Sam Bean is a first-year Master’s Student in English Literature with a Climate Change Specialization. He is a free-floating writer who has worked for the Charlatan, a dubious tech startup and the Ottawa Art Gallery Communications team. He also writes poetry in his spare time. He is from Mississauga but insists that everyone back home calls it ‘M-Town.’
Dear reader, one of my academic nightmares finally came true. A few weeks ago, one of my classes had an assignment that required us to come up with pitches for an upcoming presentation in groups of four and present them in front of a small group of professors. My group had for some reason been under the impression that we were only submitting a written document and not presenting, but half way through that week’s class we were informed of our mistake. When we found out that we would be giving our half-baked presentation pitch to the class, my team and I nervously looked at one another, trying and failing to come up with a plan telepathically. We had no PowerPoint, and after a brief stint of trying to pick a single representative from our group to go up and give a spiel by themselves, we ended up each staking out our separate spots around the front of the lecture hall and one by one sharing our visions of what our contribution to the project would be, framed by an improvised introduction and a conclusion that was more of a sputtering out than a complete stop.
Our pitch was a complete disaster. Our relatively small class was silent; a pin dropping would have been a welcome addition to the sonic landscape. When the feedback started, the professors present each took turns gently pointing out research challenges that we hadn’t considered and recommending that we switch topics. I alternated between unbreaking direct eye contact with who was speaking and staring at the yellowing leaves outside the lecture hall’s window. Once the feedback was done, I sat down in my seat and buried my face in my laptop for the final group’s pitch presentation. I wasted no time in leaving the class the second it was over. I speed-walked right out of the room and across the campus to the bus stop. My thoughts didn’t catch up with my body until I was stuck staring out the bus window, forced into stillness by the necessity of getting home. I felt thoroughly academically humiliated.
To me, anxiety feels like being trapped alone in a giant field beneath an oppressively huge sky. My favourite representations of this feeling are Andrew Wyeth’s famous painting “Christina’s World” and Terrence Malik’s 1978 film “Days of Heaven.” Andrew Wyeth, Christina’s World, 1948
Academic embarrassment can come in a variety of different forms. Maybe you’ve been given assignment feedback in which the professor states that they haven’t given you a mark because it would be too low. Maybe you’ve shared an opinion in class that was met with a long silence and someone changing the topic. Maybe a professor has forgotten your name more than half way into a semester. If you’re the kind of person who (like me) is prone to feeling self-conscious, then embarrassment can be lurking around every corner of the academy. Judgment starts at the application process, as universities “accept,” “conditionally accept” and “reject” you. The existence of participation marks can make every moment in class feel like an evaluation, that you could be discovered a fraud, that your place at university could be revoked at any moment. Even praise at times can feel like a burden being heaped on your future self: doing something right once can feel like you’re setting yourself up for unrealistic expectations of greatness that will be followed by a plummet back to earth.
Reading these few paragraphs, it may come as no surprise to you that for my first few years in higher education, I took academic embarrassment really hard. I would always start the semester with so much energy, always contribute to classroom discussions, but then say something really dumb or submit an assignment that I hadn’t done very well, and feel too embarrassed to attend class the next week. These absences would make the shame grow larger in my head, and a week would turn into a month, until I would either drop the course or submit as much as my professors would allow at the end of the semester and slide through with a low grade. I would talk in therapy about how ashamed I felt all the time until I would miss a therapy appointment and feel too ashamed to go back. I took a break from university when this shame became too much to stomach, and spent two years working at retail and childcare jobs until I could work up the nerve to come back and try again in earnest.
I share all this not to imply that university must feel this high stakes, but instead to communicate that if you feel even a little bit this way, that you are not alone. Over the course of my stint in academia, my thoughts about academic anxiety have evolved from me thinking that it’s something that only I experience, to thinking that it was something that some other people deal with, to thinking that it’s a common feeling, to realizing that it’s nearly universal. Anxiety is not just the dominion of the student, either. In the introduction to Teaching Literature, Elaine Showalter writes about professors’ nightmares about teaching: some dream about starting a lecture but not being able to form words, some about having their students turn against them in the middle of a class, others about finding out that they’ve been supposed to teach a course but forgot about it and now need to give the last lecture of the semester, et cetera. She says that some professors are just as nervous for the first day of class as their students. These realizations don’t make the moments of humiliation feel any less painful, but they do somewhat help me try to embrace the old cliche that “this too shall pass” (I tell myself “jusqu’ici tout va bien” instead of “this too shall pass” because it’s from La Haine, a French movie where tout is not ‘va’ing bien at all, and I can only engage with such an earnest idea if I present it to myself ironically).
While I was looking out the window on the bus ride home from the class of my disaster presentation, I told myself that I was going to drop out of the Major Research Project (MRP) portion of my Master’s program, that I was going to cancel a party I was throwing that weekend and that I was going to quit my job. When I got home, I cooked myself pasta with tomato, onion and hot pepper sauce. I told myself that I would send out the emails announcing my retreat from my life the next morning, only if I still felt like it. Those emails never got sent.
Dear reader, I am still in the MRP program, and I did not quit my job. I still threw the party that weekend, and everyone had a great time. I had an office hours meeting with the professor that I was most worried that I embarrassed myself in front of (on a topic unrelated to the presentation), and she remembered only that our group had changed focus.
I don’t even regret the presentation that much anymore. Our team used the feedback to come up with a better proposal. I’m grateful to myself that I handled it without letting it turn into a backslide and giant problem. I’m still putting one foot in front of the other, and I hope that you are too.
