{"id":21879,"date":"2022-09-22T15:01:55","date_gmt":"2022-09-22T19:01:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/english\/?page_id=21879"},"modified":"2026-01-22T13:53:19","modified_gmt":"2026-01-22T18:53:19","slug":"sam-bean","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/english\/life-in-english-student-blogs\/sam-bean\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to Sam’s Blog"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Welcome to Sam’s Blog\n <\/h1>\n \n \n\n

BA Honours English (2022); MA English, ongoing<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n <\/header>\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n \n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Sam Bean is a first-year Master\u2019s 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 \u2018M-Town.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n

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\n Table of Contents\n <\/h2>\n
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\n \n 1.\n <\/span>\n\n \n November 14, 2022\n <\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n \n
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\n \n 2.\n <\/span>\n\n \n September 19, 2022\n <\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

November 14, 2022<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Dealing with Academic Anxiety, One Step at a Time<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019t 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\u2019s window. Once the feedback was done, I sat down in my seat and buried my face in my laptop for the final group\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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\u2019s famous painting \u201cChristina\u2019s World\u201d and Terrence Malik\u2019s 1978 film \u201cDays of Heaven.\u201d Andrew Wyeth, Christina\u2019s World, 1948<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Academic embarrassment can come in a variety of different forms. Maybe you\u2019ve been given assignment feedback in which the professor states that they haven\u2019t given you a mark because it would be too low. Maybe you\u2019ve 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\u2019re 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 \u201caccept,\u201d \u201cconditionally accept\u201d and \u201creject\u201d 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\u2019re setting yourself up for unrealistic expectations of greatness that will be followed by a plummet back to earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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\u2019s something that only I experience, to thinking that it was something that some other people deal with, to thinking that it\u2019s a common feeling, to realizing that it\u2019s nearly universal. Anxiety is not just the dominion of the student, either. In the introduction to Teaching Literature<\/em>, Elaine Showalter writes about professors\u2019 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\u2019ve 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\u2019t make the moments of humiliation feel any less painful, but they do somewhat help me try to embrace the old cliche that \u201cthis too shall pass\u201d (I tell myself \u201cjusqu\u2019ici tout va bien\u201d instead of \u201cthis too shall pass\u201d because it\u2019s from La Haine<\/em>, a French movie where tout is not \u2018va\u2019ing bien at all, and I can only engage with such an earnest idea if I present it to myself ironically).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s program<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

September 19, 2022<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

New Year, New Program, New People<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sam in front of the hoodoos at Drumheller. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019ll ever have to work. My coworkers, a scrappy mix of local nineteen-year-olds who don\u2019t 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\u2019s degree<\/a>. Hello reader, I\u2019m Sam, and I\u2019m the next in line to be the \u201cLife in English<\/a>\u201d 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<\/a> in the spring and am back for more, except this time with a Climate Change Specialization<\/a> (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 \u2018idea person\u2019 than an \u2018execution person\u2019. 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\u2019t know what I\u2019m going to do with them. I\u2019m a Pisces moon with heavy Aquarian influence, and I half believe that my astrological profile meaningfully describes me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everything I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fact that academia marks the beginning point of many people\u2019s careers adds another layer of stress on top of meeting new people. The very idea of \u2018networking\u2019 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 \u2018professional connections\u2019 is necessary to building a durable future for myself. At an introductory presentation to FASS graduate students<\/a>, one of the presenters said something along the lines of \u201cmaking connections and securing reference letters is a central part of graduate studies\u201d (I suppose it\u2019s possible to somewhat agree with a statement while hating the way it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> 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\u2019t do that, I\u2019ll write what I would say here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  1. The vast majority of people you meet all want to like and be liked.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. People like to be listened to.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. People like to hear a fun little story if you\u2019ve got one to tell.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. Awkwardness often comes from someone wanting to connect but not knowing how, not from judgment.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  5. If you ever want to leave a situation, say a little goodbye and that it was nice to meet them. They\u2019ll appreciate it.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    These observations are obvious to the point of banality, but their obviousness helps me relax into meeting people. It\u2019s not that complicated, it\u2019s not final, it\u2019s not a reflection of personal worth. It\u2019s a chance to say hello and take the first step into everything that\u2019s to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    I can\u2019t wait for all of that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Endnotes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    1<\/sup> I first found this information through a fantastic online application, the Whose Land interactive map<\/a>, which highlights treaty land and Indigenous nation land, among other functions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    2<\/sup> Read more<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Sam Bean is a first-year Master\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21876,"parent":18417,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_cu_dining_location_slug":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"cu_page_type":[],"class_list":["post-21879","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21879"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27944,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21879\/revisions\/27944"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/18417"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"cu_page_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_page_type?post=21879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}