Another great book
In my last post, I talked about Kate Manne’s book Down Girl. What got me into that book first, however, is another great book.
It’s a great book on stress management written by a pair of twin sisters. I listened to it on Audible, of course. The authors performed the Audible recording — and they are great readers! The book discusses stress management from a feminist perspective and uses some of Kate Manne’s terminologies. A lot of the management techniques are pretty standard — you’ll probably have encountered them if you’ve read other evidence-based stress management books/articles. But this book explains it in a pretty entertaining way and offers concrete advice. There are a couple of places in the preface where I was worried the authors would oversell the science, but they never did. Their interpretation of science and what they draw from studies are all, in my opinion, very sophisticated and reasonable.
Anyway, one of the things the authors suggested to combat emotional/moral burnout (i.e. the feeling that the world is terrible and you can never do enough) is to “do something”, where “something” is “anything that isn’t nothing”. Being active helps stop the feeling of helplessness. Of course, there is a question of causal direction here — does being active help depressed people be less depressed, or are people only active because they are not as depressed to begin with?
I sometimes get moral burnout. There are many things I think are wonderful and great, but are really hard for me to engage in. For example, protesting is really challenging for me mentally, perhaps because I’m usually bored to death when I’m out there. I think it’s a very important thing to do (and so I force myself to do it sometimes), which is why I usually sink into self-blame when I fail to go.
However, there are other things that are easier for me than protest is for me, and are probably easier for me than they are for some others. Putting together something like this blog is one of those things. I’m still working on trying to be easier on myself and do things that I enjoy more to compensate for the things I don’t enjoy. (I’m now on the meta-cognitive stage where I go back and forth about whether I should indeed try to be easier on myself..)
Another project (some background)
In any case, I’ve been working on a new project: wonder philosophy. It was initially conceived as a workshop that provides information about philosophy graduate programs to students who need them.
My parents have never been to graduate school (my dad has a 1-year working master’s which is essentially an apprenticeship he did on the job) and I went to a big research university where I didn’t really get to know any of my profs. I put together my first application (from undergrad to the terminal MA program of Simon Fraser University in BC, Canada) in the worst way possible. To be honest, I still don’t know why they accepted me. (For what it’s worth, I was accepted off of the waitlist.)
I was much much more prepared when I applied from SFU to my current program. I had a good sense of what I was doing, what my strengths and weaknesses might be, etc. Even then, there were things I didn’t find out until after I started my PhD. In fact, there are things about applications that I still don’t know yet (more on this later!).
So, I figured: if it was hard for me, how hard would it be for students whose parents don’t even have bachelor’s degrees? All the things I know because I’ve gone through it once, they don’t know. And they might never find out. If I can just tell them, they’d have a better footing against someone whose parents are professors or who go to an elite SLAC with 20-people class sizes. That’s how the idea of the workshop was born.
It took some time and some great minds to find a catchy name, but eventually “wonder philosophy” is decided. “Wonder” stands loosely for “Workshop on Discovering Entrance Requirements”. I started a website for the project: https://wonderphilosophy.com
Help me out!
I’m not doing this project alone, of course. A few grad school friends are helping me. Most of them are busier than I am, having to still take courses. They are also all grad students, not faculty. So, I need to crowdsource a few things.
First of all, I have written a Google form to gather information about admissions. I included questions I have been wondering about but could not find the answers to. I have, so far, gotten 4 responses, and they are all vastly different from one another.
Second, I am slowly populating the website wonderphilosophy.com with whatever information I can find. Any feedback/pointers are welcome. My contact info can be found in the above Google form.
Third, I’d like to start a crowdsource on the process of waiving application fees for financially challenged students. My understanding is that many schools have these resources, but they differ in structure and can be hard to find, so it’ll be useful to compile a list for students. I haven’t had the time to research into how to best do it yet. There’s always Google sheet, of course. But if you happen to know something good for that purpose, please let me know.
Finally, if you’d like to start something similar, or if you have done something similar, contact me!
Cheers.
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