As a respite from all of the stress, I visited Carleton’s Annual Butterfly Show with my friends Maia (left) and Meg (right), who are part of my English Master’s cohort. A butterfly landed on Maia’s hat because it thought that the hat was a flower. I highly recommend going to see them next year!
September 19, 2022: New Year, New Program, New People
As I entered the final days of my summer job, I said private goodbyes to my least favourite parts of food service. Goodbye to the flies in the maintenance room. Goodbye to the loft from which the managers could assess our work efficiency at any time. Goodbye to the smelly mops, goodbye to the dishwashing nozzle that would inevitably splash water back at me no matter what angles I would spray the dishes at, goodbye to putting on food safe rubber gloves only to be told that you have to go do something that requires you to take them off and then have to put a new pair on again. These routine annoyances, compounding each other in unique ways every day, made me daydream often of quitting in the middle of my shift, of throwing a temper tantrum and walking out to never be seen again.
Sam in front of the hoodoos at Drumheller. The rocks on top of the stacks are harder than the soil around them, so after years of rain they form tall towers like this. Luckily for the fast-ish food chain that I am contractually obligated not to disdain in a public forum, a few key factors prevented nuclear meltdown in the long four months of what I hope is the last service job that I’ll ever have to work. My coworkers, a scrappy mix of local nineteen-year-olds who don’t take things too seriously and international students vastly overqualified for the work they were doing, kept the atmosphere light. I ate my weight in free food. While hardly attractive, minimum wage did let me keep a roof over my head. These benefits, however, barely outweighed the tedium of changing the same six garbage cans and wiping the same twelve tables week after week. In short, I could not be happier to be back at Carleton for my Master’s degree. Hello reader, I’m Sam, and I’m the next in line to be the “Life in English” student blogger. Like a lot of people I know, I simultaneously love to talk about myself and struggle to write on the subject. I graduated from Carleton with a B.A. Hons in English in the spring and am back for more, except this time with a Climate Change Specialization (still finding out exactly what that entails). I came to English through a deeply felt love of people and the stories we tell ourselves. I was born and grew up on Treaty 13A land, which was sold by the Mississaugas of the First Credit to the British government under false pretenses and this deception remained unresolved for 200 years. (Parenthetically, the restitution from the Toronto government, which amounted to a one-time payment of around $20,000 per claimant, is still only a fraction of a percent of the money that owning that land has produced. Is this really a land claim settled? Is this really justice?). My mother is Irish and a teller of long winding stories, something that has rubbed off on me in a serious way. I am a seeker of novelty, much more of an ‘idea person’ than an ‘execution person’. I am very sentimental; when I found out as a child that the plants in our garden died every winter and had to be replaced every spring, I was inconsolable for several days straight. I often bring things home that I find on the side of the road, even if I don’t know what I’m going to do with them. I’m a Pisces moon with heavy Aquarian influence, and I half believe that my astrological profile meaningfully describes me.
Everything I’ve listed in the previous paragraph is a version of how I might introduce myself at a party, in a mixer or on a date. They are expressions as much of the person I want to be as they are the person that I really am. The real me, like the real you or the real anyone else, is built every day in small pieces by action, personal experience and moments of connection. This is, however, little comfort for someone meeting a lot of people and making a lot of first impressions in a short amount of time.
The real me, like the real you or the real anyone else, is built every day in small pieces by action, personal experience and moments of connection. This is, however, little comfort for someone meeting a lot of people and making a lot of first impressions in a short amount of time.
The fact that academia marks the beginning point of many people’s careers adds another layer of stress on top of meeting new people. The very idea of ‘networking’ has always made my skin crawl, especially as a young person and student with very little to offer in terms of reciprocity for advice and connections. As the short- and long-term prospects for employment seem increasingly unstable, family, work and school have all seemed to push the idea that making these ‘professional connections’ is necessary to building a durable future for myself. At an introductory presentation to FASS graduate students, one of the presenters said something along the lines of “making connections and securing reference letters is a central part of graduate studies” (I suppose it’s possible to somewhat agree with a statement while hating the way it’s made and its implications). There is an undeniable urgency to having limited time access to a group of highly motivated, thoughtful and lovely people in your peers and faculty members, especially when these people could give you your first big break. Just making normal friends can be hard enough.
When I first came to Carleton, I signed up for Frosh, half-heartedly attended the first event and then hid in the Canal Building to read a copy of The Charlatan front to back three times before going home. Flash forward several years and things are very different. Attending faculty events and meeting my cohort are now for me a huge source of joy and excitement. I wish I could go back and comfort my younger self, give him a few words of encouragement. Since I can’t do that, I’ll write what I would say here.
- The vast majority of people you meet all want to like and be liked.
- People like to be listened to.
- People like to hear a fun little story if you’ve got one to tell.
- Awkwardness often comes from someone wanting to connect but not knowing how, not from judgment.
- If you ever want to leave a situation, say a little goodbye and that it was nice to meet them. They’ll appreciate it.
These observations are obvious to the point of banality, but their obviousness helps me relax into meeting people. It’s not that complicated, it’s not final, it’s not a reflection of personal worth. It’s a chance to say hello and take the first step into everything that’s to come.
I can’t wait for all of that.
Endnotes
1 I first found this information through a fantastic online application, the Whose Land interactive map, which highlights treaty land and Indigenous nation land, among other functions.
2 Read more.