difficulty of retaining the quantity of basic information (authors, names of books and articles, dates of publication) which is expected.

I will be spending the last week outlining answers to plausible questions, reading or re-reading some key sources, putting key bits of information into big Excel tables, and then reviewing those tables.

Comp sources, thematically listed

This is an evolving thematic outline of the major sources for my comprehensive exam on the 22nd (Excel).

It’s a matter of remembering what these authors had to say (both in terms of their own ideas and criticism of others), remembering when they said it, and being able to sufficiently regurgitate it within the context of some kind of original argument during the exam.

The future and the limits of prediction

It’s inevitable, perhaps, that whatever sort of academic or professional training you get tends to be backward-looking. The people doing the teaching have succeeded under a particular set of conditions, and it’s perfectly well-meaning for them to provide the kind of advice, assignments, and requirements that were involved in their own development.

At the same time, the last 250 years of human history have been characterized by change so profound, constant, and multi-dimensional that we cannot expect the decades ahead to be governed by the same rules as the ones people have just experienced. For one thing, we have about 15 years to collectively decide if we’re going to have a future of wild climatic destabilization, with all the political, economic, and social consequences that would involve.

The prospect of trying to prepare yourself for a future that nobody can guess is daunting. Since nobody can single-handedly establish the conditions of their own future, we all need to be prepared for a range of possibilities. We can’t know what’s going be be essential, even in what remains of our own lives.

Anything but comp prep

Partly because of its supposed effectiveness in countering stress, spending moderate amounts of time at the gym falls within what I consider acceptable procrastination. It certainly helps that the Hart House gym has pretty good hours and is only a four minute walk from my bedroom (as well as the libraries where I should generally be embedded for the next month).

Generally, I do 25 minutes of cardio on an elliptical machine, run a lap, do another 25 minutes of cardio, run another lap, and then row for 2000 metres. Even with my new glasses, I don’t find that I can effectively read during any of these activities, so it’s also a chance to catch up on Planet Money, This American Life, The Current (I tend to avoid the most depressing stories), and the Savage Lovecast (abrasive, but a useful source of perspective – like his long-running column). I wish Stephen Fry released his podgrams much more often (the one on language is wonderful, and an antidote to pedantry).

When working on exceptionally daunting and unpleasant tasks, I have to suspend the rules of my normal procrastination flowchart, since following it would easily allow me to cut study time to nothing. Beyond the gym, a few forms of acceptable non-study activity include corresponding with friends and family members (though I am still well behind); dealing with especially time-sensitive 350.org tasks; purchasing, cooking, and eating brain-sustaining food; taking and posting photos of the day; and doing a quantity of paid work that reduces the rate at which my savings are depleting.

Less justifiable activities that sometimes sneak in are the occasional ladder game of Starcraft II (seems to raise wakefulness as much as a large cup of coffee, without insomniac side-effects), reading materials unrelated to the comp, and ongoing endless correspondence with the Canada Revenue Agency.