Milestones

Today marks three years since I first learned that I had been accepted as a PhD student at Lund University. I can still recall the ecstatic feeling of listening to my voicemail outside Westbahnhof, realizing that a long-standing dream had come true.

This day also marks a milestone in the opposite direction: today, exactly three years remain until I must complete my PhD. Looking ahead, I am genuinely excited about the work I will be able to do – both here in Sweden and, thanks to a generous grant from the Crafoord Foundation, as a visiting scholar at Rutgers University.

Even so, the past three years have taught me a great deal about both the possibilities and the limitations of being a PhD student. The daunting combination of guilt-ridden inertia and euphoric productivity. A boundless academic environment, equally devoid of ceilings and floors. Yet I would not want it any other way. Before I began my doctoral studies, I assumed that the great challenge would be an intellectual one. Now I know that it is, in fact, a psychological one: to cultivate the necessary staying power, to sustain motivation, and to keep the pages flowing steadily from the computer.

Finally, the coming autumn semester marks another milestone, this time in terms of teaching. With more than 350 hours of teaching behind me, regulations stipulate that after this semester I am no longer permitted to teach during my time as a PhD student. In many ways, I find that sad. I have come to truly value teaching – both as a way of staying sane amid all the writing and as a practical activity free from doubts about its instrumental worth.